HAZMAT, that is; Freight Pilot Indicted For Undeclared
Material
Ever take a flight you
regretted? Harold DeGregory of West Palm Beach, Florida sure has.
The 58-year-old pilot delivered some cargo from the Ft Lauderdale
Executive airport to the Bahamas, in November, 2004, and it could
land him in the Federal pen.
DeGregory's not accused of shipping drugs, as one might think,
but something just as closely watched by the authorities:
radioactive material. In this case, he had a 42-lb container of
Iridium-192 which was being used in a radiographic inspection
camera to inspect structural steel. (Most of the weight of the
container was its shielding, ,the quantity of Iridium-192 was quite
small).
The Bahamas Oil Refining Company, end user of the material,
acquired it legally in the USA and hired DeGregory to deliver it to
and from their job site in Freeport, on Grand Bahama Island.
Every part of the deal was legal and above-board, except that
Degregory's company, H&G Import Export of Fort Lauderdale,
never acquired proper HAZMAT certification for its twin-engine
propeller aircraft or its Part 135 operation. And never filed
appropriate HAZMAT documents on the material it hauled. So it isn't
the hazardous nature of the material per se, but the lack of proper
HAZMAT paperwork, that threatens DeGregory's liberty.
Authorities have tried
to imply that DeGregory was trying to sneak the material in, using
the terms "secreted in a wing compartment of his aircraft," to
describe stowage in the nacelle locker of his airplane, which is a
customary feature of light and medium twins.
The eight-count indictment charges DeGregory not with smuggling
the material, but with conspiracy to do so (an easier charge for
the prosecutor) -- one count for each time he planned to bring the
material to the Bahamas, and back.
But DeGregory's attorney, Ed O'Donnell, told the Miami Herald
that DeGregory merely committed a minor technical violation.
O'Donnell stressed that DeGregory was not involved in any misuse of
the industrial isotope.
Harold DeGregory's entry in the FAA Airmen Database contains
something we've never seen before, a red-lettered instruction to
call Airmen Certification directly for information on his
certificate. The FAA office was closed when we looked him up, but
he does (did?) have a commercial certificate and an A&P
certificate, and his medical was current at the time of his last
Iridium flight (November 2, 2004).
Radiation is a scary word, but the industrial applications of
Iridium-192 show the extent to which the physical phenomenon of
ionizing radiation has been tamed and put to good use by
mankind.
According to the website of the National Health Museum,
Iridium-192 is used "to test the integrity of pipeline welds,
boilers and aircraft parts." For radiography, discs or 1.5mm x
1.5mm pellets of Iridium-192 (natural Iridium which has had an
extra neutron forced into the nucleus) are welded into a
stainless-steel container.
Iridium-192 is a gamma ray emitter with a half life of 73.8
days. It does release sufficient ionizing radiation to be a threat
to human health, if removed from its normal travel packaging (such
as the depleted uranium "pigs" in which DeGregory transported the
material).
In 2003, a Chinese
scientist, Gu Juming, was sentenced to death for planting a large
quantity of bare Iridium-192 pellets in the ceiling of a rival's
lab, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison. Juming had
obtained the material by purchasing a welding-inspection machine
with forged paperwork, and tearing the machine down.
Under the inscrutable Chinese penal code, Gu Juming, who tried
to poison someone with Iridium-192, can be paroled in only two
years, assuming good behavior in custody. That's shorter than the
40-year maximum penalty DeGregory faces, for bringing equipment
back and forth between two legitimate ends of the same company, but
not doing the paperwork.
American prosecutors have sent a message: if you want to handle,
or mishandle, Iridium-192, best bet is to do it in Communist
China.
DeGregory is free, for the time being, on $50,000 bond. If he is
convicted on all counts and gets the maximum sentence (an unlikely
event), he'll be 98 when he is released.
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