Abercrombie wants details on Army's ocean dumps
U.S. REP. Neil Abercrombie has asked the Army for details on chemical weapons dumped off the coast of Hawaii after World War II.
In a two-part series that began on Oct. 30, the Newport News Daily Press in Virginia reported at least 16,000 mustard-filled 100-pound bombs were dumped as close as five miles off the islands in 1944 under the Army's secret ocean-dumping program.
In 1976, a fisherman in Hawaii was burned when he brought up an Army mortar filled with mustard gas. The Daily Press said the Hawaii fisherman was one of more than 200 nationwide that have been burned by mustard gas from ordnance recovered from the ocean's depths.
Mustard gas agents are known to cause DNA damage, cancer and can survive for at least five years on the ocean bottom in a concentrated gel.
In a letter sent to Army Secretary Francis Harvey on Monday, Abercrombie said besides mustard gas, other toxic chemicals disposed of in the oceans were Lewisite, Cyanogen and hydrogen cyanide. Lewisite is a blister agent similar to mustard gas.
Abercrombie wants the Army to release information on the current location and condition of the munitions; the timing, location, and nature of any disposal of chemical munitions in waters near Hawaii; the potential health risks to the public; and the potential environmental impact.
Shortly after the newspaper series ran, Army spokesman Paul Boyce wrote to the Virginia newspaper saying: "The protection of human health and the environment is critical, and the Army will continue to work in part with other government agencies to identify and monitor old disposal sites, address each discovery in a deliberate manner and implement response actions."
In his Nov. 4 statement, Boyce said that until the late 1960s, ocean dumping was one of the ways chemical agents and munitions were routinely disposed of since World War I. The other means were open-pit burning and land burial.
Boyce said most of the sea disposal took place where the depth of the ocean was at least 600 feet. "The vast majority of these deep ocean sites are inaccessible."
The newspaper reported that 64 million pounds of liquid nerve and mustard agents in one-ton steel canisters were secretly dumped into the ocean. Some 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste were either tossed overboard or packed into holds of scuttled vessels, the paper said.
Besides Hawaii, 10 other states -- California and Alaska and six states on the East Coast and two on the Gulf Coast -- were affected. There were at least 26 ocean chemical dumpsites created by the Army, which only knows the nautical coordinates of only half of them.
Nerve agents can kill within minutes. They can last up to six weeks in the ocean, killing every organism before breaking down into a nonlethal compound.
However, steel corrodes at different rates, depending on the water depth, ocean temperatures and the thickness of the shells, the newspaper said. That could lead to time-delayed release of these chemicals that could span decades.
The Army admitted to dumping chemical weapons off the U.S. coast in the 1970s, and by 1972 Congress had banned the practice. The United States in 1975 signed an international treaty prohibiting ocean disposal of chemical weapons.