The military has a terrible track record at keeping tabs on chemical weapons stored outside its nine official stockpiles. From World War I through the 1970s, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, chemical weapons were manufactured, stored or dumped at scores of military bases, private contractors and other "non-stockpiled" facilities across the country. Because of poor record-keeping, most of the sites are dangerous question marks: The military simply doesn't know what's there.

The military insists that it's unlikely that terrorists would be able to locate any of the lost chemical weapons, many of which were buried in unmarked and unmapped dumps, but the prospect of such a discovery is horrifying. Less than five miles from the White House, in an affluent neighborhood of Washington, investigators have dug up 75 shells and other containers filled with chemical warfare materiel since the 1990s. Some of these munitions contained mustard agent, an oily liquid that can cause severe blistering to the skin, blindness and death. Although the munitions were manufactured at a research facility that stood on the site during World War I, tests on some of the samples showed that the deadly compound "had not degraded at all over the course of 90 years," says Chuck Twing of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Mustard gas, of course, was one of the deadly chemicals that the Bush administration accused Baghdad of possessing prior to the invasion of Iraq. Another was nitric acid, a colorless, highly corrosive poisonous liquid that gives off suffocating fumes when exposed to air (although nitric acid itself is not listed on the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention). In October of 2002, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency analyst warned that "a large new chemical complex" in northern Iraq "will produce nitric acid, which can be used not only in explosives and missile fuel, but also for the purification of uranium." In fact, a far more immediate security threat came from Nitrochem, a military contractor in Newell, Penn. In 2002, the EPA included Nitrochem on a list of more than 100 chemical plants across the country that could each place a million or more people at risk if attacked. Despite the danger, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review who investigated security at the plant had no problem entering the grounds and walking around for more than an hour without encountering a single guard or employee. Just outside the plant, he found children strolling alongside huge rail cars filled with nitric acid and other deadly chemicals.

Like the chemicals at Tyczkowski's laboratories in North Carolina and Tennessee, some of the substances in Pennsylvania were manufactured for the U.S. military. According to federal records obtained by Salon and Rolling Stone, Nitrochem and its predecessor at the site, Welland Chemical, were longtime chemical suppliers for the U.S. Navy's Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, Md. Even more frightening, such sites make up a tiny fraction of U.S. chemical plants where deadly compounds are made.

The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention -- ratified by 161 nations, including the United States -- bans a small number of chemicals, such as sarin and mustard gas, which have been employed as military weapons in the past, and restricts the use of several other substances, including PFIB. But there are hundreds of other potentially deadly chemicals, used every day by American industry, which are not covered by the convention. Such "ethyl-methyl bad stuff" constitutes a real terrorist threat, says Amy Smithson, a chemical-weapons expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an influential think tank in Washington, D.C. "An attack employing industrial chemicals would be easier to pull off than one with classic chemical warfare agents, such as sarin," she says. "And the results would sadly be much the same if this took place in a major metropolitan area."

George F. Mick, who helped spearhead the cleanup at Tyczkowski's lab in Tennessee, puts it even more bluntly. "Go to the waste-water treatment facility nearest you," he says. "You're going to see things like one-ton cylinders of phosgene or chlorine. If you take one of those one-tonners in a box truck and release it in a populated area, you're going to kill thousands. That stuff is readily available."

The Bush administration acknowledges the pressing nature of such risks -- yet it has done almost nothing to improve security at chemical plants. If anything, it has made matters worse. Last year, under pressure from the chemical industry, the White House transferred oversight of the industry from the EPA -- which was attempting to toughen security -- to the new Department of Homeland Security. As chemical lobbyists and administration officials are well aware, Homeland Security does not have the regulatory authority to require the industry to adopt stricter measures.

The Republican-dominated Congress has been equally unwilling to act. Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., introduced a bill last year to improve safety and enhance security oversight at chemical facilities. But in the face of a formidable lobbying effort against the legislation, Corzine's bill has languished. In October, a Senate committee passed a loophole-ridden measure -- written with the support of the Bush administration -- that allows industry to self-regulate without any new hazard-reduction requirements. But even that watered-down legislation has stalled.

"The industry has just completely stonewalled the involvement of the government in this whole process," says a frustrated Corzine. "We've been looking all over God's green acre for chemical weapons in Iraq and other nations while largely ignoring chemical security at home."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Ed Tyczkowski doesn't see what all the fuss was about. To him, the problem was government officials meddling in something they didn't understand. For months after officials discovered his stockpile on Rock Hill, Tyczkowski resisted orders to clean it up. State and federal regulators, he told the local media, were exaggerating the dangers at his lab to "justify their jobs."

