Published: July 18, 2007 11:14 pm         

No immediate decision coming to block VX shipments

INDIANAPOLIS — An attorney for a company hired by the Army to incinerate nerve agent waste argued Wednesday that environmentalists raised unsound concerns in trying to block truck shipments of the waste from western Indiana’s Newport Chemical Deport.

U.S. District Judge Larry McKinney gave no indication Wednesday when he’ll rule on whether to prohibit the transfers as requested by environmentalists who claim it is unsafe to move the neutralized VX nerve agent waste across some 900 miles of highways in the nation’s midsection.

“I’m not sure how long it will take but we won’t be wasting any time,” he said after hearing closing arguments at the end of three days of testimony.

Last month, the Army agreed to suspend the shipments until McKinney decided whether to issue an injunction blocking the transfers. By that time, a company hired by the Army had moved 103 tanker trucks from the Newport deport to Port Arthur, Texas, where it’s being incinerated by another company.

The Army signed a $49 million contract in April with Veolia Environmental Services to incinerate at its Port Arthur complex about 2 million gallons of the waste. VX is a Cold War-era chemical weapon so deadly only a tiny droplet can kill a human.

During Wednesday’s closing arguments, an attorney for Veolia called the environmentalists’ concerns that the shipments pose a public health threat “an irrational fear based on nonscience.”

Veolia attorney Peter Racher said officials in each of the eight states that the trucks pass through en route to Port Arthur are notified as each shipment leaves Newport.

He said those officials are updated of the shipment’s progress and that at no time are the trucks more than 120 miles from one of Veolia’s emergency response centers.

“No public official has come to you and asked for you to stop this process,” Racher told McKinney.

The environmental groups contend that the shipments from Newport, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute, to Port Arthur would threaten public health and the environment if one or more of the trucks carrying the liquid waste crashed or was targeted by terrorists.

The Chemical Weapons Working Group, the Sierra Club and other groups argued in the lawsuit filed in May that some batches of the waste produced by Newport’s ongoing VX neutralization project contain more residual VX and a toxic byproduct called EA2192 than the Army maintains.

Mick Harrison, an attorney for the environmental groups, said in his closing arguments that the shipments pose “great risk” to public health.

“There is a real possibility that the hydrolysate may contain excess levels of VX under certain circumstances,” he said.

The environmental groups want the Army to stick to its original plan of disposing of the VX waste at the Indiana depot.

Col. Jesse Barber, a project manager for the Army Chemical Materials Agency, acknowledged in court Monday that the Army could not say conclusively that the nerve agent waste does not contain trace amounts of the deadly chemical.

The Army contends the waste contains only a minuscule amount of VX — 20 parts per billion or less — and is no more dangerous than other hazardous wastes shipped each day across the nation.

Army spokesman Greg Mahall has said the Army is confident the hydrolysate is safe enough to be shipped to Port Arthur, noting that it had won approval from regulators in each of the states the shipments will pass through.

The Army’s agreement with Veolia came after two earlier deals, with Perma-Fix Environmental Services Inc., in Dayton, Ohio, and DuPont Co. in Deepwater, N.J., were scuttled because of strong opposition.

The Army estimates that more than 300 additional truckloads of hydrolysate will be needed to haul away the remaining waste Newport’s VX neutralization is expected to produce.

Although the shipments to Veolia are on hold, an Army contractor continues to chemically neutralize Newport’s VX stockpile, which was originally more than 250,000 gallons. As of Tuesday, that project had destroyed 60 percent, or about 180,000 gallons, of the VX.