Global tear gas business a boon for one Western Pa. town
“A pastime activity for some people during the clashes was to pick up these tear gas canisters and read [what] is the country that has supplied these weapons to try and kill us.”
On the surface, Noor Noor and Terry Burns don’t have much in common. The former is a 28-yearold student at Cambridge, getting a degree in environmental conservation that he plans to use back home in Cairo, Egypt. The latter sells lawn ornaments and homegrown vegetables out of her house in the farmlands of Jamestown, Pa., population 617. They’ve never met.
But Mr. Noor and Ms. Burns are linked by the global trade in nonlethal weapons, a growing industry that burst into the headlines last month when the U.S. Border Patrol tear gassed asylum-seekers on the country’s southern border. It’s the most recent, high-profile incident in a decade that has seen rising use of tear gas around the world.
Mr. Noor’s first interaction with the weapon was on Jan. 25, 2011, the first day the Egyptian uprising took hold in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. At 20 years old, he’d been at political demonstrations before, but he’d never seen this many people in the streets and never a group this diverse. The regular use of tear gas — that was new, too.
“At the beginning, it was greeted almost with curiosity: ‘Will this gas really make you cry?’” Mr. Noor said.
Getting gassed by security forces trying to dispel the protesters didn’t just make him cough and cry, though. It made his stomach clench up. He saw others pass out; some fell to the ground, convulsing.
“I thought it was called tear gas; I had no idea it was called ‘choke you to death and run around blindly gas,’” he said.
Security forces gassed protesters on the first day of the uprising and continued for months. Mr. Noor made it his mission to try to pick up the tear gas canisters and throw them away from the crowds, wearing a thick glove he brought to Tahrir Square just for this purpose. He got to know the canisters well.
“The tear gas canisters kind of look like soda cans from a distance — silver, round,” he said. “A pastime activity for some people during the clashes was to pick up these tear gas canisters and read [what] is the country that has supplied these weapons to try and kill us. So, ‘Ah, look, this is American tear gas,’ or, ‘This is British tear gas,’ or, ‘Oh no, they’re cheap, and they’re using Chinese tear gas now; they want to kill us.’”
Some of the canisters, he noticed, bore the brand name Combined Tactical Systems, an address in Jamestown, Pa., and the words, “Made in the USA.”
Combined Tactical Systems is a brand of the company Combined Systems Inc., one of the world’s leading manufacturers of tear gas. The canister had come from its plant, just a half mile behind Terry Burns’ home on a country road, about an hour and a half north of Pittsburgh. On at least one occasion, Ms. Burns said, an accident at the plant leaked tear gas onto her property.
“It was a cloud of smoke coming our way,” she said. “You could tell it was something so unusual, dangerous, if you want to say.”
Ms. Burns was running a day care out of her home at the time. Schools were instructed not to let children home until the cloud had cleared, so Ms. Burns and the kids just waited, uncertain.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Accidental tear gas releases like that one have been rare in Jamestown, but there have been multiple fires at the plant over the years and test explosions can be heard multiple times a day.
The plant doesn’t just test tear gas, but also other crowd control devices like smoke bombs and rubber bullets.
Still, Ms. Burns is glad it’s here. “It’s just like anything else; people don’t want it in their backyard,” said Ms. Burns. “Is it better for our area? Probably. It brings in tax dollars and employment.”
Nonlethal weapons are a multibillion-dollar-a-year business and growing. The industry could be worth more than $9 billion by 2022, according to Allied Market Research, a company that does industry forecasting. CSI supplies not only Egypt, but also Israel, Bahrain and U.S. police departments, like the one in Ferguson, Mo.
That growth has been a boon for Jamestown. Combined Systems, Inc. set up shop there in 1995. Until CSI opened up, there weren’t many jobs in the area, said Jamestown Borough council president Michael Reilly.
“We used to have a lumberyard, two lumberyards at one time,” he said. “There was probably 10 gas stations, two railroad stations in town; tracks going north, south, east and west. All that is gone. So, now, we have what we have, and there’s not much here.”
Today, there’s some tourism-related businesses because of a nearby state park. There’s a mill that makes paint. And then there’s CSI, which employs around 230 people.
“Something like that was just a godsend for a lot of people,” Mr. Reilly said. “In this area, there’s just not the work there used to be. We’ll take anything that comes in just to make people employed.”
CSI did not respond to requests for an interview. Workers at the plant say the jobs don’t pay well — less than $10 an hour. Workers have been injured in accidents reported in local press in 2012, 2013 and 2015. At least four plant fires have been reported in the last 15 years.
Still, Mr. Reilly said CSI is good for the community and that it’s important work.
“There’s a lot of times, like in Israel when they use their nonlethal bullets and their rubber bullets and their gas and that stuff, most of the time it comes from here,” he said. “Most of the people say, ‘Yep, we manufactured that, we put that together, we sent it.’ There’s a little bit of pride in that. Being that it’s nonlethal, that’s even better.”