Ways to dispose of Camp Minden’s explosives are eyed

9th March 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer

After an outcry in northwest Louisiana, a plan last fall to burn M6 propellant, stored at Camp Minden for a past use in grenades and artillery rounds, is being rethought. The Louisiana National Guard uses the nearly 16,000 acres there as a training site. “Every­one’s working for a solution other than open burn so that we won’t have to worry about contamination,” City of Minden Mayor Tommy Davis said last week.

Minden in Webster Parish is represented on a dialogue committee that began meeting in early February to consider the safest way to dispose of M6, Davis said. The group includes community leaders, scientists, nonprofits, volunteers, and state and federal representatives.

The M6 burn could have begun as soon as this June, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spokesman David Gray in Dallas said last week.

Residents worry a burn would impact their air, soil and water. Chemist Wilma Subra, president of Subra Company in New Iberia, said toxins released by burning M6 would threaten human endocrine, respiratory and central nervous systems, reproductive organs, kidneys and skin, and could cause cancer.

“Residents of the town of Doyline work at Camp Minden, and in a 2012 explosion they were exposed to a 7,000-foot plume in the air,” Subra said last week. “We feel they’ve been through enough,” She’s a member of the technical working group of the Camp Minden Dialogue Comm­ittee. Doyline is just south of the camp.

On March 3 and 4, nearly a dozen commercial vendors made presentations about disposal methods to the technical working group, Subra said. “Alternatives include blowing M6 up in detonation chambers, and using rotary kilns, hydrolysis and supercritical water oxidation,” or SCWO, she said. With SCWO, pressurized water spurs oxidation, pulling chemicals apart.

At a March 11, face-to-face meeting in Minden of the Camp Minden Dialogue Committee, the technical working group will report on alternative disposal methods, Subra said.

Last year, the EPA said the U.S. Army was responsible for the camp’s M6 stocks, and it ordered the Army to pay disposal costs. In October, the open-burn method was chosen by the Army and EPA, and that approach was to begin later this year once a contractor was selected. But after the public weighed in, the EPA in mid-January granted a 90-day extension on an order to dispose of 15 million pounds of M6 at Camp Minden.

Since then, the dialogue committee and its technical working group have been meeting to compile alternative ways of disposal. “The committee will offer a recommendation but a final decision about the disposal method rests with EPA,” Greg Langley, spokesman for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said last week. DEQ has a representative on the dialogue committee.

Federal funds are already available. “The Army transferred nearly $20 million out of a possible $24 million to the state of Louisiana last year to be used for disposal of these propellants,” Dallas-based EPA administrator Sam Coleman said in the dialogue committee’s public meeting on Feb. 27. “Army officials indicated the rest will be provided if it’s needed.”

Roughly $19.6 million was transferred and is in an escrow account controlled by the Louisiana Military Department, DEQ’s Langley said. “In an attempt to make funding available for cleanup, the Louisiana Military Department, or the Louisiana National Guard, took ownership of the explosives in the Explo bankruptcy in 2013,” he said.

Camp Minden is the site of a former ammunition factory built in World War II. The feds deeded it to Louisiana in 2005. On Oct. 15, 2012, one of its 97 storage bunkers exploded. At the time, Explo Systems, Inc, a veteran-owned business in northwest Louisiana, had an Army contract to demilitarize surplus munitions there. After the explosion, the Louisiana State Police found 15 million pounds of M6 improperly stored outside of bunkers, along with other explosives unsafely stashed in bunkers. Residents of nearby Doyline, with about 400 homes, were evacuated from late November to early December 2012 in case of another blast.

The Louisiana State Police conducted an open M6 burn at Camp Minden in spring 2013, without notifying local officials or response authorities, according to Concerned Citizens of the Camp Minden Explosives Open Burn. Explo Systems declared bankruptcy in August 2013, and the Louisiana National Guard became owner of the M6. Last year, the Army’s Explosives Safety Board said M6 and other materials stored at the camp had deteriorated and could blow up by August 2015.

Last October 28, the Army, the EPA, the Louisiana National Guard and DEQ signed an agreement to use open-tray burning to get rid of M6. Local officials didn’t learn about the accord until after it was signed. The agreement was finalized in early November.

As residents got wind of the plan, opposition mounted this winter. Last Tuesday, retired Lieutenant General Russel Honore, now head of the nonprofit Green Army, spoke out against open burning at a rally in Minden, organized by Louisiana Progress Action and Concerned Citizens of the Camp Minden Explosives Open Burn.

Beyond Webster Parish, dialogue committee members from Caddo Parish speaking at the Feb. 27 public meeting said M6 burning would worsen their air quality, which has been harmed by years of natural gas fracking around Shreveport.

Why was the open-burn approach chosen last fall? “The Army’s manuals, as well as the Army’s Explosives Safety Board, stipulate open burning is the only practical method for propellant in the condition found at Camp Minden,” the EPA said in January on its Camp Minden Questions and Answers web page. To learn more, visit the web at http://www2.epa.­gov/la/camp-minden-questions-and-answers

The Army on February 23 joined the dialogue committee’s effort by making technical experts available, the EPA’s Gray said.

This article originally published in the March 9, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.