VX Waste Shipments to Resume This Week

A Texas waste management company expects this week to begin receiving shipments of VX disposal waste from Indiana, after a federal judge on Friday rejected an injunction request, the Port Arthur News reported (see GSN, Aug. 6).

“We are going to resume transport this week of the VX hydrolysate,” said Dan Duncan, health and safety manager for Veolia Environmental Services in Port Arthur.  “We are expecting 12 shipments of wastewater and they should start arriving about midweek.”

Veolia has a $49 million U.S. Army contract to incinerate hydrolysate produced by chemical neutralization of VX nerve agent stored at the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana.  The company to date has “safely managed 103 shipments of hydrolysate,” about one-quarter of the contracted amount.

The Army halted shipments in June while it waited for the judge’s decision.

Environmental and community groups seeking the injunction argued unsuccessfully that the waste contained higher levels of VX and the byproduct EA2192 than acknowledged by the Army and that moving the material constituted a threat to public health and the environment.

“We anticipated the ruling to come down as it did,” Duncan said.  “We believed that once the judge heard all the facts and scientific proof that this hydrolysate is not dangerous, he would come to the conclusion that we should resume transport.”

“Our hope now is that the project can go off without another hitch,” he said.  “I think this project is not only beneficial for our employees, but also beneficial to the community” (Ashley Sanders, Port Arthur News, Aug. 8).

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