Carrying the Flame

How Richard Magee harnessed the science of burning and turned it into a lifelong mission to protect public health

RICHARD MAGEE MAY BE THE United States’ foremost expert in incineration. But if one were to speak to the modest mechanical engineer from Hoboken, New Jersey, it would be hard to know. His humility belies the important contributions he has made to public health.

Magee has spent his working life dedicated to understanding how everything from rocket fuel to chemical waste burns. His knowledge has taken him across the country and across the world; he has advised both the US Army and the Iraqi government on how to dispose of their chemical weapons.

In his most significant public health role, Magee led a group of a dozen engineers, chemists, toxicologists, and social scientists in an effort to oversee the US Army’s destruction of the massive stockpile of chemical weapons stored at 8 locations in the United States and on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. That stockpile of nerve and mustard gas and other human pesticides has the potential to injure and kill those charged with monitoring it. Under a worst-case scenario, a large number of munitions could leak, casting these deadly agents into the atmosphere and potentially exposing members of the public to them. The US government has the obligation to prevent a low-probability but high-consequence public health catastrophe by destroying these weapons, and the National Academy of Sciences formed a committee that Magee chaired for years to manage this significant public health project.

This work has at times sparked controversy, and Magee has taken his share of abuse from a hostile and fearful public. But he has always managed to stay above the criticism, motivated by what may seem to be almost quaint beliefs in today’s world of relative values. Magee believes deeply that science can provide an objective solution. He also believes that scientists can and should make the world a better place to live.

“It was the right thing to do,” Magee says simply of the many years he spent as a volunteer on the National Research Council’s (of the National Academy of Sciences) stockpile committee.

Magee’s service to the public began early in his career. Following his graduation in 1963 from the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, NJ, Magee was awarded a National Aeronautics and Space Administration fellowship toward a doctorate in mechanical engineering. He ended up studying how to make propellants burn better. It was work he thought would eventually help put men and women into space.

But Magee soon found himself working on how synthetic substances reacted to fire. It was the 1970s, when these new materials were rapidly replacing cotton and wool, and during that time, an understanding of their fire safety issues became increasingly important. “Whenever you ride the Washington, DC, Metro, you can think of me,” says Magee. In 1975, the city’s transit authority was considering putting in polyurethane seats, often thought of as more comfortable because the foam is plusher. But after fire safety tests, Magee noted that even a small fire in which one seat, for example, was set alight, would most certainly end in disaster. Sure enough, when the transit authority conducted a mock test, the Metro car caught fire leaving behind a gutted shell in a matter of minutes. Thanks to Magee, the seats now used on the DC Metro are made from the more fire-resistant material neoprene.

As the decade wore on, his attention turned toward the burning of waste materials. Before this time, much of the waste produced was simply buried or dumped in landfills. But with the staggering amount of garbage being produced, local governments needed an alternative. He started out looking at the burning of municipal waste, then medical and hazardous waste, which eventually led to his work in the incineration of chemical weapons. As Magee likes to joke of his career, he has been “carrying a flame” for combustion and incineration for 40 years now.

Eventually, Magee’s work led to his appointment in 1991 to the National Research Council, specifically to the Board on Army Science and Technology Committee and Evaluation of the Army Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program, or the stockpile committee as it is known for short. Magee served as a member for 8 years, and chaired the committee for 4 of them, with his tenure ending only as his National Research Council–regulated term was up.

The committee had been convened to serve as an impartial, scientific observer to the US Army’s chemical demilitarization program, which began in 1985 after Congress directed the Army to destroy the US chemical weapons stockpile. In 1993, the program was given an additional incentive to complete its mission after the United States signed the Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty, in which it agreed to get rid of its chemical weapons stockpiles by 2012.

Getting rid of the country’s stockpiles has been a lengthy and arduous process. Initially, it was thought that the program would take 10 years to complete and cost $1.7 billion dollars. Two decades later, the program is still not finished, and may end up costing more than $30 billion. Michael Parker, director of the US Army’s Chemical Materials Agency and the head of its Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives Program says that the disposal may not be complete until 2016.

It is now understood that the complexity of the task was severely underestimated. The sheer size of the stockpile is a daunting one. At the start of the program, the stockpile was made up of 30000 tons of agent; much of it is stored in more than 3 million individual containers, housed across 8 sites in the continental United States and 1 site on Johnston Atoll, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean.

“Each [container] had to be dealt with one at a time,” says Magee, “They had to be opened up, the agent had to be drained, they had to be washed out, and the container had to be decontaminated. Obviously, it hasn’t been easy. These weapons were not built to be dismantled; they were built to be used.”

