Army steamrolls state on chemical training.

Next June, the United States Army Chemical School begins training soldiers at Ft. Leonard Wood in the use of "obscurants" to hide battlefield movements. Some area environmentalists think the Army already is using verbal obscurants to hide its intentions for the Fort, and the damage it will inflict on the surrounding Mark Twain National Forest.

When the chemical school opens at Ft. Wood next summer, it will begin four types of training exercises. These are: training in detecting and combating chemical weapons such as nerve gases or mustard gas; training in detecting and combating biological weapons; training in detecting and defending against radiation, and training in hiding troops from enemy observers. The common emphasis is "force protection," says Hershel Chapman, media chief at Ft. Mead McClellan, which has been the base for the chemical school since 1980.

The Army believes in "live agent training." A 1977 report concluded that soldiers in training learn to protect themselves better if they are exposed to real dangers. The study noted that students in chemical defense training were more worried about their own comfort if they knew they were exposed only to simulated chemical agents, but that no one exposed to real chemical weapons was ever observed to deliberately open their protective garments.

Accordingly, the Army will manufacture and use small quantities of poisonous gases at the fort. Chapman says the Army will make and use Satin, VX and mustard gas at Ft. Wood. Sarin is the nerve gas a cult used in a subway attack in Japan in 1995 that killed or injured more than 500 people. VX is considered more than 100 to 300 times more toxic than Sarin. A report on chemical weapons by the Canadian Security intelligence Service states that "the amount of VX that one can place on the head of a pin is sufficient to produce death in a human being."

The Army also will use radioactive isotopes at Ft. Wood to contaminate military gear for training in detection and decontaminating radiation. Plutonium, a notoriously long lived radioactive element, will be among the isotopes used, according to the environmental impact statement prepared for Ft. Wood.

When it comes to biological agents, however, Chapman says the Army will use "simulants:" some relatively harmless, naturally occurring microorganisms, and Kaolin dust. Kaolin is a very pure form of clay.

A little history

Concerns about the Army's planned activities began in early 1995, when officials at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources rushed to approve new pollution permits for the base. The Base Realignment and Closing (BRAC) Commission was considering augmenting Ft. Leonard Wood, which is about 20 miles south of Rolla, with chemical and military police schools taken from Ft. Mead McClellan in Alabama.

The BRAC Commission had said the Army needed all of Ft. Wood's environmental permits in place by June 22, before it would approve the move of the chemical school. The only stumbling block seemed to be Missouri's own laws. The state's process for granting an air pollution permit was designed to take a year or more in order to collect necessary pollution data, but the Army didn't apply for the permit until March.

The Carnahan administration sprung into action. Governor Carnahan instructed David Shorr, director of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), to put consideration of the permit applications on "the fast track." But "he never told the department to ignore any permitting requirements," says Douglas Sifford, the governor's press secretary.

It wasn't necessary.

It was clear that the Army's obscurant training could not possibly comply with Missouri's air pollution control laws, so the DNR decided to give the Army a variance. The DNR staff had to get the Air Conservation Commission to approve the variance before it could issue permits. So fast was the track the Army permits were on, that Shorr advised the Air Conservation Commission to approve a request for variance from the Army six days before the DNR received such a request. So fast was the track that the DNR acted without information from the Army, ignorant of the fact that the obscurants in question contained hazardous chemicals. Sifford, however, is "confident the DNR followed every step of the proper procedures." The DNR managed to issue all permits ahead of the BRAC deadline.

Legal challenge

St. Louis attorney Lewis C. Green challenged the variance on behalf of the Coalition for the Environment and others, and a court later struck it down, but that was after the BRAC Commission ordered the chemical and military police schools to move to Missouri.

"We didn't say what they proposed was dangerous. What we said was what they proposed had to be addressed under existing laws. It wasn't,"' says Robert Schreiber, president of Schreiber, Yonley & Associates, an environmental engineering firm hired by the Coalition for the Environment to analyze the impact of the Army's plans.

"We outlined a need for a hazardous waste permit, which was not being addressed at the time," he says.