Then, on April 3, 2000, Tyczkowski met EPA officials on the front steps of his lab. His finances, it turned out, were in as big a mess as his chemicals. Forced into bankruptcy, he had decided to give up. "He literally handed us the keys and walked away," says Dean Ullock, who coordinated the team that took over the site.

Ullock is something of a natural-born troubleshooter. In January of 1982, when he was a 21 years old and serving as a diver for the Army, he was given the gruesome assignment of pulling corpses from the submerged fuselage of an Air Florida jet that had plunged into the Potomac River after taking off from Washington's National Airport. Ullock can still describe how some people died holding tight to their seats and how he had to peel back their fingers so that he could carry them up through the icy green water to their loved ones. It was grim and exhausting work, but something about the mix of danger and do-goodism hooked Ullock. Crisis became a career.

The Air Florida disaster, caused by inadequate de-icing, also taught Ullock that small oversights can lead to horrific consequences. He called Tyczkowski's lab "the sleeping giant" because of its potential for a deadly fire or a toxic release, and he went to great lengths to make sure the beast wasn't awakened. His team established a "hot zone" on top of the hill, sealed off by two rows of barbed wire fencing, which no one could enter without a protective suit. They put rescue teams on standby and erected a huge warning siren to alert hundreds of local residents that they might have only minutes to save their lives. They removed some 1,500 tons of contaminated dirt -- most of it from dump sites left by earlier occupants -- and razed Tyczkowski's lab. They established a remote air-monitoring system, designed to detect escaping toxins, that was later replicated at the World Trade Center cleanup, and they created an innovative system for neutralizing PFIB on-site. And because the possibility that the deadly chemicals might fall into the wrong hands "was considered a pretty overwhelming hazard," according to an official familiar with the site, the EPA posted guards around the clock to monitor the gate and patrol the perimeter.

These days, Tyczkowski finds himself back in Durham, where, a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, he is attempting to make a new start. Although he declined to discuss the specifics of the Flura debacle, he agreed to meet for a beer in an empty Mexican restaurant one afternoon. He and his wife, he explains, are living on their Social Security and whatever he can scrounge together from his latest entrepreneurial enterprise -- one far different than those of the past. "Right now I've got a book business. I buy and sell used books on eBay and Amazon," Tyczkowski explains. "I have to make a living since the EPA put me out of business."

In the end, the state of Tennessee had to write off $125,000 of Tyczkowski's $225,000 loan. Of the 35 jobs he promised to create, only a fraction ever materialized. The EPA's cleanup cost $8.5 million. No matter how you look at it, what happened on Rock Hill was a tragedy -- though perhaps one inspired less by greed than by old-fashioned hubris. Dean Ullock, for one, thinks that after half a century as a chemist, Tyczkowski simply became overconfident in his skills: "He's a brilliant man. He just had absolutely no regard for environmental laws, for storage and disposal laws and for worker safety. He was so comfortable around these chemicals that he may have taken them for granted."

Unfortunately, the Pentagon also seems to be taking the risks posed by the case for granted. A federal criminal probe of Tyczkowski's activities had to be abandoned -- in part because the U.S. Army was less than cooperative, according to a source familiar with the investigation. Civil penalties against the scientist are expected to be announced in the near future.

If you travel east of Newport today, past the Pigeon River, the True Gospel Free Will Baptist Church and the county dump, you'll find yourself at that same gated drive leading up the steep forested slope. Beyond that gate, however, you'll be hard-pressed to believe that not long ago this was one of the most dangerous places in the United States. Wildflowers grow where Tyczkowski's cluttered laboratory used to stand. Oaks, pecans, walnuts and hickories tower over ground once inhabited by men and women in vulcanized orange bio-suits.

The top of the hill is still fenced up, but that's mostly a formality. The EPA now considers the land up there so safe that it has allowed a Boy Scout troop to take the place over as a campground. The scouts have dug a fire pit, and on warm nights, they sit around it, cooking burgers and singing songs. Then they roll out their sleeping bags, stare into the sky, and wait for sleep, listening to the crackle of the fire. And sometimes, just before it comes, there's a moment when the night is so still and the air tastes so pure and the heavens seem so close that those boys might suddenly feel as though they live in a world where nothing bad can ever happen.

Recent Stories