
DATE: Sunday, July 13, 1997                 TAG: 9707130082

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY JEFFREY S. HAMPTON, STAFF WRITER     

DATELINE: BELVIDERE                         LENGTH:  101 lines

ARMS DISPOSAL: A PROFIT IN DANGER

For most of his life, Charles E. Wharton Sr. has heard the echo of ``bombs away,'' although he's never actually dropped one on anybody.

Instead, during his 30-plus years in the Navy and nine years with his private firm, Wharton's job has been to remove things that explode.

With the exception of his business that is.

Environmental Hazards Specialists International has mushroomed in the last six months from a small company operating out of a converted garage to one of the top five players in the ordnance disposal industry.

``We've joined the big boys,'' Wharton said Friday in his office just outside this little historic town in Perquimans County.

EHSI just won a contract that sounds like something reported on the sports pages. The Army Corps of Engineers signed EHSI for $50 million for three years to clear sites anywhere in the United States. The company has a half dozen contracts averaging $40,000 for each job.

Wharton and his wife, Evelyn, and his right hand man, Gordon Fields, still work out of the enclosed garage, and annexed rooms in the house. But because the business eventually squeezed them out of their living space, they bought a second house, just as a residence.

EHSI crews travel all over the country sniffing out long-buried explosives, some still as dangerous as the day they fell. Old hand grenades still armed and live rounds from tanks, bazookas and cannons are found above and below the ground. Dirty and rusted, they look as harmless as an old forgotten metal pipe, but they are not.

Children and construction crews occasionally make that discovery the hard way.

``Ninety percent of the unexploded ordnance is within 18 inches of the top of the ground,'' Wharton said. There are 1,700 sites in the United States with unexploded ordnance, from old bombing ranges to armories shut down long ago to Civil War battle grounds.

EHSI once cleaned a site in New Mexico after a child found a bazooka round on the ground and then dropped it in the middle of several children, killing them, Wharton said.

In Texas, Wharton has a crew clearing an active bombing range where the Japanese practice firing Patriot missiles. The government wants Wharton to create a 700,000-acre buffer between the edge of the range and where the action is. Of course, when the missiles are flying, Wharton's crew doesn't work.

And in Hampton Roads at the Suffolk campus of Tidewater Community College, which was built over part of the old Nansemond Ordnance Depot, EHSI has made several trips to clear the dangerous artillery prior to any new campus construction.

Wharton hires his crews as the jobs come up. Most are retired military and all have been in the service at least one hitch. They are required to have graduated from the Department of Defense ordnance disposal school in Maryland. They travel to different sites for different companies, sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for months.

These experts all know how to deep sea dive, parachute, rappel, operate heavy equipment and avoid rattlesnakes. They have worked in snow storms and desert heat, on mountaintops, on the sides of cliffs hanging from a rope, and in the bogs of a snake-infested swamp.

The job of ordnance disposal used to belong exclusively to the military, Wharton said, until private companies began bidding for the jobs in 1984. There are dozens of small companies, but only a handful that handle the large contracts.

To find ordnance, crews first mark out search lanes 10-feet wide and up to 1,000 feet long. Using high-powered metal detectors, they comb the lanes thoroughly. Once they dig up all the old ordnance, they stack it in a remote site and blow it up.

The brains of the operation, however, remain within the garage in Belvidere. Wharton, 58, is the ordnance and hazardous waste expert. Fields, 59, also retired from the Navy, is the expert on government contracts and administration.

``It's easier to do the work than figure out government contracts,'' Wharton said. More heavyset than he was in his military days, he still has a hint of red in his graying hair and mustache.

Friday, Wharton sifted through pages of a small booklet marked ``Land Mines.'' It sat among stacks of other documents on a makeshift desk made from a pool table covered with a Ping-Pong table.

All around the room are mementos from Wharton's long military career.

``I loved it,'' he said.

In a small cabinet are a few pieces of small ordnance he's dug up over the years. Among the souvenirs is a Vietnamese hand grenade he found during one of his tours during the war there.

One memento he'll never forget is the loss of four fingers on his left hand and the thumb on his right hand. He was dismantling a so-called dud in 1971 when it went off.

A month later, though still banged and bandaged, he was on a mountain once used as a target range so he could take the bombs away. He hasn't stopped since. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

JEFFREY S. HAMPTON/The Virginian-Pilot

EHSI's Charles Wharton Sr., left, and Gordon Fields recently signed

a $50 million contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to clear

sites of explosives such as these rounds of chrome-plated tank

ordnance. ``We've joined the big boys,'' Wharton said.

Graphic

THE MARKET

1,700 SITES IN THE U.S., FROM ARMORIES TO CIVIL WAR BATTLE

GROUNDS, HOLD UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE, WHARTON SAYS