05:30 PM PDT on Wednesday, September 8, 2004

By kgw.com and AP Staff

HERMISTON, Ore. -- A mechanical glitch halted the disposal of a chemical rocket, which is part of the nation’s last stockpile of deadly weapons left over from the Cold War on Wednesday at a remote site in eastern Oregon.

AP U.S. Army spokesperson Mary Binder holds a tube containing a clear liquid to demonstrate what GB sarin looks like for reporters at the Umatilla Chemical Depot, near Hermiston.

Automatic systems have been built to destroy the weapons, but a slight malfunction occurred. A slide gate that feeds the chopped rocket parts into a chute that will flow into a furnace for decontamination wasn’t functioning properly.

The problem was fixed, enabling the depot to destroy the first rocket.

"It's an incredibly historic day. This is a Cold War-era mission that is today starting to end," said Mary Binder, an Army spokeswoman at the depot.

Workers had removed a pallet of 15 M-55 rockets from an earth-covered and concrete-reinforced storage igloo Tuesday and loaded it into a pressurized cylinder on a truck to transport to the incinerator, officials said.

The depot was taking as much time as they could with the incineration process to ensure safety.

Once loaded onto a conveyer, machines punched a hole into the M-55 rocket and began draining it of sarin gas. Once the rocket was drained after 50 minutes, it was chopped up into eight pieces and incinerated in a 1,700 degree furnace.

The heat inside the furnace will eradicate the chemical, and the decontaminated rocket pieces will be shipped to a hazardous waste landfill near Arlington, Ore.

Only one rocket is to be disposed of on Wednesday. It will be the first of more than 220,000 weapons scheduled to be destroyed, officials said.

Two more rockets may be destroyed on Thursday, and by the weekend, another five rockets will be disposed of. Officials said they hope to be destroying up to 20 rockets per hour when the process is at full speed.

When a sufficient amount of chemical agent is collected for about a month, the liquid will be burned in a separate, 2,700 degree furnace.

The exhaust from the burn will be sent through an afterburner, then filters, before it is released into the air.

The Umatilla depot was built in 1941 and was used to store munitions from World War II through Desert Storm in 1991. After 1991 it has stored only chemical weapons, including sarin and VX.

The first incineration comes after years of delays in construction and testing, and in spite of a lawsuit still pending in the Oregon Court of Appeals seeking to block the process.

A Multnomah County judge denied a request by the opposition group GASP for a preliminary injunction in August. Oregon Court of Appeals Judge Walt Edmonds gave the group 10 days to file for an injunction in higher court, but the group had not filed by Tuesday.

Hermiston-based GASP says burning the weapons risks an accidental release of chemical agents. The group is advocating a chemical neutralization process instead, a newer technology the Army uses at four of eight chemical storage sites around the country.

Burning was to have begun Aug. 16, but was postponed at the last minute when ventilation system monitors during a trial showed larger amounts than expected of a test chemical in the charcoal filters.

The Umatilla Chemical Depot in eastern Oregon holds about 12 percent of the nation's remaining chemical weapons. The military began stockpiling rockets, artillery shells, bombs, land mines and sprayers containing nerve and mustard agents beginning in 1962.

The 7.3 million pounds of weapons are scheduled to be destroyed by 2010 at a cost of $2.4 billion.

With the first rocket disposal on Wednesday, the Army now has three working chemical weapons incinerators in the United States -- Hermiston; Tooele, Utah; and Anniston, Ala. A fourth is expected to open next spring in Pine Bluff, Ark.

Another four sites -- at Newport, Ind., Blue Grass Ky., Edgewood, Del., and Pueblo, Colo. -- use chemical neutralization.