The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 3

Thursday, March 15, 1990 The Philadelphia Inquirer 3-A Libya's alleged poison-gas plant burns The Scene In the nation Early today, the British Broadcasting Corp. quoted a JANA spokesman as saying there had been a fire in some machinery at the complex, but that there was no damage to the building housing the machinery. U.S. officials have alleged that at least two buildings are used for producing poison gas and canisters to store it or deliver it. The Rabta plant has been the focus of intense criticism by the United States since late 1988.

The Libyan government of Moammar Gad-hafi has repeatedly denied accusations that the Rabta complex produces poison gas, saying it is used to make pharmaceuticals. Last week, the Bush administration said the Rabta plant "is dangerous and becoming more so" because of the potential terrorist use of chemical weapons produced there. U.S. officials said yesterday that the first reports of the fire came from Tunisian and Italian diplomats, as well as from sources in Tripoli they declined to disclose. Some reports said that Libya had attempted to close its borders after the fire.

A spokesman for the Tunisian Interior Min istry told the Associated Press that Libya had reinforced its border forces and that it was impossible to cross from Tunisia into Libya. Libya also shares borders with Egypt, Chad, Niger, Sudan and Algeria, but there were no reports of unusual activity on those borders. "The Libyans said it was a terrorist attack but it was impossible to say what group," the Tunisian spokesman said on condition of anonymity. White House spokesman Fitzwater, who first disclosed news of the fire late yesterday, said the reports stemmed from sightings of smoke at the plant. "We just dare not speculate on the cause," he said.

"We deny we had any involvement." President Bush told reporters yesterday afternoon that the United States did not know what had happened. He also said the United States was not involved in the fire. The fire began seven days after the Bush administration said the Libyan plant had recently begun producing limited quantities of lethal mustard gas and nerve gas as well as canisters in which to pack it. The start-up of weapons production "points to the necessity for vigorous efforts to stop the operation of Rabta," Fitzwater said on March 7. U.S.

officials said they expecled to obtain more reliable information about the extent of damage by this morning, apparently from U.S. photo-reconnaisance satellites. But one U.S. official said the lack of observable flames indicated that it was not a "major fire." The Rabta facility has experienced several industrial accidents. U.S.

officials said, for example, that toxic chemicals leaked during a production "test run" in late 1988, substantially delaying full-scale operation. -j Western officials say it is ringed by sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to protect it against attack by hostile aircraft. The United States has engaged- in hostilities with Libya three times in the 1980s, twice shooting down Libyan fighter planes and bombing Tripoli in 1986 in retaliation for what President Ronald Reagan said was terrorism against Americans in Europe. By R. Jeffrey Smith and Patrick E.

Tyler Washington Post WASHINGTON A fire of undetermined origin and severity broke out yesterday at an industrial complex in Libya where U.S. officials say the Libyan government is producing chemical weapons. The fire was first disclosed late yesterday afternoon by U.S. officials. A spokesman for the official Libyan news agency ANA, reached by Reuters last night, confirmed the report of a blaze at the plant, which is located near the town of Rabta, about 50 miles southwest of Tripoli, Libya's capital.

Asked how the fire began, the JANA spokesman told Reuters that Libya "does not rule out Israeli or American sabotage." White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater denied any U.S. involvement in the blaze, and an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said he had no knowledge of the incident. ABC News last night quoted unidentified Libyan sources who said that the plant had burned to the ground, but there was no confirmation of that report. mm 4Pl The tornado that hit Hesston, as Tornadoes Associated Press Tornadoes ground across Texas, Arkansas and Missouri yesterday in a renewed assault of thunderstorms. Elsewhere, crews were still clearing the wreckage of more than 100 homes left by twisters that ripped six states.

Two twisters in central Texas flipped mobile homes, tore oif roofs and toppled utility poles yesterday, and wind in excess of 50 m.p.h. blew over trailers and highway signs and downed power lines across northern parts of the state. No injuries were reported. A tornado touched down last night in the southern Arkansas town of Fordyce, injuring at least three people and causing widespread damage to a residential area, said police. In central Missouri, tornadoes damaged five businesses about five miles east of Columbia and hurled 18-wheel trucks on top of a building.

"It just picked those transports up and just tossed them like matchsticks," said Richard Head of Head Auto Sales. In southwestern Missouri, winds gusting to 100 m.p.h. blew off a high school gymnasium roof, toppled utility poles and did an estimated $1.75 million worth of property damage, officials said. No injuries were reported. On Tuesday, tornadoes damaged homes and other property in Kansas, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas.

At least two people were killed and 29 injured. In Oklahoma City, a tornado picked up an off-duty policewoman running from her mobile home and threw her and her dog about 25 feet before dropping her uninjured. "All I could think of was this is like the Wizard of Oz," Sgt. Paula Shaw said Tuesday. "It sucked us up, literally sucked us in there, along with tree branches, and mud and leaves.

