“‘ Just 58 miles west of Indianapolis, the Newport
Chemical Depot houses enough of the nerve agent VX to kill every person on
earth.’ ”
Wearing a Cheshire cat grin, Diogenes hit me with
that quote this morning before I had even had coffee. I blinked at him.
“Gets your attention, doesn’t it?” he asked,
handing me a magazine. “That’s the lede from an excellent and well-balanced
story in Indianapolis Monthly. It’s the November 2001 issue. It was timed
perfectly, as everyone was still jumpy about terrorism.
“Somewhere in the Operations Office of the Newport plant
was a map of the region, divided by concentric circles centered on the Newport
Depot. The central circle wasn’t red like a target. It was black, and it was
called the Dead Zone. In the event of a major accident it was the area the
powers that were had decided would have to be written off because there would
be no way to evacuate and/or save those within it.
“While my cousins—and I when I was visiting—were playing
tag and baseball and swimming and riding bicycles and learning to dance and
having picnics and campouts and birthday parties and big family Thanksgiving
and Christmas gatherings and trying to understand algebra and going to drive-in
movies and parks and discovering sex and puzzling out conjugations of Latin
verbs and having not a care in the world—and right on through maturity and falling
in love and getting married and having children—we never knew we could be
snuffed out in an instant. We worried a little about ICBM attacks, but not
about ‘friendly fire’ death floating in across the river. We were in the Dead
Zone! For almost half a century! And no one knew! Can you begin to understand
why this angers me?”
This last he almost shouted, he was so heated. I’ve
never seen him so exercised about an issue.
I was silent for a moment, partly out of respect
for his emotion, and partly from the shock of hearing about his childhood.
Until then I wasn’t sure he had had one.
Finally I ventured, “But you’ve said the plant
wasn’t secret. Surely there was some knowledge of the facts.”
“It’s true that the plant itself wasn’t secret,
and neither was the nature of its products, but the civilian workforce was
strongly urged not to discuss their work or anything they knew about the plant.
And such was the longstanding friendly relationship between the plant and its
neighboring towns that the employees seem willingly to have acceded to that
charge.
“My uncle was well placed in his community and had
a great many contacts. He hobnobbed with politicians, law enforcement personnel
and several people who worked at the plant, and if he knew anything he kept his
silence.
“In the 1980s when the truth began to come out the
army was forced to mount a sort of public relations campaign. There were public
meetings held mostly to assure the locals they were in no danger, and some
people began disputing that point. As more information emerged the public
became more engaged, and some very heated meetings took place.
"When the army’s plan
to destroy the VX by incineration became public people became even more active.
Incineration had proven problematic in the past, and the knowledge that the
agent could be spread by fire helped to support arguments against the process.
Finally, after some head butting between army personnel and activists, the
incineration plan was dropped and chemical neutralization was agreed upon. It
was at the beginning of the neutralization program that the spills I discussed
last time happened.
“Let me draw a worst-case scenario for you. Let me
stress that this series of events would have been statistically virtually
impossible, but the real world does have a tendency sometimes to ignore
statistics. The circle that was the Dead Zone had a 30 mile radius. It would
have been near impossible for any accident to affect the entire area.
Prevailing winds would have caused one vector to suffer while the rest would
likely be spared. But humor me.
“Imagine a bright summer day with no clouds and no
wind. It’s Sunday and only a minimum staff is at the plant. The army has agreed
to allow CSX to park a half-dozen tank cars filled with LPG on a siding until
the gas can be transferred to a holding tank on Monday. The siding is between
two bunkers that hold ton containers of VX.
“Early that evening an off-duty guard is strolling
the grounds, enjoying the evening air and a cigarette. As he crosses the siding
with the tank cars he tosses his cigarette butt in their direction—and under,
as it happens, a car with a leaking valve. The hapless guard is vaporized in
the ensuing explosion, which also rips open the bunkers and ruptures a dozen
or so VX containers. The nerve agent is carried upward by the firestorm
thousands of feet higher than the visible fireball, expanding as it goes. At
about 12,000 feet it stops and begins descending in a circle into the Dead
Zone. No wind, remember?
“When the VX reaches ground level it immediately
contacts a few hundred people within a few miles of the plant who have come
outside to look at the fireball. The explosion destroyed the plant’s
communication center, so the system that should have sounded an alarm is never
activated.
“Inside a couple of hours 2,827 square miles of
mostly productive farmland has been rendered unusable, possibly for years, and
virtually every structure will be uninhabitable. More than a hundred fifty thousand
people live within the Dead Zone, and they will start to die in minutes, along
with all pets, livestock and wildlife under the umbrella of death.
“Within two hours, long before the fire at the
plant is extinguished, the Dead Zone is dead.”