Officials in Hawai'i and Washington, D.C., are demanding information from the Department of Defense on more than 8,000 tons of chemical weapons that were dumped off O'ahu at the end of World War II and may still be there.

The weapons and bulk chemical containers include the lethal toxins hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride and the blistering agents mustard and lewisite. In 1944 and 1945, the military dumped much of its chemical weapons supply into the oceans of the world, including waters as close as five miles from shore and as shallow as 1,000 feet deep off Wai'anae, Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Harbor.

An Army spokesman last week said there is no danger of the toxic chemicals washing up on O'ahu beaches, but he was unable to say how the Army came to that conclusion. The Army has not responded to Advertiser requests over the past week for additional information on the situation.

In 1976, several Hawai'i maritime workers received chemical burns to their feet when they dredged up off Honolulu Harbor leaking containers of a blistering agent, possibly the chemical munition mustard. An Environmental Protection Agency report says that in July 2004, three explosives demolition workers on the East Coast were injured by a mustard agent from an explosive shell dredged up off New Jersey.

U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said yesterday he isn't second-guessing the military's decision to dump the chemical weapons 60 years ago, in "a different era, at a time when the consequences were not understood the way they are today." But he is concerned that the Department of Defense has had updated reports on the dumping for several years and appears to have done nothing about them.

"The military has not handled this well at all. It has had these reports, all of which were kind of hiding in plain sight. They should have been proactive on this," he said. "Anybody with any sense would realize that the information would come to light eventually."

Abercrombie has written to Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey to ask for a full report on what the Army knows about the dumping near Hawai'i, what it knows about the current condition and location of the dumped munitions, and any information on the human health and environmental threats posed by the materials.

"What has to happen here, is there's got to be a risk assessment made," he said.

Abercrombie said the issue is on the agenda for a meeting this week of Hawai'i's congressional delegation.

Citing a 2001 Army report and other sources, the Newport News Daily Press in Virginia reported last week that the United States dumped chemical weapons and bulk chemical warfare agents into the world's oceans and off 11 states. Since then, some East Coast members of Congress have called for hearings on the issue, and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., has filed a formal request for more information about dumping in the nearshore waters of the Atlantic.

In Hawai'i, Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann has asked the Defense Department's Pacific Command for a briefing "to see how best we can address the issue," said the mayor's spokes-man, Bill Brennan.

The EPA's Pacific Region office oversees the cleanup of toxic sites, but in this case the agency may be out of its field of expertise, said EPA Hawai'i press officer Dean Higuchi.

"Our San Francisco staff will be calling the military locally to find out what the situation really is. But, especially when it comes to munitions, (the EPA) tends to go back to the military to deal with, because we don't have much experience handling munitions," he said.

"At this point, we're going to follow the situation and try to get the military to do what they need to do."

The undersea chemical wea-pons dumps might qualify as Superfund hazardous waste cleanup sites, under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980. Roughly 130 military sites around the country are listed as Superfund sites, including some in Hawai'i. However, Higuchi said the chemical weapons situation is still very new to the EPA.

"We don't even know where these sites are yet," he said.

That is a problem in itself, said Ed Laws, a chemist and oceanographer at the University of Hawai'i.

"If the Army does not know the location or depth of two of the dump sites, I would say there is a problem. Even for the munitions that were dumped in known locations, there could be a problem. Without knowing more about the nature of the containers, I cannot say how much of a problem," Laws said.

While there appear to have been few regulations on chemical weapons and dumping in 1944 and 1945, there are many now, including treaties that ban the production and storage of such weapons and prohibit dumping toxic materials in the ocean.

"If there is no problem associated with dumping chemical munitions in the ocean, why has there been an international convention in effect for over 30 years prohibiting such practices?" Laws said, referring to the London Dumping Convention of 1972.

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com.