The U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) announced on Thursday that it had dispatched a team to the Sonoran Desert for a project supporting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville Center, and the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG).
The YPG is an installation first acquired in 1943 that has since been used extensively by the Army, as well as other services and friendly foreign nations, for the testing of munitions and a wide variety of ground and air weapon systems on the proving ground’s various 1,300 square-mile ranges.
“Historically, the sites were used to test the fate of chemical agents in high temperatures,” John Ditillo, CBARR project manager, said. “For example, they would sit a pallet of munitions in the hot sun for the summer, where it can get upwards of 120 degrees; then, test to see if the chemical agent inside the munitions changed or if the containers degraded.”
The Chemical Biological Application and Risk Reduction (CBARR) team from ECBC is providing chemical agent air monitoring and chemical warfare materiel laboratory testing services, which allows for remedial investigation/feasibility studies to take place on two different field sites in the YPG.
“The purpose of this project is not to remove the items but to investigate discreet areas and determine what’s there and how much, and what the condition is,” Ditillo said. “This is a first look at the problem and what we can expect.” It will be up to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to decide how to handle what the team discovers, he said.