It still isn't, says Green.

One issue the state never addressed was the purposeful release of microorganisms and Kaolin dust into the environment. Utah and Alabama required air permits for them, Missouri has not. Roger Randolph, director of the Air Program at the DNR, says he doesn't know if biological agents are regulated by the state's air quality laws. "It isn't something I've heard of before," he says, "but I'd think they would at least have to deal with the Department of Health."

Environmentalists say the potential hazards the chemical school will bring to Missouri never were fully explored. The chief environmental hazard is the most prosaic, says Schreiber. It is the obscurants. That is because the more sensational hazards are well enough understood that the Army is taking extra precautions with them.

It is fairly easy to break apart the chemicals in poison gases so that they don't exhibit their dangerous characteristics, says Schreiber. However, the decontamination of VX and mustard gas creates toxic sulfide chemicals, according to the chemical school's environmental impact statement. If the poison gases were decontaminated outdoors, the sulfides could collect in the soil and ground water. The Army plans to train with poison gases only inside a tightly sealed building, says Chapman, the Ft. McClellan spokesman. Sergeant Collin Murphy, a spokesman for Ft. Wood, says all the waste from poison gas training, liquid and solid, will be collected and treated to destroy dangerous chemicals. Liquids will be treated in holding tanks and then shipped to a hazardous waste incinerator. Solids will be cooked in an autoclave, essentially a superhot steam cooker, to break down complex chemicals and then shipped to a hazardous waste incinerator. Though the Army will ship them to a hazardous waste incinerator, the treatments the wastes receive on the base should render them non-hazardous, says Murphy. "We'll refer to them as 'special wastes' at that point," he says.

The radioisotopes are a bigger problem, and a long range one. The Army will have to store radioactive wastes on site because there is no place to ship them. Anti-nuclear activist Kay Drey says the collapse of the Midwestern Compact for Low Level Radioactive Wastes means than no state is accepting low level radioactive wastes from Missouri. 'We have the oldest wastes of the Atomic Age," she says. "We've been generating atomic waste for 46 years, and we still don't know what to do with the first cupful of it." She says it is absurd to let another atomic waste generator into the state until we know what we will do with the waste. The military's laxity with atomic wastes in such states as Washington, Utah, Colorado, Ohio and New York is legendary, with wastes leaking into the soil and ground water. Several of the most prominent whistleblower suits of the 1980s and 1990s involve officers and civilian employees who tried to do something about the Army's negligence at the bases at which they worked, and suffered job reprisals because of it.

Yet, the biggest problem probably is the obscurants, says Schreiber. Since they are not immediately toxic, the Army classifies them as safe. Little really is known about the toxicity of the obscurants, however. Two University of Missouri - Rolla chemical engineers who studied obscurants at the Army's request likened the chemical composition of obscurant smoke to cigarette smoke. Last year, the EPA got the Army to agree to study the toxicity of the obscurants and look for alternatives. The problem is that they are looking only at cancer and not other health problems, says Drey.

Dangers

Data is beginning to accumulate indicating serious long term health effects from exposure to chemicals that are in obscurants. For example, a September, 1996 report on the human health risks of fog oil commissioned by the Army found concentrations of dibenzofurans of 2.2 micrograms in a cubic meter of air 11 meters from the fog generator.

According to Dr. Paul Connett at Work on Waste, furans are similar to dioxins both in chemical structure and toxicity. An industry-sponsored researcher claims that furans are worse. The level documented in the Army study of fog oil, though small, is a million times larger than the daily intake that the World Health Organization says is acceptable. The reason for such a low exposure level is simple. Studies link even low exposures to neurological, reproductive and immunological problems similar to some of those reported by Gulf War veterans. The military used obscurants extensively in the Gulf.

Another chemical obscurant, diethyl phthalate, is part of a family of chemicals commonly used in the plastic industry to provide elasticity to plastics. Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly reported in the June 18, 1998 edition that those chemicals also are linked to reproductive damage and kidney and liver illnesses. At least six European countries have petitioned the European Union to ban the use of phthalates in babies' toys because of health concerns.

