Precinct 3 Commissioner Waymon Hallmark said he recently met with Osborne and is “satisfied with the company’s safety plan.”

“We are excited for them that they were chosen to do this,” Hallmark said of Veolia’s contract with the Army. “This is going to mean a great deal for their facility. They have a great safety record and I guess that is why they were selected for the job.”

Hallmark said the county has researched the proposed project and that they are satisfied with the conditions of the contract.

“This means a great deal to the 200 employees working at Veolia,” Hallmark added. “This gives them job security.”

Several groups are planning to sue the Army in a bid to block Veolia from trucking the caustic wastewater about 1,000 miles from Indiana to Texas.

The contract with Veolia, a division of Paris-based Veolia Environment, comes three months after DuPont Co. dropped out of a plan to treat the hydrolysate at its Deepwater, N.J., plant, citing strong public opposition.

The Army finalized its contract on April 9 with Veolia, which will truck the waste from the Newport Chemical Depot in western Indiana to the company's permitted incinerators in Port Arthur, said Army spokesman Greg Mahall.

“This is our path forward for handling the hydrolysate, and we'll see how it plays out," said Mahall, adding that the Army is prepared for the possibility of legal action against the plan.

He said the contract includes trucking and incinerating all of the hydrolysate produced by an ongoing effort to destroy in chemical reactors Newport's stockpile of about 250,000 gallons of VX.

The VX destruction project, which began in May 2005, is about 48 percent complete and is expected to produce about 1.8 million gallons of hydrolysate.

Osborne said safety is key in the transportation process of the wastewater.

“All of our trucks will travel in convoys,” he explained. “There is a two truck and two driver minimum. We have a sister company on standby for any unforeseen leaks, although we do not anticipate any leaks. We also have a emergency response plan in effect.”

Mahall said Veolia is working on a transportation plan to ship the hydrolysate atop flatbed trucks in large reinforced storage tanks that each hold about 4,000 gallons of hydrolysate.

For that journey, he said trucks carrying one tank each would pass through at least eight states: Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. That trek, covering about 980 miles is longer than the roughly 740-mile journey that would have been needed to truck the hydrolysate to the DuPont plant.

Osborne said Veolia is working with the Army to discuss its plans with the states along the shipping route.