By Arthur Foulkes, The Tribune-Star
arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com
NEWPORT - Nearly 200 more jobs are being eliminated at the Newport Chemical Depot in Vermillion County.
The U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency announced Thursday that about 180 employees of Parsons Corporation will be laid off beginning in September.
"It's always sad," said Terry Arthur, a public affairs official for the Newport Chemical Depot. "You come to know a lot of people very well" over the years. Saying good-bye to them is "not an easy thing to do."
The Parsons employees losing their jobs built, operated and now are dismantling the equipment used to neutralize Newport's stockpile of VX, a deadly nerve agent.
VX was manufactured at the facility in the 1960s, and neutralization of the agent began in 2006. The last of the chemical agent was neutralized in August 2008.
Since last fall, 150 employees of Mason and Hanger, another military contractor at the Newport site, also have been laid off from the facility, according to a CMA news release issued Thursday. Mason and Hanger has operated the Newport installation since 1986, about 17 years after President Richard Nixon halted U.S. chemical weapons production.
About 385 contract and government employees will remain at the facility for now, but those positions gradually will be phased out before the property is returned to the locally-controlled Newport Chemical Depot Reuse Authority no later than the autumn of 2011.
At one time, more than 1,000 people worked at the Newport Chemical Depot.
Workers being laid off at the facility have a wide variety of skills and experience, Arthur said. They include administrators, engineers, security officers and members of skilled trades.
"It's a whole broad spectrum," she said.
Several of the laid-off workers will move to jobs at other chemical agent disposal sites, according to the Army CMA news release.
About 38-percent of the workforce at the chemical depot are natives of Vermillion County or the surrounding area, Arthur said.
The Newport layoffs add to an already large number of unemployed workers in Vermillion County. According to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, the mostly rural county had a May unemployment rate of 11.2 percent. That is higher than the state unemployment rate of 10.4 percent and the national rate of 9.1 percent in May.
The employees remaining at the site for the final months of federal government control will have a variety of responsibilities, Arthur said. Some will continue dismantling the equipment used to neutralize the VX. Others will operate site utilities, provide security, fire protection and other "city functions," she said.
Newport is the third U.S. Army CMA facility to destroy all of its chemical weapons stockpile, according to Thursday's news release. Newport also is the first facility to neutralize VX, the most dangerous chemical weapon ever made.
"Neutralizing VX was something that had not been done anywhere else," Arthur said. "We're very proud of what we've done."