[CPEO-MEF] ENCROACHMENT, MUNITIONS: Fort Indiantown Gap (PA)

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Guard should fully end efforts to expand into wilderness area

Editorial
Harrisburg Patriot-News (PA)
May 7, 2008

The Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs has mounted 
a strategic retreat in dropping -- for now -- plans to construct a 
multipurpose training range at Fort Indiantown Gap.

What is unclear is whether the "delay" in proceeding with the $15.3 
million project, which would have provided live fire exercises for crews 
of the National Guard's M1A1 Abrams Tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 
will prove temporary or permanent.

For the moment, the decision by Maj. Gen. Jessica L. Wright, the state's 
adjutant general, represents a reprieve for a 900-acre section of Stony 
Creek Valley that the Pennsylvania Game Commission had agreed to be used 
as a buffer zone to absorb rounds that might ricochet over Second 
Mountain into the game lands. An environmental consultant hired by the 
Guard claimed that the estimated 779 nonexplosive shells that might land 
in the buffer zone during the course of the 90 days a year of live-fire 
exercises would cause minimal environmental damage. A previous 
computerized ricochet analysis had projected that as many as 10,000 
shells might land in the buffer adjacent to the National Guard reservation.

The Guard's proposed encroachment on neighboring game lands represents 
another assault on Stony Valley, the last expansive roadless area in 
eastern Pennsylvania, through which the Appalachian Trail runs, as well 
as numerous other trails in a virtual hikers' paradise.

...

For the entire editorial, see
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1210110912242920.xml&coll=1

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
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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