Tooele depot set to shut down anyway

TOOELE — While many communities across the country are angry about their military installations possibly closing, officials and workers at Deseret Chemical Depot seem almost happy.

The depot, near Stockton, Tooele County, was Utah's only military facility recommended for closure on Friday's Base Realignment and Closure list. And that was not entirely unexpected, as the site's chemical weapons incinerator was already set to disappear in the coming years.

"The BRAC timeline really fits what we were looking at anyway," depot commander Col. Raymond T. Van Pelt said Friday. "We have pretty much always been under the mission of storing and destroying the munitions we have here in Utah."

And when that's done, the depot is set to shut down.

Since 1996 the depot has been destroying the nation's largest stockpile of chemical weapons, including GB and VX nerve agents and blistering agents like mustard, as part of an international treaty. In March, the depot destroyed its historic millionth weapon.

The treaty calls for all weapons there to be destroyed by 2012, so employees had expected to lose their jobs in the coming decade anyway. The BRAC closure process is set to start in 2006 and should take about six years.

But Jim Hansen, the former Utah congressman who serves on the BRAC commission, said he thinks it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars to tear down the incinerator.

"It would just seem to me when we're trying to get rid of a lot of junk and the best way is to pulverize it, beat it up, sell it as scrap, to take a facility such as that and tear it down just because there is a lot of paranoid people that panic every time they hear the word 'chemical,' it doesn't make any sense to me," Hansen told the Deseret Morning News.

The depot employs about 1,500 people — about 1,000 contractors and 500 civilians. There are only three military personnel employed at the depot. Numbers differ from the Pentagon's BRAC list, which was based on earlier estimates.

"All of us were aware" they would lose their jobs one day, said Gary Hunter, a chemical plant operations supervisor. "We're in the business to go out of business. . . . When you're initially hit by the BRAC you panic. But now we see it as a plus, after we realize the benefits."

With the depot's inclusion on the base-closure list, the facility qualifies for benefits from the Army, including help to relocate displaced workers either to jobs at other facilities across the country or work with other government agencies. The Army also will offer job training and early retirement to some employees.

And Van Pelt said the Army has programs to help the county respond to the closure.

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