honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, November 7, 2005

It's time to deal with chemical arms debris

In the context of the times, it might have made rough sense a half-century ago for the military to take thousands of tons of wartime chemical weapons and simply dump them in the ocean off Hawai'i, ever to be forgotten.

That's no longer the case.

Details of the dumping program are now emerging. And it is imperative that military specialists and civilian scientists deal with this aging and potentially dangerous residue of another time.

Because records are sketchy, it is impossible to say precisely where these weapons are. The first task should be for the military — mostly the Army in this case — to conduct as thorough a search of records (and memories of those still alive who did the dumping) to identify specific locations.

These should then be clearly marked on all marine navigation maps.

In general, the Army says, these weapons should pose no threat as long as they remain undisturbed where they are. That's asking a lot.

At times, pieces of this weaponry are dredged up by fishermen and others. And it's naive to think that corrosion won't eventually cause some of these weapons to fall apart, releasing their toxins and poisons into the marine environment.

What details exist of the dumping program are largely contained in a 2001 report by the Historical Research and Response Team of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.

The report was covered in recent news stories by John M.R. Bull as printed in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch.

He points out that hundreds of injuries from accidental exposure to the chemicals, including mustard and Lewisite (which contains arsenic) have already occurred.

In one particularly horrifying scenario, Bull quotes scientists who describe how mustard — after exposure to seawater — becomes a concentrated, encrusted gel that lasts for at least five years, rolling around on the ocean floor, killing or contaminating sea life.

Advertiser Science Writer Jan TenBruggencate quotes senior UH marine scientist Rick Grigg as saying that the task of identifying the weapons, plotting their danger and then removing them if possible should be a high-priority research objective.

We couldn't agree more. Years ago ocean dumping might have seemed the most practical method of dealing with these weapons. But it's not too late to realize that a mistake was made and — even more than a half-century later — set things right.