Saturday, March 21, 2015

LOUISIANA IS STRUGGLING TO DISPOSE OF 15 MILLION POUNDS OF M6 ARTILLERY EXPLOSIVE PROPELLANT. EPA IS TRYING TO GET RID OF THE PROPELLANT, WHICH IS EXPECTED TO BECOME AN EVEN GREATER RISK AFTER AUGUST OF THIS YEAR AS IT CONTINUES TO DESTABILIZE





MARCH 20, 2015

MINDEN, LOUISIANA
 
The largest stockpile of M6 artillery propellant in the country is sitting abandoned at an old military facility in Louisiana. The New York Times reports that the discarded propellant is slowly deteriorating, posing a potentially explosive problem to the facility's neighbors.

The solid propellant, an incredibly hazardous material, was accumulated by a now bankrupt military contractor named Explo. The company amassed over 15 million pounds of the explosive over the years, storing it in bunkers and open fields at Camp Minden.  As the stockpile aged, it became too unstable to use.

Worried about an explosion, the EPA is trying to get rid of the propellant, which is expected to become an even greater risk after August of this year as it continues to destabilize. The typical way to get rid of M6 propellant is to burn it, but that would release harmful chemicals into the air, and given the huge amount of the stockpile (the EPA estimates it would take over a year to burn the entire stockpile), the people who live near the Camp aren't too thrilled with that solution.

Just this week, the EPA issued a memo approving six other methods as possible alternatives to burning in the open, including burning it in contained situations, like a kiln or tunnel furnace, using a microwave reactor, or using chemical reactions to neutralize the explosives. The EPA and the Louisiana National Guard are accepting bids from companies ready to use those methods to get rid of the propellants. They hope to make a decision as soon as possible.


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LOUISIANA PARISH FIGHTS PLAN TO BURN TONS OF PROPELLANT NO ONE WANTS

MARCH 18, 2015 


A photograph released in 2012 showed thousands of tons of M6 propellant, which is used in the firing of artillery rounds, stuffed into plastic bags and piled into sagging cardboard boxes at Camp Minden in Louisiana. Disposal of the propellant, which was owned by a private contractor that declared bankruptcy in 2013, has been problematic. Credit Louisiana State Police 


MINDEN, LOUISIANA

Just before midnight on Oct. 15, 2012, Sheriff Gary Sexton of Webster Parish was driving home from the airport when the sky lit up like midday. He flipped on his walkie-talkie to hear everyone asking: What on earth were those big booms?
As the sheriff would soon learn, two massive explosions had taken place at Camp Minden, a 15,000-acre site owned by the state in the pine woods just south of here, where private companies engage in military-related work. When the authorities began examining the blast site, they found something startling: thousands of tons of M6 propellant, used in the firing of artillery rounds, stuffed into plastic bags and piled into sagging cardboard boxes, many of them out in open fields.

“Turned upside down, spilled, out in the open, in the weather, out in the woods — it was unbelievable,” Sheriff Sexton said. “To be honest with you, I was ready to leave.”

Though the initial explosions were so big that smoke from them showed up on National Weather Service radar, no one was injured and damage was minimal. But more than two years later, figuring out how to dispose of 18 million pounds of unstable and dangerous material — who would do it and whether it could be done in a way that did not compound the danger — remains the talk of the parish.

The material belonged to Explo Systems, a private contractor. The 18 million pounds includes some explosives like TNT, but nearly all of it is M6 propellant, which can spontaneously ignite, a risk that increases significantly over time. 

Officials with the Environmental Protection Agency say it is the largest such stockpile in the country.

Last week, a couple of dozen people, forming what is called the Minden Dialogue Committee, gathered at a community center here to discuss how to proceed. The group included scientists, environmental activists, government officials and local residents like Sam Mims, a retired Army colonel, who appeared as an “irritated, concerned citizen representing my 17 cows.” They had been meeting almost constantly, at least by telephone, since early February.

