REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala. – Senior Pentagon officials visited Redstone Arsenal’s munitions recovery and disposal project to gain a greater understanding of the operations to safely restore the excavation sites.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, alongside professionals from Redstone Arsenal, Chemical Materials Activity and Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosives Analytical and Remediation Activity lead Amy Borman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, Kingston Reif, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Threat Reduction and Arms Control and Ron Tickle, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environmental Management and Restoration, on a tour to visit facilities for recovered munitions.
At the beginning of the tour, Borman said, “It is clear that it ‘takes a village’ to successfully accomplish missions like this.”
Additional agencies involved in the project include Chemical Ammunition Surveillance Office, Recovered Chemical Materiel Directorate and U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center, Chemical Biological Application and Risk Reduction.
Ashley Roeske, Huntsville Center’s Chemical Warfare Design Center project manager, elaborated on organizations involved in the effort, “Multiple agencies all working together is what helps make this project a success.”
Huntsville Center’s Ordnance and Explosives Directorate’s Chemical Warfare Design Center is leading the project in managing the safe removal of potential munitions and chemical agent hazards among other roles.
Munitions were manufactured at Redstone Arsenal from World War II until after the Korean War. Numerous munition types have been manufactured, renovated, stored, tested or demilitarized across the arsenal. After World War II, a common practice at the time was to dispose munitions in buried trenches.
“After World War II, the approved practice for disposal of munitions and items like this was to bury them or to create trenches and pits and blow them up and then bury the remains -- and it was an approved practice then,” Roeske said.
Throughout the event, Roeske explained Huntsville Center’s responsibility for this project.
“We are the sole U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Design Center authorized to execute responses involving chemical munitions and certain materials of interest,” she said.
“Our team is providing the technical expertise for planning and executing all investigation and remediation phases of the Recovered Chemical Warfare Materiel Program.”
The tour included the Marshall Space Flight Center MSFC-003 excavation site, storage facilities for recovered munitions and sites where the chemical munitions will be destroyed.
The visit aimed to show senior leaders the ongoing efforts on the site, while brining attention to challenges and future requirements.
“This site visit enabled our team to brief senior leaders and Recovered Chemical Warfare Materiel program managers of the ongoing chemical warfare materiel remediation efforts,” Roeske said.
Closing out the tour, Roeske reiterated the importance of these efforts.
“The goal of this multi-year project is to enable Redstone Arsenal to return the cleared areas to its tenant organizations to meet Army and DOD mission requirements.”