[CPEO-IRF] Chanute Air Force Base (IL)

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Glory days have passed for Rantoul's Chanute base

By Paul Wood
Urbana/Champaign News-Gazette (IL)
July 28, 2006


RANTOUL – A marmalade cat sprints through the rubble of an old Air Force 
operations building that fell from its own weight after termite infestation.

"That's our rodent control system," explains Rantoul village 
Administrator David Johnston.

The building's filled with asbestos and lead-based paint. A few hundred 
yards away is an even larger building– White Hall – that's also full of 
asbestos and lead-based paint. White Hall is better known as Buckingham 
Palace to hundreds of thousands of airmen who passed through it from 
1939 until Chanute Air Force Base's closure in 1993.

White Hall should be the jewel of Chanute, which was recently named to 
the National Register of Historic Place. Certainly history must have 
been made in White Hall in its 54 years of military service. White 
Hall's nearly 400,000 square feet of labs, classrooms and dorms 
constituted the largest military building in the world, until the 
Pentagon was built.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2006/07/28/glory_days_have_passed_for_rantouls_chanute_base
--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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