WASHINGTON — The Army’s top general said Thursday that human error probably was not a factor in the Army’s mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples from a chemical weapons testing site that was opened more than 70 years ago in a desolate stretch of desert in Utah.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, told reporters the problem may have been a failure in the technical process of killing, or inactivating, anthrax samples. The process in this case “might not have completely killed” the samples as intended before they were shipped, he said.

Odierno said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating that aspect of what went wrong at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army installation in Utah that sent the anthrax to government and commercial labs in nine states across the U.S. and to an Army lab in South Korea.

CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said four people who worked at labs in Delaware, Texas and Wisconsin were recommended to get antibiotics as a precaution. None is sick.

U.S. officials at Osan Air Base in South Korea said the anthrax bacteria it received for training purposes “might not be an inert training sample as expected,” and as a result was destroyed by hazardous materials teams Wednesday. About two dozen people were being treated for possible exposure at Osan.

Odierno said normal procedures had been followed, and that he was not aware that such a problem had surfaced previously at Dugway.

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But there have been at least two other questionable incidents at the site 85 miles west of Salt Lake City that has been testing chemical and biological warfare weapons since it was opened in 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In 2011, Dugway was locked down for 12 hours because less than one-fourth of a teaspoon of VX nerve agent was unaccounted for. The agent affects the body’s ability to carry messages through the nerves.

Military officials launched an internal investigation, but the results were not released. Questions about the incident were not answered Thursday by military officials. Gov. Gary Herbert said in 2011 that he met with the base commander and that the issue had been resolved to his satisfaction.

In 1968, the test site came under scrutiny when 6,000 sheep died nearby. An Army report produced two years later out of Maryland acknowledged that the nerve agent was found in snow and grass samples where the sheep died, The Salt Lake Tribune said based on a report that was declassified in 1978. An Army spokesman said in the late 1990s that the Army does not accept responsibility for the sheep deaths, saying state agriculture scientists never identified the cause of death.

The Dugway Proving Ground was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The site has gone through name changes and been closed and reopened several times.

Today, it sits on nearly 180,000 acres of flat, desert terrain with the Dugway Mountains in the distance.


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