The US Army settled on incineration as its method of choice for disposal of the weapons. Incineration had the advantage of being able to get rid of the agent and to decontaminate the containers. But as the program got underway, the public backlash against incineration began. For many in the towns where the chemical weapons depots were located, the idea of burning chemical weapons seemed an outrageous risk to public health and to the environment. “Incineration struck a very real fear in the communities,” recalls Magee.

Part of Magee’s time at the National Research Council was spent visiting the weapons’ sites to meet with citizens’ groups to allay their concerns. These encounters were often emotional, charged with anxiety, and could be downright hostile. Magee and his fellow committee members, who had studied the incineration of the chemical weapons and found it posed a minimal risk, were routinely accused of being liars, frauds, and puppets for the US Army. Magee recalls one woman who stood up at a meeting and begged him not to put an incinerator in her community because she thought it would kill her child.

Bruce Braun, the current head of the National Research Council’s stockpile committee, attended some of these meetings. He recalls a meeting that got particularly aggressive. “A normal person would have got red in the face and said some things that should-n’t be said, but that were in [his or her] heart,” says Braun, “But Dick held his cool and was very professional in his presentation and demeanor. He was able to calm the naysayers and get the information across we needed to get to them. It takes a strong and confident person to do that.”

Magee admits it was hard at times not to feel personally attacked. “You try to tell people that you are giving them your best professional opinion; that you are willing to write it down, to have it reviewed by other [scientists]. And, of course, I would not recommend anything that I did not feel safely got rid of weapons with basically no measurable impact to public health and the environment.”

But as Parker notes, much to Magee’s credit, Magee did not shy away from evaluating alternative technologies as the citizens’ groups demanded—though he believed and still believes that incineration poses little risk. “I know there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” says Magee. “I’ve always believed incineration is a good way to dispose of the weapons, but I know it’s not the only way.”

Magee’s work for the National Research Council contrasts sharply with the time he spent in Iraq after the Gulf War, when he was appointed to a United Nations committee working under Resolution 687 to get rid of the country’s chemical weapons. He was 1 of 3 disposal experts sent to Iraq. For 18 months, Magee made 6 trips to Iraq to oversee the disposal. The Iraqis, eager to have sanctions lifted, and realizing that their stockpile was deteriorating rapidly anyway, pressed the United Nations committee to do the job as quickly as possible. “They burned their mustard and hydrolyzed their sarin,” says Magee. “Some of the techniques obviously wouldn’t pass [US Environmental Protection Agency] standards, but it happened in the middle of nowhere in the desert.”

Magee likes to say of his Iraq experience that he was “a footnote to history.” He recalls that he and his other team members developed a good working relationship with the Iraqis, despite the initial suspicion that he and the other Americans were possible US Central Intelligence Agency agents. “On the third or fourth day there, one of their engineers made a miscalculation, and I helped him recalculate it. It was then that I think they thought I was OK.”

Magee recalls the Iraqi government keeping the pressure on the United Nations committee to get rid of the chemical weapons stockpile sometimes resorting to intimidation. For example, Magee remembers at times being awakened at night every half hour with telephone calls. When he answered the phone, the line would go dead. Amenities such as soap or towels would be removed from the hotel room while the inspectors were out, and despite calls to get them back, they were not returned. Sometimes groups of Iraqis would be stationed outside the hotel upon their return and would heckle and shout at the inspectors as they made their way inside.

“Those were just small things. Overall, I’m glad I did it,” says Magee. “It was interesting. We didn’t have a political agenda, we just wanted to put together the best system and destroy the agent. It was nice because we walked away and we were done, unlike in the United States, which is dragging on forever.”

Still, as Magee says about the slow and often frustrating progress of the United States’ chemical weapons disposal program, he would not have it any other way. As he points out, the communities where the weapons have been stored should have a say in how they are disposed. “It is their community after all,” he notes.

As for the public debate that has delayed the program by years and has sent costs spiraling, Magee notes, “It’s the American way and the American process. That’s the great thing about America; we have open debates. I would much rather live in a country where we are not dictated to.”

Today, while officially off the stockpile committee, Magee continues to spend half his time on chemical demilitarization. The other half of his time is spent as the technical director at the New Jersey Corporation for Advanced Technology, which helps the state evaluate emerging environmental and energy technologies—everything from how to treat storm water runoff, to sensors for early warnings in wastewater.

Looking back at his career, Magee says he never imagined it would shape up the way it has. “You don’t grow up dreaming of a career destroying weapons of mass destruction,” he notes wryly. But for those who have worked with Magee, and for the public, it is a good thing he did.