Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD – August 18, 2024 marks 10 years since an international effort allowed a team of demilitarization experts from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center (DEVCOM CBC) to safely destroy 1,300 tons of Syrian chemical warfare material at sea.
It was late December 2012 and the Obama administration’s national security team had a problem in Syria. A big problem. The Syrian government, enmired in a civil war, had agreed to turn over its stockpile of chemical agent -- an estimated 1,300 tons -- for destruction under the direction of the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
The problem was that nobody in the OPCW, U.S. State Department, Pentagon or the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) had any idea how to carry out the destruction. That is when the deputy director of DTRA, Maj. Gen. Jay Santee and the State Department’s point person for this mission, Richard Falkenrath came to the Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center’s (DEVCOM CBC) Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland campus to meet with the Center’s field response arm, the Chemical Biological Application and Risk Reduction (CBARR) business unit. CBARR had decades of experience destroying recovered chemical agent munitions all over the world - including Iraq - and these visitors knew that if anybody could do it, it would be CBARR.
They presented their problem to CBARR Chief Timothy Blades and his team as a hypothetical, proposing the possibility of incineration as way to get the job done in an austere environment on the other side of the world. Blades shot the idea down immediately. It would take too long to build, require too many people to operate and require too large a logistics train. Hydrolysis was the way to go according to Blades. Mixing the agent with hot water and a caustic compound to render it a conventional industrial waste made more sense to him.
Hydrolysis only required mixing vessels, storage containers, piping, valves and pumps. It would be much easier to build, transport, operate and disassemble than an incinerator. CBARR was also experienced with it, having used it to assist the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency with the destruction of two different stockpiles on U.S. soil.
The meeting adjourned with Blades telling his visitors, “Yeah, we can do this. I don’t know exactly how, but we’ll find a way.” Falkenrath knew at that moment that he was dealing with highly operational, no-nonsense people, as was captured by Joby Warrick in his book, Red Line, which recounted the events surrounding Syria’s use of chemical weapons at that stage of its civil war.
Blades put his mechanical engineers and electricians to work right way. They worked off Blades’ simple sketches depicting a very small field deployable hydrolysis system (FDHS) that could be easily assembled and disassembled, would fit in tight spaces yet be sturdy enough to withstand transport across the world. A month later, Blades had a blueprint to take to the Pentagon.
The reception he received was “What do you need,” and “How soon can you build them?” They wanted three: two for deployment and one as a backup. Blades told them he needed $3 million and that he could have them by mid-summer 2013.
In June 2013, the CBARR team demonstrated their system: a modularized FDHS that could be disassembled and fitted into standard shipping containers. It was designed for ease of maintenance and avoided digital gauges and sensors, reasoning that tried-and-true analog would be more durable and easier to operate and maintain. It came with a portable laboratory for testing batches to ensure complete agent destruction, power generation, an array of storage tanks and all the piping needed to move the liquid agent through the system. The team also doubled up on valves and pumps color-coded for plug-and-play assembly upon arrival.
The CBARR team had delivered a working prototype within six months and within a very modest budget by Pentagon standards. The Pentagon then ordered a total of seven to be built.
Meanwhile, the State Department, Department of Defense (DoD) and OPCW were very busy. In August 2013, the Syrian government used chemical agent against its own people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. In September, U.S. and Russian representatives negotiated the Syrian government’s surrender of its chemical agent stockpile in a three-day conference in Geneva.
When the discussion turned to the method of destruction, Jeff Harris, a mechanical engineer and project manager for the U.S. Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense, was at the table. After the Russian delegation scoffed at the portable hydrolysis method as “totally impossible,” he walked them through a diagram of the FDHS. A Russian chemical destruction expert was present. He understood Harris’ explanation and declared, “This will work.” Thirteen days later the OPCW and the U.N. Security Council approved a destruction agreement.
Still left to do was the daunting job of rounding up the Syrian chemical agent stockpile stored in caches of varying size all over the country, in the middle of a civil war. As the round up proceeded, the CBARR team learned that the agents they would have to destroy were a precursor to the nerve agent Sarin known as methyl phosphonic difluoride (DF) and mustard, a blister agent. And then there was the issue of finding a destruction site.
No nation was willing to host the destruction of these agents on its own soil, so in October 2013, CBARR was asked to explore the possibility of performing destruction operations at sea. While CBARR had no experience with maritime operations, they learned as much as they could as quickly as they could. They traveled to seaports around the country learning about the different kinds of ships available. It quickly became clear to them that the two-story high FDHS would require a ship with high ceilings in its interior.
