The government, and the military especially, has a way of getting away with misplacing things. Just days before the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld failed to explain to a Congressional committee how the Pentagon managed to misplace several trillion dollars. That story was swept under the rug, as have many similar stories concerning official mismanagement of vital resources.
Last week, in the latest bout of such incompetence, a weapons cache of deadly sarin gas was misplaced at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground.
This material loss is not the first of its kind at Dugway. In 2015, in what was called a series of “egregious safety failures,” the base accidentally shipped live anthrax to 194 labs all across the country as well as to nine foreign countries. The shipments were performed by FedEx, not an organization known for its ability to safely transport highly bio-hazardous material. At the time, more than 24 people working at the base were treated for anthrax exposure. The reprimands that followed ended the careers of those deemed responsible. The Army Times reported that the DOD’s investigation singled out a number of safety protocols had not been followed.
The military stores a great deal of dangerous and physically sensitive material at nearly every base in the world. But sarin gas is deadly in even minuscule amounts, and the tracking and marking procedures designed to control their use, movement, and storage incorporate a massive chain of custody control procedures. This means that numerous authorized individuals are required to sign off on every step in the movement, use, or storage of this substance. That means that a failure to secure a substance of this kind would necessitate a procedural failure on such a massive scale that it is almost hard to believe that it was done by mistake.
For some perspective, consider the bureaucracy surrounding the maintenance of a gas-gate seal in the hinge of an outer hatch on a Navy ship for example. Such a simple item is easy to inspect, simple to maintain and replace. However, such an item is essential for protecting the crew of a ship in the event of a chemical or biological attack. For that reason, there are at least five individuals of different ranks who would have to check off the paperwork on such an item.
Five people for a small piece of rubber… Imagine the chain of custody that must be consulted and sign off on something as dangerous as a container of sarin gas. Unless the Army has starkly inferior safety protocols compared to the Navy, or there has been an enormous breakdown in the enforcement of the safety regulations at the Dugway base and proving ground.
The Dugway Proving Grounds, as you might have guessed from the name, keeps, moves, and tests highly dangerous substances like that of sarin gas. They also store and handle the deadly nerve agent, VX. The Pentagon describes Dugway as “a high-risk, zero-defect select biological agents program.”
That means the risks associated with failure are so high that there is zero room for procedural or material defects. But the base in Salt Lake City has been plagued with safety failures and accidents in recent years. In 2011, an indecent with a misplaced vial of VX nerve gas triggered a complete shutdown of the 800,000 acre Army base. The situation was remedied when it was discovered that the missing VX had been improperly labeled.
In response to the recent sarin gas indecent, the Army Times wrote, “Dugway officials failed to immediately notify the base’s chemical materials accountability officer of the 1.5-milliliter shortage discovered during a 2016, inventory check. That amount is sufficient to cause death in minutes.”
The report also cited several containers that were not fit to contain sarin which has been in regular use for some time. Furthermore, one contractor was found to have been using plastic containers sealed with tape rather than the lock-sealed steel containers with tamper resistant seals that the Army’s safety and materials handling procedures call for.
All of this takes place before the backdrop of the anthrax scares that occurred after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The materials involved in those attacks were linked to failures at a military base in Maryland.
The fact is that Dugway is not the only military base with a history of failing to properly handle dangerous substances- and we should be concerned that would-be terrorists would exploit this tendency of domestic military bases to regularly make gross errors with deadly, weaponized poisons.
~ American Liberty Report