The committee was formed in direct opposition to a plan announced in October by the Army, the E.P.A. and the Louisiana National Guard to burn all of the M6 propellant outdoors in large trays, a disposal method routinely used by the Army, though not at this scale. The idea of burning 80,000 pounds a day in open fires for more than 220 days — which some experts said would send untold amounts of carcinogens and other hazardous pollutants into the air — was a nonstarter with nearby residents.

“If there is an open burn,” Colonel Mims said, “somebody’s equipment is going to have to run over me.”

People who live around Camp Minden, for years the site of a munitions plant run by the United States government, are not unacquainted with explosions or pollution, but this time is different.

Explo, which had run into problems with safety violations at other sites, had been working at Camp Minden under contract with the Army to dismantle bombs and artillery shells into components that it would later sell. The M6 propellant was usually purchased by coal mining companies, but in recent years the demand from the coal industry began to dry up. The supply, however, kept coming — even as Explo ran out of room to store it.

After the explosions, the 18 million pounds of material was gathered and put into 97 separate bunkers to reduce the risk of an ignition setting off a huge fire. Now, said Johnny Heflin, a rancher in the nearby town of Doyline, there are “97 big bombs all waiting to go off.”

Given years of natural degradation, accelerated by long stretches out in the elements, the propellant has for some time been at “imminent and substantial risk” of self-igniting, according to the E.P.A. But disposal has been problematic.



The Camp Minden site of two massive explosions on Oct. 15, 2012. Environmental Protection Agency officials have said the camp contains the country’s largest  stockpile of M6 propellant. Credit Louisiana National Guard 


The Army’s position was that once charges are demilitarized they no longer belong to the Army, which is statutorily barred from cleaning up private property. E.P.A. officials responded that Defense Department officials, which had oversight of Explo’s demilitarization activities, consistently gave Explo clean marks in quarterly safety audits — though, as one Defense official acknowledged to the E.P.A., inspectors were always escorted by Explo representatives and did not look at storage areas.

While this debate continued, seven of Explo’s employees were indicted and, in August 2013, the company declared bankruptcy. The State of Louisiana thus found itself the owner of roughly 9,000 tons of dangerous material that no one wanted.

A funding arrangement was eventually worked out, with $24 million coming from a federal liability pool, and the E.P.A., the Army and the National Guard came to a formal agreement last October to set up an open-tray burn.
Dolores Blalock, a retired journalism professor living on a farm not far from Camp Minden, heard about it on the news. She looked up M6 propellant online. Her first thought, she recalled: “These people are crazy.”

At a December public meeting, Ms. Blalock, along with a chemistry professor at a nearby university, lit into the officials for making the decision without reaching out to private citizens and challenged testing that showed an open burn would be safe. Thus began a feisty campaign, joining liberal environmental activists with conservative politicians in common opposition to the open burn.

The E.P.A. had insisted that an open burn could be controlled so that it stayed well within state and federal emissions standards. But Ron Curry, the regional E.P.A. administrator, acknowledged last week that officials had made a mistake in going forward without community comment.

“The remedy was based upon past practices more than anything else,” Mr. Curry said last week. With the public outcry, he said, “we thought it was important to kind of back up.”

In late January, the E.P.A. announced a delay and agreed to the creation of the Minden Dialogue Committee to recommend alternative disposal methods. Since then, the group has been studying the relevant science, interviewing contractors and demanding, with limited success, responses from officials.

Last week, the committee made a final recommendation of six technologies that members believed would be both safe and effective, including the use of microwaves or high-pressure and high-temperature water. The recommendation is not binding, and the Army, which has expressed reservations about the other methods, maintains that an open burn “generally constitutes the safest and most efficient way to dispose of these materials,” according to a spokesman.

But for now, the process is in the hands of the Louisiana National Guard and the E.P.A., which on Wednesday released a memo that highlighted the dialogue group’s work and recognized the potential of “one or more alternative disposal methods” to an open burn. And indeed, several members of the committee have said they would not shy from a confrontation if an open burn went ahead.

Still, amid the pine trees at Camp Minden, the M6 sits. When asked how grave the danger is, with no way to know how old the material is or how long it was left outside or how many of the bunkers may have let in moisture, Sheriff Sexton said what just about all of the experts are saying: “I really don’t know.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com