Technical Report
[1]Excerpted from Office of the Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) for Gulf War Illnesses, Medical Readiness, and Military Deployments, "US Demolition Operations at the Khamisiyah Ammunition Point" (Case Narrative), December 5, 2000 (DHS, 2000, web site www.gulflink.health.mil/khamisiyah ii)
[2] Source Term as used in this paper is defined as the composite of the characteristics of a chemical warfare agent release required by dispersion and transport models as input parameters such as number of rockets, their locations at time of detonation, the duration of the demolition process, quantity of agent released from the munitions, vertical distribution of agent release (height of agent cloud), purity of the agent, and processes for agent removal. (IDA, 1997)
[3] Before the Khamisiyah investigation, the chemical warfare agent medical effects community used "low-level exposure" as exposures to dosage levels above the FNE where personnel experienced minimal symptoms. However, DoD introduced "low-level exposure" in announcing the potential hazard area resulting from the Khamisiyah demolitions as chemical warfare agent concentrations between the levels for the FNE and the GPL for three days, or one day.
[4] United States Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine (USACHPPM, 1999) recommended modifying the GPL, which is based on a lifetime exposure, by multiplying that value by the factor of 10, which is the uncertainty factor used to account for a chronic exposure in the original calculation of the GPL. This effectively removes the chronic uncertainty factor from the original GPL calculation and thus bases the resulting modified GPL on a short term exposure, which more closely approximates the Khamisiyah experience.
[5] These values were calculated as follows:
[Ct]Daily = AdjGPL x texposure
= mg/m3 x 24 hr/day x 60 min/hr
= 0.00003 mg/m3 x 1440 min/day
= 0.0432 mg-min/m3
[6] For this modeling, VLSTRACK was run on a UNIX workstation.
Appendix A
[7] Excerpted from Office of the Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) for Gulf War Illnesses, Medical Readiness, Military Deployments, "US Demolition Operations at the Khamisiyah Ammunition Point" (Case Narrative), December 5, 2000 (DHS, 2000b).
[8] Formerly the Defense Special Weapons Agency (DSWA).
[9] Often simply called dispersion modeling.
Appendix B
[10] Information provided by Dr. I. Cecil Felkner.
[11] Revised Environmental Protection Agency proposed Acute Exposure Guideline Levels were published in the Federal Register in May 2001 (NAC/AEGLHS, 2001).