That pointed them toward a type of cargo ship known as roll-on/roll-off, or ‘roro’ for short. In this class was the U.S.-owned Motor Vessel (MV) Cape Ray. It was 647 feet long, 105 feet wide with four decks including an unusually spacious trailer deck. The CBARR team calculated that they had room for the actual FDHS units in which destruction occurred, the many storage tanks that would be required plus room for living quarters; a kitchen, mess hall, medical clinic, exercise room and sleeping pods. Those would be inside standard cargo shipping containers bolted to the deck.
The main trailer deck in which the two field deployable hydrolysis systems were located was made air-tight and kept under negative air pressure in case any agent leaked during operations. The CBARR team also had to account for the stresses to the FDHS unique to a sea voyage. They replaced rigid hoses and pipes with flexible ones that could roll with a pitching sea. Other equipment had to be given additional welds and bolts.
Working through the winter holidays, the CBARR team, with the help of the MV Cape Ray crew, completed construction inside the ship by New Years Day 2014. The construction phase included a sea trial that lasted three days. They steamed out of Norfolk, Virginia and into a North Atlantic gale. The team added coping with sea sickness to their list of mission stressors. However, the stress test was very valuable in determining where and how to secure the system’s many parts to the ship.
The job of hauling the declared stockpile caches out of bunkers around Syria was underway. The caches of chemical agent were placed on board a Danish cargo ship, the Ark Futura, as they were collected. By January 2014, the CBARR team was on the MV Cape Ray and ready to rendezvous with the Danish ship in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. But a sudden polar vortex over the Mediterranean burst the MV Cape Ray’s PVC piping. President Obama himself was informed. In addition, collecting all 1,300 tons of agent from around the country was taking longer than anyone anticipated.
The CBARR team and MV Cape Ray crew sat idle at a U.S. Navy base in Rota, Spain just west of Gibraltar. The weeks and months went by as the dispersed stockpile was collected. Blades busied his team with fire drills, spill response drills and maintenance checks. But they were bored and frustrated, and Blades worried about members of his all-volunteer team deciding that their families had endured long enough without them and returning home. None did.
Come June, 90 percent of the stockpile had been loaded, but the Danish ship could not set sail until it had all 100 percent as any disruption in collection might end the collection effort altogether. The U.N.’s June deadline was now defunct, and the Italian and Greek chapters of Greenpeace were following the news on the operation and getting restive.
To add to the Danish ship’s woes, the constant jostling caused by waves caused leaks in some of the agent containers and had to be carefully tape-wrapped. Their crew was also concerned that, in the course of moving the containers, the valves on some of them might shear off causing a catastrophic leak. Blades visited the ship with his deputy, sized up the problems with the containers and promptly drew up mitigation procedures for safely moving them aboard the MV Cape Ray.
Finally, at the end of June 2014, the last of the agent stockpile was loaded on trucks and sent to a port in Gioia Tauro, Italy where the Ark Futura was docked. The MV Cape Ray arrived and the chemical agent was carefully transferred from one ship to the other using heavy equipment.
Destruction operations began on July 4, 2014. The CBARR team members worked around the clock in six-hour shifts. They did not experience any summer storms, which are common in the Mediterranean, and the seas were mostly steady at 1 to 2 feet. But it was hot, often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
While destruction operations were going smoothly, Blades and the ship’s engineer became aware of something ominous. The ship was staying in the rolls of waves longer than it should. The ship was becoming top-heavy. There were two reasons. First, the ship consumed fuel located low in the ship and the weight of that fuel is relied upon as ballast. As the fuel was used and the fuel tanks emptied, there was less ballast. Second, as the contents of the caustic storage tanks were moved into the mixing vessels mid-deck and the resulting hydrolysate from the reaction moved up to storage tanks on the deck, the liquid weight in the destruction process shifted up.
CBARR engineers and the ship’s engineer put their heads together and calculated that the rate of fuel consumption combined with the upward movement of liquids in the hydrolysis process gave them 39 days operations plus a few extra days to get to port to unload. According to these calculations, they would be three days short of entering the danger zone where capsizing was a real danger.
At the same time, the Italian and Greek chapters of Greenpeace, egged on by concerns of residents of Crete had that an accident in the operations would harm their tourist trade, began making public statements. “We are coming,” they proclaimed, and they were assembling a flotilla of small fishing boats and yachts. While the MV Cape Ray had an international escort of warships, the CBARR crew had a job to do and did not need the aggravation. As it turned out, heavy weather prevented the Greenpeace flotilla from getting near the operations area.
