Site of VX destruction being scoured before possible handover to local government.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051205/NEWS01/512050372The Army is investigating whether hazardous materials are buried at the Newport Chemical Depot, a military installation where the nation's largest stockpile of VX nerve agent is being destroyed.
Officials want to make sure they know what's on the grounds of the 64-year-old former weapons-production plant because the Army could turn the site over to Vermillion County within the next several years, possibly for use as an industrial park....
A federal panel voted this year to close the depot once the VX is removed and the plant is dismantled. More than 250,000 gallons of VX, stored at the depot since production was halted in 1969, is supposed be destroyed within three years....
A former Newport civilian worker, Tom Burch, said that when VX was produced in the 1960s, depot workers would drain faulty munitions of VX and the liquid would be neutralized before being placed in a well more than a mile below the ground. Burch, who worked as a VX analyst at an Army lab at Newport, said the munitions also were decontaminated before being buried...
...because VX was the only chemical weapon produced in Newport -- the depot also produced heavy water for the nation's first nuclear bombs, TNT and the plastic explosive RDX -- and was produced in the 1960s, the possibility of undocumented chemical weapons is remote, Linson said. Still, "it is absolutely an issue at Newport because we know the base is destined for closure," Linson said. "We know (the site) will become potential public property, and we can't say there haven't been surprises at Newport. As thorough a job as has been done, we've still found a few things that had been initially overlooked.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051205/NEWS01/512050372
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