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 ared Beatty takes potshots at the enemy on a TV screen in his room. He practices daily for his future career as a spy by playing James Bond video games on his Sony PlayStation. In the corner of his room, his two fire-belly frogs, Carmichael and Tortelli, lounge in a glass aquarium. Overhead, models of jet fighters shoot mock missiles at one another. His bedroom overlooks the family’s two acres and five llamas on the banks of the Columbia River in Irrigon, Oregon, a small but growing rural community 150 miles east of Portland.
If a career as a spy doesn’t work out, Jared has a fall back job in mind as a stock car mechanic. Like his older brother, Brandon, he races dirt bikes. When his father drives Jared to the Tri Cities for one of his motocross meets, they take Interstate 84 past the 20,000 acres of the Umatilla Chemical Depot (UMCD). Living in the shadow of the depot and its 1,001 storage bunkers, the 11-year-old boy has been forced to face realities of a world he cannot yet understand.
The depot stores 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons. Its rockets, bombs and mines are filled with enough mustard agent, VX nerve agent and sarin to kill tens of thousands of people. In April 1997 the U.S. Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international treaty outlawing chemical weapons. Because of the agreement, the site has a new mission: to incinerate its stockpile by 2007. The idea of incinerating chemical weapons has some members of the community feeling uneasy; the facility has been plagued by a series of problems including bomb threats, a flawed warning system and chemical leaks. Others welcome the jobs the project provides and believe incineration is a safe way to dispose of the depot’s cache.
As Jared talks about the depot, his brow furrows the way an adult’s does, the lines bunching up on his forehead. "The war wasn’t here. How come [the depot] had to be in Irrigon?"
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Several signs used by CSEPP warn drivers in the event of an accident at the weapons complex.
The region must have looked ideal when the U.S. Army arrived in 1941: far enough inland to be safe from a Japanese attack, yet strategically located next to the Columbia River. The depot began as a storage and
transfer point for some of the nation’s conventional arsenal. The first shipment of chemical weapons arrived in 1962. Although most of the bunkers now lie empty, a storage area known as K Block holds the remaining munitions in 89 steel-reinforced concrete igloos. Two 10 foot fences topped with razor wire surround the bunkers, and armed mobile security units patrol with shoot to kill orders. The weapons they protect are so terrible the United States never used them against an enemy.
More than 700,000 pounds of VX nerve agent are stored in K Block. Less than a drop of the odorless liquid can cause the central nervous system to shut down if it is not treated immediately. Two million pounds of sarin are housed there as well. Twelve people died and 5,000 people were injured when the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinri Kyo used the nerve agent to attack a Tokyo subway in 1995. Mustard agent, 2,635 tons of it, rounds out the deadly trio of weapons. The Germans first used this persistent chemical during World War I with horrific results. Soil samples taken from battlefields in France showed lingering traces of this carcinogenic substance 80 years later.
 | | Jared and his classmates go through monthly emergency drills at school.
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Jared fights imaginary wars in his video games, but his fears of the depot are real. "One time I had a dream," he says. "The alarm went off, and I was locked outside of the house, and they wouldn’t let me in." When his school began emergency preparedness drills in case of an accident, he bought a gas mask with his allowance. At show-and-tell, he demonstrated how to put it on for his classmates. Some of them had parents working at the depot.
The UMCD pumps more than $9 million a year into the area’s economy in wages alone. Everybody in the county seems to have a friend or relative who works or has worked at the installation. Government, civilian and private employees at the depot live off base in neighboring communities. Next door to K Block, the Army has contracted the Raytheon Corporation to build a $1.2 billion complex of incinerators to burn this stockpile. Employing approximately 1,000 construction and administration workers, and fueled by millions of federal dollars, the disposal facility has created a mini boom in the area’s economy.
According to Mary Binder, the depot’s public information officer, incineration is the only technology proven to destroy chemical weapons. "Incineration to date is the only process we know of [that disposes of] not only the chemical itself in the ammunition, but also the explosives, the casings and what we call the dunnage, or the packing materials that go with it." Yet prompted by public opposition and a report by the National Research Council in favor of alternatives to burning, the Army has agreed to build prototype chemical neutralization plants at depots in Aberdeen, Maryland, and Newport, Indiana.
Despite this new movement toward alternative technologies, construction on the incinerator complex continues in Umatilla. But the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) announced on April 19, 2000, that the incinerator would not begin test burns in January 2001 as expected. A perimeter air monitoring system required to be in place for a full year is still undergoing testing. The Army has until June 7, 2000, to present a new operations timetable to the DEQ.
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