Deseret Depot Investigating Vapor Leak

Officials are investigating how a small amount of VX nerve agent vapor leaked into a laboratory last week at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah, the Deseret Morning News reported (see GSN, May 4).

An alarm went off Tuesday at 2:40 p.m., just after two monitoring technicians left the Agent Vault Room of the Chemical Assessment Laboratory, said depot spokesman Chuck Sprague. 

Everyone in the lab put on gas masks and was escorted from the building, located one mile west of the U.S. Army’s chemical weapons incinerator. The Army temporarily shut down all operations involving toxic material at the facility while the event was under investigation, Sprague added in a press release.

No munitions are stored in the room, but it does have small vials of VX nerve agent used for testing (Joe Bauman, Deseret Morning News, May 21).

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