By David McGlinchey
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Army officials believe that a recent test failure at the Tooele chemical weapons incinerator in Utah may in fact have been an analytical problem, a spokesman said today (see GSN, Aug. 14).

“We had similar readings when we ran blank feeds,” said Greg Mahall, a spokesman at the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency.

Last week, the Army stopped burning some chemical weapons after it was discovered that test burns of rockets containing VX nerve gas had not destroyed a sufficient amount of the chemical agent.  Officials at the Tooele facility suspected the test reading may have been faulty and they ran the incinerator without any chemical weapons to see if testing equipment still showed that dangerous chemicals were being released.

“You feed nothing [into the incinerator], knowing that you have a zero, to see if you receive a zero,” Mahall said.

Mahall said officials are not yet certain if the problem lies only with the testing equipment, but he said the Army “believes that it is an analytical problem.”

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