It was incredible." After she realized the jet-engine noises she heard weie really those of a tornado passing overhead, Shaw headed for cover in a culvert. But just before she reached the pipe, the tornado grabbed her and the dog, Foofer. "Foofer came rolling along and thumped me in the back. I didn't get any scrapes on my photographed by a resident as it entered return, rip across three states and the world mm 11 United Press International High temperatures helped push Washington's cherry trees into premature blossom, to the pleasure of a jogger and tourists. Under-exposed Yesterday was "White Day" in Japan, which results in some unusual behavior.

Sales of women's lingerie soars, and most of the buyers are men. One month after Valentine's Day, men who received gifts from women are supposed to return the favor. Fpr some reason, men have shown an increasing preference for lingerie, especially women's white panties. "It. was very strange to watch men picking up women's underwear.

I had a little difficulty with that," said a saleswomen at Tokyo lingerie shop. So do some men. But the ever-inventive Japanese came -to the rescue of guys too shy to look a clerk in the eyes and ask for panties. Some department slores set up special panty-vending You can bet we'll see them here soon to complicate our lives. Imagine offices around the country in a few years.

A guy says, "I'm going to the machines for a snack; can I get anybody anthing?" "Oh, get me some Snickers," one gal responds. "Snickers?" asks the guy, for all to hear. "Sure. You want the candy bar or panties?" Grand Ole Party ponper Texas rancher and oilman Clayton Williams spent millions of his own money to win the GOP gubernatorial primary. Yrtu'd never know it in Shep.

(That's not one of the Three Stooges. It's a west Texas town, population 60.) No one showed up for the Republican primary in Shep. Election officials weren't really surprised. Only one person voted in the previous primaries. only Republican voter developed cancer and went to a hospital in Houston, said county COP chairman Brent Casey.

The man had been the only GOP voter in primaries in 1986 and 1988. Before 1986, there wasn't even a voting place for Republicans in Shep, 250 miles west ot Dallas. Republicans had to vote in another precinct. Officials opened the GOP polling place Tuesday hoping to attract other voters, who were allowed to decide at the last minute whether to vote in the Democratic or Republican gubernatorial primary. "We had really hoped that Clayton Williams might draw some people out there because it is a farming community," said Casey's wife, Betty, precinct election judge.

"But it is difficult for people who have been Democratic for years and years to have Republican stamped on their voter registration." It was a long, boring day for the election judges as they waited for voters who never appeared. "We did a lot of reading," she said. 13 111 1- illlil pti "1 1 Itllflllli sllll8llMl the southern edge of town Tuesday. Associated Press two dozen houses and five businesses. in Texas, 2, according to Ferguson.

"It's very unusual to have that many tornadoes reported any one day, any time in the season," he said. "The unusual aspect is that the severe activity extended so far to the north," Ferguson said. "Normally we expect the severe weather'in northern states to come later in the season." The worst of the tornadoes hit in Hesston, snowy peaks of the Continental Divide rising all around. But as he and two other hunters approached the 17 shaggy bison that grazed majestically along Lake Hebgen's shores, the 19th-century tableau was ruptured by a band of young protesters who had found the bison hours ahead of the hunters. They skied, snowshoed and snowmobiled out of the forest into the bison herd, waving their arms, crying, "Shoo!" and "Heeyah!" They had been trying since before the frigid dawn, one protester explained, to chase the bison back to the safety of Yellowstone, barely five miles away.

"We want to get in between the hunters and the bison to prevent the bison being shot," said John Milburn, a monkeywrench earring symbolizing his affiliation with the environmental group Earth "What we want to see is an ecosystem approach," Milburn said. "They're trying to make Yellowstone into an outdoor zoo." Behind him, the orange-clad hunters scrambled this way and that, trying for a shot without hitting the protesters who zigzagged through the herd like Day-Glo-nylon banshees. Jacobs' rifle cracked, and a 2-year-old bison cow staggered, steaming blood gushing from Associated Press Sixteen people in the town were hurt. 35 miles north of Wichita, Ferguson said. The two deaths occurred near the Kansas towns of Burrton and Goessel, near Hesston.

Sixteen people were injured in Hesston, but only four required hospitalization, said City Administrator Jay Weiland. About two dozen houses in Hesston were destroyed and at least 75 were damaged. About 15 businesses were struck and five'of those were demolished. Officials had not estimated the damage in dollars. "It looks like it traveled a hundred miles at least and maybe a little over that.

It was on the ground for 2Vi hours. The average tornado is on the ground only for a couple of miles," Ferguson said. Extensive damage in Hesston prompted authorities yesterday to cordon off the town of 4,000, barricading all roads and guarding damaged areas. A Highway Patrol officer stood guard outside the Hesston State Bank, which lost its roof and part of a wall. Twisted piles of metal, wood and insulation marked where businesses once stood.