The problem for environmental regulators is knowing exactly what the Army wants to do at Ft. Wood, says Randolph of the DNR. The environmental impact statement on moving the chemical school to Ft. Wood states that the Army will use many of the same obscurants it uses at Ft. McClellan: fog oil, phthalate smoke pots and smoke grenades, brass flakes and graphite for countering infrared detection devices, and chaff for countering detection equipment that operates at millimeter wavelengths. The permit application to the DNR specified only fog oil, says Randolph. Yet, there were several communications from the Chemical School to the DNR explaining that the school would use the other obscurants. Green tried to introduce that information into evidence at the hearing by the Air Conservation Commission, but the commissioners ruled that it was irrelevant.

The permit the state issued on June 7, 1995, limits Ft. Wood to 65,000 gallons of fog oil in any 12-month period. It limits the use of fog oil to one training site at a time, severely limits the wind conditions under which the Army can use fog oil, and bans other obscurants including brass flakes and graphite. If the smoke begins to drift across the base property lines or across a road, the school must cease the exercise.

On March 23, 1995, Lt. Col. Edward W. Newing, special assistant to the commandant at Ft. McClellan, sent a memo to John A. Young in the Missouri DNR, informing him that Ft. McClellan used 93,800 gallons of fog oil in 1994, and 116,350 gallons in 1993, and that to allow for the possibility of training reserve battalions, it needed to permission to use twice that amount in a year. The DNR seemed to ignore that information

Two months later, Newing concluded that the restrictions Missouri would place on the permit were so severe that they would "inadvertently squash the [chemical school's] goal and tragically cripple the capability to conduct smoke training. One of the most stunning restrictions of this permit," he went on, "is the loss of capability to train with smoke hand grenades, vehicular smoke grenades, smoke pots, infrared defeating grenades, riot control agents, and large area infrared obscurants."

The restrictions would cripple even fog oil training, because they would cut back the fog oil use by 30 percent and training time by 75 percent. based on practices at Ft. McClellan, the school would violate the permit on 169 days a year when it trained multiple groups in different areas at the same time. "!f allowed to stand, the Missouri smoke permit allows us to conduct roughly 25 percent of training to standards," he wrote in his memo. "These restrictions would kill both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force smoke training." Mike Mansfield, a DNR environmental engineer who worked on the permit, says it has not been updated since it was first issued.

Murphy of Ft. Wood and Lt. Col. Thomas, a spokesman for the chemical school at Ft. McClellan, both say the Army can conduct all the training it needs under the permit. Thomas said representatives of the Chemical School traveled to Missouri last October and worked out all the remaining questions.

A different story

Lawyers tell a different story. On March 24, Assistant Missouri Attorney General Deborah Neff sent Green a letter telling him that Ft. Wood was in discussions with the DNR about whether it needed to modify its present permit or get a new permit to conduct the smoke training it deems necessary. The letter resulted from Green's appeal of the permits. The intent was to get a clarification from Green that he did not want to proceed with his appeals until the Army decided what it was going to do. "I don't want to go through the motions of trying a permit that is moot," says Green. "Make them come in for amended permits and we'll try those."

Three days after the Neff letter, Army attorney John Simion wrote the Attorney General's office agreeing that no hearing was necessary until the Army had gotten its permit modified.

Drey is convinced the original permit was just "a foot in the door." She believes the Army never intended to follow the restrictions in the permit. The chemical school will expand at Ft. Wood; it already is authorized to use 96,000 acres of the Mark Twain National Forest, and use more chemicals, damaging the environment of the National Forest and the rivers that flow through it, including the Gasconade.

The McClellan base closing now seems to her but another "obscurant." Myron Marlin, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, confirms that while the base will close, the facility will not. The Army will turn McClellan over to the Justice Department, which will operate its own chemical school there "to train people on how to respond to suspected chemical and biological terrorism," he says.

Instead of one chemical school and a base closing to save the taxpayers money, there will be two chemical schools costing taxpayers more money and spreading the risk of contamination and environmental damage over two states.

Peter Downs is a St. Louis free-lance writer