Navy’s training plan stirs questions

SEATTLE – For the Navy and the Forest Service, it didn’t seem like a big deal, doing some aircraft training over the Olympic National Forest.

Oh, boy. Guess what happened?

The plan is for Growler jet pilots flying out of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island to pick up skills in detecting radar, as that is what the Growlers do.

The Boeing-built EA-18G Growlers, for example, fly ahead of the planes we’re now using to bomb the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, and jam enemy radar.

But what the government bureaucrats did was rile up the local citizenry with the project.

They proposed – without really explaining what it means – testing “electronic warfare” over the pristine public land. And they said these jets will be looking for electromagnetic radiation emitted from trucks driven into that public land.

The Navy didn’t adequately explain that the trucks emitting the radiation will be similar to television news vans, or the radar on a commercial fishing boat.

For someone to get hurt, they’d have to ignore red warning tape around the trucks, get past the two people inside, climb a 14-foot ladder and put themselves directly in front of the antenna, said John Mosher, the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Northwest environmental program manager.

After 18 minutes or so, Mosher said, they’d feel burns as their tissue heated up.

There’s just no real danger, the Navy insists.

The Forest Service, too, concluded there was “no significant impact” when it gave initial approval to the project and released a series of documents about it.

But it’s easy to search the Internet for “electromagnetic radiation dangers” and start reading through the mountain of results, some with references to tumors and irritable bowel disease.

In that digital clutter, it’s not hard to skip over the reputable World Health Organization ongoing study that says “current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low-level electromagnetic fields.”

As was memorialized in “Cool Hand Luke,” the 1967 Paul Newman classic, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

The Navy says you can’t just train the Growler crews using computer simulations.

The crews need to test their skills in the air, trying to figure out what is a threat signal and not one of a multitude of other radio signals out there, from Doppler weather radar to air traffic control.

The proposed testing is an $11.5 million project, which, according to the Navy, is actually supposed to save money in the long run.

Mosher said the Navy spends about $5 million a year to do such training exercises at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, some 400 miles away.

“It’s a considerable cost in jet fuel and squadron relocation,” he said. The Navy wanted the training closer to Whidbey.

But at $11.5 million, couldn’t a few bucks have been found to put a public notice in the weekly Forks Forum or the bigger Peninsula Daily News that covers the area?

Instead, ads were placed in four other publications, including the Aberdeen Daily World, on the grounds that much of the testing would be done closer to its area of coverage.

And a notice was taped to a window of the post office at Forks, that little town of 3,700 in Clallam County.

It finally was noticed by a woman who sent a letter to the weekly, asking what this was all about.

By then it was late September, and the Forest Service said it had gotten only a couple of comments from the public about its initial approval of the project.

Christi Baron, editor of the Forks Forum, then writes:

“Why were there only two comments? Because the legal notices describing this proposal were not published anywhere that anyone that lives in Forks might see them …

“Does the Navy and the U.S. Forest Service believe that ‘we’ the people that live in Forks are not worthy of knowing what is planned … about an activity that may have an impact on our quality of life? Our tourism industry? Unknown effects on wildlife and human beings?”

The comment section on the Forest Service’s assessment of the project went from two emails to more than 450, largely questioning the proposal and how it was presented.

Uh-oh.

Backtrack time.

“We were taken aback. We were surprised,” said Mosher, of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

On Tuesday night, at Forks High School, he and others from the Navy and Forest Service met with the locals to try to explain things. More than 100 people showed up, Baron said.

There was a PowerPoint presentation. There was a fact sheet that this time tried to explain in simpler terms.

No harm to spotted owls because of noise from the trucks. The generators in them have been specially muffled and aren’t noisier than a refrigerator, Mosher said.

No threat to wildlife. The trucks would beam the signal upward, not 360 degrees around.

The vehicles would be required to shut down if a logging truck stopped near them, or somebody was walking around.

The Growlers already are allowed in that airspace and would fly at 9,000 to 15,000 feet. They wouldn’t be buzzing anybody.

And, finally, to answer one man’s email of concern: no potential hazard to pacemakers.

Did it all convince the locals?

Michelle Simpson, owner of the Cabins at Beaver Creek on the peninsula, who went to the meeting, said, “I’m convinced we’re not going to get fried. I also came away convinced that they were derelict in informing the public.

“It opens the door to military expansion here. There is truth and there is perception. … Would you choose to vacation in a military testing range?”

The Forest Service extended the public comment period to Oct. 31.

It says it will decide whether to extend it even further.