As if the problem of becoming ever more top heavy was not enough, the CBARR team was hit with another very serious problem. As the caustic neutralizing solution was mixed with the highly acidic hydrolysate, salts formed and settled on the bottom of the mixing vessels as a clay-like sludge.
It couldn’t be flushed out or scooped out and as time went on, less and less room was available for mixing. The CBARR team had to come up with a fix quickly as the time before the ship became subject to capsizing kept getting closer.
The solution they came up with was to bypass the mixing vessels and run hoses from the caustic storage tanks in the hold up to the deck and directly connect them with the hydrolysate storage tanks up there. CBARR team members then had to mix the hot acidic hydrolysate with the caustic compound by blowing pressurized air through a pipe. This required a kind of ship-wide ballet of maintaining stability as the liquid inside 200 tanks (each containing 6,000 gallons) moved from the hold to the deck in an ebb and flow. And all the while, the ship kept consuming fuel.
On top of everything else, the ship had to be entirely self-sufficient during destruction operations. The only supplies they could get was what could fit inside a helicopter. No port in the world would allow them entry to receive supplies due to their dangerous mission. This added to their problems because the very high pH of the caustic compound continuously assaulted the entire system by eroding any material it came into contact with vessel walls, hose linings, valves, pumps. Because of this difficulty with resupply, they had to use valves and pumps right up to their red zones. The ship was also running low on storage tanks at this point.
Working day and night for 42 days, overcoming every obstacle thrown at them, the team processed their last batch of agent on August 17, 2014. In all, it took five months to build the FDHS, 66 days to outfit the ship, and 42 days to destroy the 1,300-ton stockpile. On August 18, they dropped off the tanks carrying the hydrolysate waste at a waste processing facility in Finland.
Then they landed in Germany, where the majority of the CBARR team took commercial flights back to Dulles Airport in Virginia. There, they were greeted as heroes by family, friends and other members of DEVCOM CBC who had been tracking their progress.
Several team members stayed behind with the ship and spent five days thoroughly cleaning the ship. They delivered a ship cleaner than before they ever boarded it for this operation.
Later still, as they had time to recoup and take stock, several members of the project team reviewed their calculations for the capsizing danger zone and made a startling discovery. The storage containers bolted to the deck to serve as living quarters were heavier than they thought. Also, the system for measuring the volume of liquid going into the storage tanks on the deck routinely under-counted that volume. They then entered the correct numbers into their calculations and discovered that they had entered the danger zone a week before the mission ended.
Blades, looking back on the operation years later said that in his 49 years of performing field responses all over the world in all sorts of difficult conditions, that he had “never seen a group of people pull together, concentrate and cooperate so well in such a difficult environment and under that much pressure.” Most of the members of the team that accomplished the mission are still with DEVCOM CBC and all remember the mission with pride and consider it the adventure of a lifetime.
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The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) was established with a bold objective: to integrate a diverse set of Army research and technology expertise to solve complex problems, rapidly deliver next-generation combat capabilities and make our Soldiers more protected and more lethal than ever before The command executes its mission to accelerate research, development, engineering and analysis to deliver warfighter capabilities by serving as the Army Futures Command’s leader and integrator within a global ecosystem of technological innovation and scientific exploration. From drones to dozers, rockets to robots, autonomy to aviation – DEVCOM experts work alongside partners in industry, academia and other federal agencies to drive scientific discovery, advance and improve existing technologies, and engineer solutions that will transform the Army and ensure war-winning future readiness.
The DEVCOM Chemical Biological Center is the primary DOD technical organization for non-medical chemical and biological defense. The DEVCOM Chemical Biological Center fosters research, development, testing and application of technologies for protecting our military from chemical and biological warfare agents. The Center possesses an unrivaled chemical biological defense research and development infrastructure staffed by a highly-trained, multidisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, technicians and specialists located at four different sites in the United States: Edgewood Area of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland; Pine Bluff Arsenal, Arkansas; Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois; and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
| Date Taken: | 08.15.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 08.15.2024 16:15 |
| Story ID: | 478743 |
| Location: | ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, MARYLAND, US |
| Web Views: | 49 |
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This work, Army Marks 10-Year Anniversary of Syrian Chemical Agent Destruction, by Brian Feeney, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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