NSA Crane, Indiana – Members of one small team of specialists at Crane Army Ammunition Activity in southern Indiana have shown they have what it takes to tackle their very specific and somewhat hazardous mission. Their specialized work earned them a unique, if slightly familiar sounding, nickname as well as recognition among their coworkers.
The members of Spill Team Six, as they’ve come to be known, volunteered for 40 hours of additional Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response Training, or HAZWOPER training, to certify their capabilities in combatting a potentially hazardous issue.
“Our mission,” said Ross Brown, a CAAA explosives handler supervisor of the spill team, “was to clean up spillage of energetic material, mainly compositions like TNT or comp A-5 bulk powder; anything that had spilled on the floor or was leaking.” Most of the spilled or leaked explosive material was contained in cardboard boxes. After several decades of storage, most containers had deteriorated – sometimes by a lot.
Brown added that any magazine with spillage could not be accessed until a qualified team could be assembled and cleanup was complete. Once his team was certified and ready, they went to work not just to clean, but to resolve a critical issue.
“We had to go out there wearing our coveralls and respirators and all the safety stuff we needed to clean the mess in the magazines because they were locked out according to (standard operating procedure).” Permanently locking any of the nearly 1,800 storage magazines situated seemingly everywhere on NSA Crane means less storage for other munitions.
Most of the magazines the team had to go into had very minimal spills, Brown said, usually consisting of less than five pounds of material. Although minimal, almost everything presented a potential health hazard. “Most of what we handled was 50 years old and covered in mouse and bat droppings.”
“It’s hard to believe that 55-year-old cardboard boxes don’t survive well in a magazine,” joked Edward Walden, also an explosives handler and STS member. “There were several times there where the boxes were deteriorated to the point they could not be used. We had to get in there and very carefully get the stuff cleaned up. Luckily, none of (the explosive material) was decomposing or deteriorating, but it could have been a hazard later on if we had not gotten in there.”
“We saved the big jobs for the end,” Brown said. “We wanted to go in there and knock out as many of the smaller jobs as we could, as soon as we could, so we could get back into those magazines and start reusing them.”
He recalled work that he and his team did to clean out “T-Rail” magazines that hadn’t been touched in decades.
“There were 60-pound boxes of explosives just pyramided up to the ceiling. They had been there since the 1975-76-time frame, the cardboard has deteriorated, and we had to go through and physically touch every single box, stack it on a pallet, wrap it with netting or shrink wrap, and then ship it to another magazine.”
Of course, the spill team had to clean as they went.
There were also times when the team didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with and question of just how dangerous and how hazardous material they encountered was a frequent question that demanded the team lean on their training.
For explosives handler and STS member Jordan Stockrahm, the HAZWOPER training was critical to getting the job done right – and safely.
“It was an in-depth training,” he said, adding that the course focused dealing with many different hazards associated with chemical compounds.
“Some of the powders that we had to handle required wearing a respirator. You couldn’t work around those powders without one,” Stockrahm said, adding, “The hardest part was trying to make sure everything was stored properly because there’d be a mix of things in the magazines we went into. Sometimes we went in just to repackage stuff only to find out that, with a lot of the materials, the packaging was completely deteriorated where it couldn’t be contained anymore. We had to figure out what in the world was in there, not knowing exactly what we were handling, while trying to be careful and follow SOPs and our training.”
“We had an excellent crew, a great supervisor and good training”, he said. “Even though we did do a lot there's still a lot of demand for that job and a lot of work that still needs to be done.”
The team, according to Brown, cleaned two dozen magazines over the summer months. “I don’t know if there’s more,” he said, “but that’s all of my list for now.”
“I've seen crews that have been handpicked,” he said. “This team, while not technically handpicked by me, really came together, worked well together, and knew what to do without being told. They kind of gelled together as a really good team.”
CAAA produces and provides conventional munitions in support of U.S. Army and Joint Force readiness. It is part of the Joint Munitions Command and the U.S. Army Materiel Command, which include arsenals, depots, activities, and ammunition plants. Established Oct. 1977, it is located on Naval Support Activity Crane.
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