After two years of time extensions and a missed deadline, the U.S. Navy”s plans for expanded training and weapons testing off the far Northern California, Oregon and Washington coasts are about to become final.
A required final 30-day comment period on the Northwest Training Range Complex Final Environmental Impact Statement began Sept. 10. The public has until Tuesday, Oct. 12 to comment before it goes before the assistant secretary of the Navy for a final decision and implementation.
The NWTRC testing area includes 122,400 nautical miles of air, land (all the way to Idaho), the Pacific Ocean 288 miles out, and subsurface space for underwater weapons testing and training.
Although the area starts at the Canadian border and ends at the Mendocino County line, locals have played a key role in the proceedings, creating delays and changes to the process. Navy officials came to a Mendocino County Supervisors meeting last year to answer the questions of locals, something that didn”t happen in most of the affected area.
Because of confusing maps offered by the Navy with the draft EIS, the southern boundary appeared to include a portion of Mendocino County. The boundary was clarified by Navy officials as not including any of Mendocino County, but locals have stayed involved.
Opponents of the Navy testing plan a strategy meeting at the Mendocino Caf? Monday morning, Oct. 4, at 10 a.m.
Testing in the area has been going on since World War I. But during the Bush Administration the decision was made to increase weapons testing on all the coasts and file environmental impact statements with each. Apparently, such statements had not been filed in the past for the testing activities.
In 2008, the Bush Administration released a two-part preliminary environmental impact report that totaled more than 1,500 pages. The final document, now available for comment at www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com, is even larger, totaling 2,713 pages. The three-part environmental impact statement contains hundreds of public comments, many by locals.
Many comments, including those from leading scientists, question the Navy”s claims in the documents about how limited the impact will be on whales and other marine mammals, which has been the key controversy.
The Navy is proposing two options to increase testing. Option one would increase existing activities to test new weapons from aircraft and guided missile submarines. Option two would add new air and sea surface targets, new electronic signal emitters, development of a small-scale underwater training minefield, and development of a portable undersea tracking range (both off Washington where most of the activities in the plan will take place).
The Navy”s preferred alternative would increase missile testing from 10 fired per year to 57, while bomb dropping would increase from 108 to 144 per year.
The Navy would increase the number of shells it fires, from 25,856 per year to 53,343. The first draft of the environmental impact statement said some of the shells would be made from depleted uranium, but the Navy abandoned those plans after receiving negative feedback from the public.
Some testing activities would also be decreased under the plan.
With very little media coverage or interest, the Navy has already expanded weapons training ranges in the Atlantic, in the Pacific off Hawaii and in the Gulf of Mexico. Locals chimed in at the very end of what had been an entirely obscure process. One naval official told this reporter he was quite surprised that the Navy”s publicly noticed meetings had gotten virtually zero response from the press up until the issue riled up people in Mendocino County.
The proposed EIR had been scheduled for completion in early 2009 with the final decision scheduled that year, but the dates were postponed several times as controversy spread.
Mendocino County supervisors and Congressman Mike Thompson brought Navy spokespersons to a meeting, where locals were briefed, and another delay was made in the public comment period. With the last public meeting having been held back in early 2009, the late and voluminous final EIS is available for download but not in paper form at any local libraries.
Comments can also be mailed attention Kimberly Kler, Naval Facilities Engineering Command Northwest, 1101 Tautog Circle, Suite 203, Silverdale, WA 98315-1101.
