UH robot joins study of munitions

University of Hawaii oceanographers will be launching a new robot into deep water off Oahu’s coast to study the impact of chemical weapons leaking mustard agent.

Margo Edwards, principal investigator for the expedition, which will launch Saturday morning from Snug Harbor at Sand Island, said another goal of the mission is to develop methods for dealing with decaying chemical weapons dumped into bodies of water around the globe.

In the 1940s about 16,000 chemical weapons were pushed overboard near Oahu as the internationally accepted method of disposing of munitions at the time, she said.

The chemical weapons sit on the sea floor about 1,800 feet below the ocean’s surface, some six miles south of Oahu. Four previous voyages to study the munition sites used manned submersible vessels and other methods to collect data samples. This voyage will be the first to use the remotely operated vehicle Lu‘u­kai, meaning sea diver.

The eight-day voyage will be the longest so far for Lu‘u­kai, which was unveiled by UH’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology about five months ago, said Scott Ferguson, director of marine technical services at SOEST.

Researchers will focus on how well Lu‘u­kai performs compared with manned submersibles. The 3,000-pound robot will make about 15 dives to gather seafloor samples, cages of shrimp, and starfish living on the munitions.

Edwards said the samples will be tested for mustard agent, a chemical that causes blisters and death if it gets into the lungs.

As the crew made last-minute preparations on the deck of UH’s research vessel Kilo Moana on Friday, Edwards said she believes the government should leave the munitions in place because they will fall apart if handled.

She said small amounts of mustard have been identified in seafloor samples taken about six feet from the weapons, and only trace amounts were seen in the surrounding water — about 500 parts per billion. None was found in animals living on the munitions.

"It’s slowly leaking into the environment in a way that doesn’t seem to be having an effect on anything close to it," Edwards said.

Jacek Beldowski, a proj­ect manager from the Institute of Oceanography of the Polish Academy of Sciences, came to Hawaii to join the expedition because undersea munitions are a growing concern around the world.

"This field is very new," he said. "Nothing was done for 50 years, and only right now this field is emerging."

In the Baltic Sea, where submerged chemical weapons are only about 90 feet deep, mustard agents leaking from munitions have burned fishermen who touched mud saturated with the agent.

Beldowski hopes Hawaii’s research helps Polish scientists better understand the behavior of mustard agent in the Baltic Sea.

"It’s really introducing new technologies and some new approaches," he said of UH’s work. "It’s one of the few institutes which is leading this subject."

The Hawaii Undersea Military Munitions Assessment, which it is formally called, is a $7.5 million, federally funded project.