Toxicology: Sheep & the Army

• Share

There was no denying that over 4,500 Utah sheep had staggered, fallen and died—their feet twitching spasmodically and some frothing at the mouth. There was no denying that their carcasses lay scattered across an area stretching 14 miles downwind from the Dugway Proving Grounds, a restricted U.S. Army chemical, biological and radiological research center in western Utah where nerve gases are tested. But last week there was plenty of denying by the Army that anyone had proved Dugway directly responsible for the sheep deaths.

It was true enough, said Army spokesmen, that three operations involving nerve agents were carried out the day before the sheep collapsed. In one, chemical-warfare troops in training watched as three 155-mm. artillery shells containing a short-lived nerve agent were fired off in an area 27 miles inside Dugway's limits. Later that afternoon, 160 gal. of a more stable nerve agent were destroyed by fire in a disposal training exercise about 19 miles inside the proving grounds. Finally, a nerve liquid was sprayed from a jet aircraft traveling at high speed. But the spray had stayed well within Dugway's limits, said the Army experimenters.

8-ft. Trenches. Still, there were the sheep. In a preliminary autopsy, a local veterinarian found that their digestive systems were "intact," but there was evidence of "disturbances in the central nervous system." In other words, it wasn't just something they ate. Then Utah State University veterinarian Delbert A. Osguthorpe reported that more extensive testing had narrowed the cause of death to an organic phosphate compound of a kind found both in insecticides and nerve gas. "Since the Army had admitted conducting the nerve-gas tests the day before the sheep began dying, that would seem to clear the matter up," said Osguthorpe.

But Osguthorpe's way is not the Army way. While Utah ranchers buried their sheep in 8-ft. trenches and wondered who was going to pay them some $300,000 in damages, Brigadier General William W. Stone of the Army Materiel Command insisted that the heavy, viscous nerve liquid sprayed from the aircraft could not have been carried off the proving ground by wind. Yet wind velocity during the test was between 5 m.p.h. and 20 m.p.h., with gusts up to 35 m.p.h. blowing in practically a straight line from the proving grounds to Skull Valley, where the sheep died. Facing a delegation of Utah Congressmen in Washington last week, General Stone admitted that "we fully recognize with this occurring right on our doorstep, and probably involving a chemical similar to materials we have been testing, that we are highly suspect." Investigation of the sheep deaths, he said, would continue.