In the wake of Deseret Chemical Depot closing last week, many have talked about the long and storied history the installation had during its 70 years of operation.
But few — if any — are as familiar with it as Richard Trujillo, nicknamed the “Historian of DCD.”
“No one really had the connections or interest that I did,” he said. “It’s a labor of love.”
Trujillo, 65, came out of retirement in 2011 to rebuild and fill out the history of the depot that he had worked on during his 40 years between Tooele Army Depot and Deseret Chemical Depot. Between his work experience and his childhood, he had a secure bedrock for the area’s history, and the interest and drive to record it.
Trujillo’s father, like many workers in the 1940s, came from Taos, N.M., for a job with the burgeoning defense industry in Utah. At just 18 months old, Trujillo and his family moved to Deseret, an on-base township. He fondly recalls the homes and businesses, including a movie theater, lining the freshly paved asphalt streets.
“It had all the luxuries of any town,” he said. “It was like they built a whole new neighborhood.”
His family stayed in Deseret until much of it was razed in the early 60s. He said he begged the commander of what was then Deseret Chemical Warfare Depot to not destroy the little town, but to no avail.
“I was a 13-year-old kid. I couldn’t do anything. I think he probably went really soft on me,” said Trujillo. “Really, what I saw was my hometown get demolished.”
In 1966, after turning 18, Trujillo went to work at Tooele Army Depot with conventional munitions. From there, he worked at the depot’s South Area — what would become DCD — destroying chemical munitions. In 1976, he helped with the beginnings of the Chemical Agent Munitions Disposal System (CAMDS), which would go into operation in 1979.
With CAMDS, operators and engineers developed new techniques for detecting if an agent was present in a room and how much. Before, rabbits were sometimes tossed into rooms, much like canaries in a mineshaft, said Trujillo. Through CAMDS, mechanical testing was honed to eliminate the need for rabbits, and those techniques, as well as destruction practices and other innovations, spread to other facilities around the country.
“They slowly got better and better at monitoring agents and being able to detect them,” he said. “CAMDS really was a pioneer.”
Trujillo moved to the environmental office at Tooele Army Depot in 1992, and then opted to move to Deseret Chemical Depot when it was separated from TEAD in 1995. A few years later, he started working in the depot’s natural and cultural resources department, which afforded more time to look back at the history of the area.
Among the projects in that department was the plotting and renovation of a 13-grave pioneer cemetery that had apparently been forgotten or mistakenly not entered into state historical records. Three of the graves were identified.
After nearly 40 years working at military installations in Tooele County, Trujillo retired in 2005, with no intention of returning six years later.
In many ways, the history project grew out of the discovery that the memories of his childhood home had faded into dust. From there, he became resolute that the entire history of DCD be drawn out and accessible.
“I felt obligated to make sure it was documented and people knew it was there,” he said.
Over the last two years, Trujillo has written 22 articles and a 10-page timeline, which collectively, he calls “DCD Revisited.” Because of the shifting borders that defined DCD’s 70 years (besides being joined with TEAD for a time, DCD had a brief stint with Dugway Proving Ground), many records have been lost or misplaced, he said. He suspects that some may be in Pennsylvania because of the acronym between Tobyhanna Army Depot and TEAD.
But, between scores of interviews with past DCD employees and doggedly digging through records, Trujillo has uncovered some nearly forgotten pieces of American history. One such nugget is a record of how DCD held Italian prisoners of war for a time, located far enough away from the German POWs at TEAD to foil the acrimony between the two nationalities. DCD also was one of the facilities that allowed Italian POWs who swore allegiance to the Allies to work in non-munitions areas on-base while their homeland rebuilt itself.
Trujillo’s interviews with former workers also have helped with ongoing environmental remediation efforts in some of the archaic disposal sites where chemicals were done away with using less-than-green methods. From those past employees’ accounts, current workers are trying to clean up those areas, dubbed Solid Waste Management Units (SWMUs), and to know what was dumped or burned where, and why and how much there might be.
A total of 12 SWMUs were discovered through Trujillo’s interviews, he said, while some accounts, such as one of a horse stable and troughs being built by one commander, cleared other areas of suspected contamination.
Now that DCD has closed and is once again TEAD’s South Area, Trujillo finds himself back in the sunshine of retirement, keeping busy with home improvements and volunteering part-time at Miller Motorsports Park, where he has found a new use for the skills he used as a controller at CAMDS. Finishing what he’s started the last two years, though, remains a high priority.
“I’m going to finish actually writing the history of DCD for the Utah State Preservation Office,” he said. “I want to make it available for [Utah State University], the [University of Utah], [Brigham Young University] or whoever’s interested, so everybody can have access to it.”