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DAN DeWITTWorld War II-era disposal methods mark the Hernando County Airport a potential hot spot for danger.
BROOKSVILLE - A few months after the end of World War II, soldiers dumped 127 canisters of mustard gas into a freshly dug pit at Brooksville Army Air Field and set them on fire.
One G.I. then shot at the burning chemicals. "Some of the material splashed back on the soldier and they thought, maybe this isn't a good idea," said Robert Bridgers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Because the corps has so little confidence in this old cleanup operation, it will now spend $1.2-million to locate any chemical weapons left behind at the site, now the Hernando County Airport.
The project - aimed at finding, not removing the chemicals - is scheduled to begin next week and continue through the end of September.
The airport, 7 miles south of Brooksville, is listed as one of about 10 "Code One" former Defense Department sites in Florida, meaning it carries the highest level of potential harm to the public. It is the first such site targeted for a detailed search in which the corps and private consulting firms will dig up three areas at the airport where canisters may have been dumped.
"We think this (site) requires our immediate attention," said Bridgers, manager of the Formerly Used Defense Sites program in the corps office in Jacksonville. "It is one of the most important sites we have (in Florida) and it stacks up pretty high on a national basis as well."
Handling chemical weapons is far more sophisticated now than it was in 1946, Bridgers and other corps officials said as they led a media tour of the operation on Friday.
All holes the workers dig will be covered with a portable 16- by 32-foot aluminum hut designed to contain any chemicals unearthed. Everyone entering the site will be required to put on a protective suit in a tent and to leave the suits there at the end of each shift.
Next to this tent is a bright orange one, where any workers exposed to chemicals are decontaminated before they are transported to a hospital. This will be done, if necessary, by an ambulance that will be parked a few feet for the duration of the project.
Nearly every airport in the state was used for defense purposes during World War II, Bridgers said. Hernando has been singled out for the intensive search because it and the area around it is ripe for development, he said, and because of the strong evidence that chemical weapons were stored here.
Documents show mustard gas bombs were loaded onto planes here, and dropped in the nearby Withlacoochee State Forest so the Army could study how the chemical spread.
"This part of Florida was not extensively populated then," Bridgers said. "And this was war. And it was, like, "We can't afford to lose this war.' So they did a lot of things back then that we can't even comprehend now."
In 1963, a county worker suffered burns after being exposed to either a mustard gas bomb - four pounds of the chemical and an explosive charge packed in a length of steel pipe - or a glass vial of the agent used in training exercises.
In the early 1990s, a substance thought to be derived from chemical weapons was found in groundwater near the airport. That substance didn't actually come from the weapons, but subsequent tests, using sophisticated metal detectors, located deposits identified as the possible weapons dump sites.
Work was set to begin in 1998 but did not because of a lack of money. The Sept. 11 attacks generated new interest in chemical weapons and money to find them, Bridgers said.
Despite the precautions and the current alarm about chemical weapons, the threat to the public is relatively small, Bridgers and other corps workers said.
Mustard gas is actually not a gas at all, but a viscous substance that depends on an explosive charge to send it into the air as a mist. And mustard gas was never even intended to be fatal. It burns the eyes and blisters the skin of people exposed to it. The idea was that two soldiers would be required to transport every one soldier who was injured.
It is also possible that the underground dumps hold far more routine byproducts of a military encampment, Bridgers said.
"They could be the items we are looking for, or they could be engines out of a Jeep."