Streetlight poles tilted at 45-degree angles, and street signs were flattened to the ground by wind estimated at 100 m.p.h. or more. Lowell Good, whose home was one of the first hit in Hesston, said that the tornado "came right across the trees that are splintered over there" and that "it sounded like a big grinder grinding things up." About 20 farms were destroyed outside of town. Among them was the Bontrager farmstead near Burrton. "If I had listened to my wife, that's where we'd be," Eli Bontrager said, pointing to the basement of what used to be his 90-year-old farmhouse.

A large trailer used to store chain saws and other equipment was upended in the basement. Its tires had blown off. Bontrager, 76, and his wife, Opal, 75, escaped harm by driving nearly a mile away. Cottonwood and cedar trees that had once nearly obscured the Bontrager place from view were stripped of their limbs, chopped down to 18-foot stumps in 30 seconds. -l- Yellowstone National Park Mammoth Hot Springs i LLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK WYOMING Hebgen Lake MILES' West I Yellowstone her side.

One young woman shrieked and began to sob. The bison took 10 faltering steps and slumped to its knees. Lee Dessaux, 25, of Santa Cruz, began whipping and poking Jacobs with a ski pole. Jacobs shrugged him off. Two more bison fell to the hunters' guns; protesters threw themselves crying upon the stricken beasts.

One dipped her hand in an animal's blood and smeared it across the face of hunter Hal Slemmer. "The war is on!" she said. Tmontana I I II JUH( 1 I 1 WYOMING Yi 7 pas The tornado in Hesston destroyed knees because I was 8 to 12 inches off the ground," she said. The tornado that grabbed her was one of 78 reported Tuesday in the Midwest, said Ed Ferguson, deputy director of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City. He said he expected the count to go down because of duplication.

In Kansas, 25 were sighted; in Nebraska, 16; in Iowa, 15; in Oklahoma, 14; in Illinois, 6, and Montana ranchers have purged from their herds at a cost of more than $30 million. Although hunting opponents picketed last year's bison hunt, they did not disrupt it. State fish and game officials nationwide say they worry about a trend of potentially dangerous demonstrations in which protesters put themselves between hunters and prey. Officials in Connecticut barred hunting in a wildfowl refuge last year after an angry hunter loosed a load of birdshot toward a group of protesters. Rep.

Ron Marlenee Mont.) has introduced a bill that would make disrupting a legal hunt a federal offense. Montana officials say they won't let protesters cancel this year's bison hunt more than 200 lottery-picked hunters are waiting their turn. But the fracas at Hebgen Lake is certain to affect talks between state and federal officials who have been struggling to do the impossible: create by next year a strategy that will please everybody. Jacobs, a 39-year-old air ambulance nurse from Kalispell, planned a return to the grand old days of bison hunting when he set out to bag his trophy Tuesday with a model 1902 black-powder Remington Rolling Block rifle much like what frontier hunters used in the last century. The setting was perfect: crisp and cold, with the jagged Shrieking protesters disrupt a bison hunt near Yellowstone By Margaret Knox Special to The Inquirer WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont.

Dan Jacobs' rifle shot brought down a bison and triggered half an hour of chaos. At one point, hunters, protesters, game wardens, reporters and 17 freaked-out, half-ton bison swirled around one another in a wild, beachfront melee on the shore of Heb-gen Lake. Rifles came up and quickly dropped as shrieking protesters jumped into their sights. The crowd of protesters wept and shouted, and one flailed Jacobs with a ski pole. So began the first organized disruption of Montana's bison hunt.

The New York-based Fund for Animals sponsored the protest, which this week brought hunting opponents from as far as Maryland and California. The Battle of Hebgen Lake may not rank alongside the Little Big Horn, but it heralds a superheated and potentially violent factor in the anti-hunting movement. Since 1985, Montana has used supervised hunts to control the bison that stray from the cold, barren highlands of Yellowstone National Park in search of low-lying winter range. The bison carry brucellosis, a disease that causes abortions in cattle and severe fever in humans who drink their milk and which United Press International Sea lions at the Point Defiance Zoo in Ta-coma, wait to be trucked back to their native California waters. The recently captured animals are numbered and radio transmitters glued to their backs to allow them to be tracked.

Mickey Mouse defense Ever see the Disney World ads that 1 boast about a Magic Kingdom in Florida the size of San Francisco? Apparently the Disney folks haven't. The Disney company is being sued in a Florida court by Mary Costa, the voice of Sleeping Beauty, who says she deserves a cut of the $29 million earned from the videotape version of the tale. Disney is attempting to have the case thrown out of court based on the following argument, stated in court papers by Disney Vice President Doris Smith: "The Walt Disney Co. is not qualified to do business in Florida and does not do business in Florida." By Tom Torok.