Fired Safety Whistle-Blower Back on Job

WASHINGTON —  Safety engineer Steven Jones, fired from his job in 1994 after warning that the nation’s plan to dispose of chemical weapons was unsafe, will return to his job today as chief safety officer of the government’s Tooele Chemical Disposal Facility in Tooele, Utah.

“I’m excited to be back. It’s a great victory,” said Jones, whose job now will include charting the Tooele plant’s transition to safer disposal technologies. But, he added, “the life of a whistle-blower is not wonderful; I wouldn’t propose anyone become one.”

In 1994, after nine weeks on the job at the Army’s chemical-weapon disposal plant, Jones warned of a host of safety violations on the part of the contractor, EG&G; Defense Materials Inc. EG&G; then fired him, citing poor management. In the meantime, the Tooele plant, which was then still in the planning stages, has become operational--although Jones and other critics noted that it has worked well short of its capacity because of technical problems.

Since it began incineration operations in August 1996, the Tooele plant has destroyed tens of thousands of rockets, bombs and projectiles, most of them dating from World War II, that contained the toxic nerve agent GB. It is part of the Army’s $30-billion program to clean up and destroy the nation’s stock of chemical weapons, which are now stored at eight Army bases.

EG&G; still wants Jones out of the job, according to Mark Mesesan, a spokesman for EG&G;, and the company’s appeal of several court rulings is still pending. But Jones said the company has complied completely with a recent court order to reinstate him to his job with back pay and $50,000 in damages.

“So far, they’re bending over backward,” said Jones, who continues to charge that the incinerator operation in Tooele and planned for three other sites in the United States--one each in Alabama, Arkansas and Oregon--is “a very unsafe technology.”

In the years since his firing, Jones has served as an expert witness for the Chemical Weapons Working Group, which is challenging the Tooele facility in state and federal courts. Asked Monday whether he regretted taking a public stance against the Tooele facility, he said that “they were taking gigantic risks with their workers and the community.

“When you can kill people for 40 miles around, you can’t make mistakes,” Jones added. “The cause is bigger than me, and there’s a time in everybody’s life where you say this cause is important enough for me to take a stand.”

Jones’ reinstatement is among the earliest of those ordered by the U.S. Labor Department under a new law protecting government whistle-blowers. It comes as the department is seeking legislation that would strengthen the law.