All treaty and surety obligations are complete at the Pueblo plant after verification activities confirmed all chemical weapons and their components have been destroyed.
The Department of Defense defines the surety umbrella as including the safety, security and reliability standards for safeguarding chemical agents.
“It is a great testament to the dedication of the entire workforce that both the international treaty verification team and the United States Department of the Army have verified and validated the chemical weapons destruction mission has been successfully completed and met the highest of standards,” said Mike Strong, director of compliance, Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant.
Once the last chemical weapon at PCAPP was destroyed June 22, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the implementing party for the Chemical Weapons Convention, began final verification activities. This included visual inspections of the facility to ensure no chemical weapons remained, witnessing sampling and analysis activities to show that there was no recoverable agent left in various tanks and piping throughout the plant and verifying that all chemical weapons and their components had been destroyed.
“Our surety program was extremely successful over the years, passing all inspections,” said Walton Levi, site project manager, PCAPP. “It has been an honor and a privilege to be the reviewing official for one of the largest Chemical Personnel Reliability programs in the nation’s chemical demilitarization system.”
OPCW inspectors vacated the site in August after completing final verification at the main plant and the Static Detonation Chamber at the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama where destruction of the uncontaminated energetics from the Pueblo munitions was completed in August.
The Department of the Army provided the plant a surety termination memorandum Sept. 22. With no recoverable munitions, agent or energetics remaining, treaty seals have been removed from surety areas in the PCAPP main plant, laboratory and SDC complex; areas that contained chemical agent have been downgraded; and security checks of munitions storage areas are no longer required.
Even though the chemical weapons and their components have been verified destroyed, the safety of the workforce, community and environment remains the plant’s highest priority as it transitions to the closure phase, Levi said.
