[Peace-discuss] Vieques
Dlind49 at aol.com
Dlind49 at aol.com
Fri Dec 26 16:56:55 CST 2003
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040105&s=levin
The Nation
December 22, 2003
Vieques Aftermath
by Kate M. Levin
recent issue of National Geographic Traveler featured a list of its Top Five
Caribbean hot spots for the year. Number one is Cuba, the perfect destination
if you love those "faded Commie icons," as the magazine put it. Their second
favorite is the Puerto Rican island-municipality of Vieques, which was, until
recently, a bomb-testing zone for the US Navy.
Last month, two tourists, perhaps acting on a tip from the glossy mag's
feature, visited a Vieques beach. They found, in addition to the stunning natural
beauty they'd been promised, something unexpected: a small cylindrical
detonator with two wires dangling from it. Navy specialists confiscated the object,
inspected it, declared that it was an explosive of nonmilitary origin and
destroyed it.
Their response was hardly a surprise to Vieques residents, according to
Roberto Rabin of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques.
Viequenses have come to expect denials and deflections from the Navy on the issue of
environmental contamination. They have, Rabin says, "a long history of dealing
with the Navy's mistruths."
The Navy's departure from the island last May was a bittersweet victory for
those who had fought for decades to make it a reality. There was jubilation at
having defeated the Goliath which, in 1941, expropriated three-fourths of
Vieques's land and displaced half the population. And there was deep satisfaction
in expelling the killers of David Sanes, the civilian guard killed by an
errant Navy bomb in 1999.
But the celebration was tainted by fear for Vieques's future. For sixty-two
years, the Navy pummeled the island with millions of pounds of bombs, missiles,
depleted-uranium bullets, napalm and Agent Orange. But the toxic threat to
Viequenses didn't end when the Navy stopped bombing. Some Navy bombs never
exploded when fired, dropping instead into the shallow ocean water and remaining
there, lying on the coral reef or resting on the ocean floor. These live bombs
leak contaminants and pose an explosive threat to fishers and divers. How,
then, does the Navy--which promised, in a Memorandum of Agreement issued upon
leaving the island, to assume responsibility for environmental cleanup--plan to
deal with the unexploded bombs lying in Vieques's waters?
It doesn't, according James Barton, a former senior technician with the
Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. The Navy, Barton explains, has procedures
for the safe removal of unexploded bombs on land--but not underwater. So it
has traditionally taken two approaches to unexploded underwater bombs: blowing
them up in place or, as Barton puts it, "leaving them there and learning to
live with them." The former option is not viable for Vieques; detonating bombs
would mean the destruction of the area's ecosystem, including its delicate coral
reef. The leave-them-be choice, however, is hardly preferable: "If left
there," says Barton, "the casing of the bombs will deteriorate, gradually
contaminating the surrounding environment."
A 2001 New York Times article titled "For the Future of Vieques, Look to
Hawaii" noted the parallel between the cases of Vieques and Kahoolawe, the
Hawaiian island also used for decades as a Navy bombing target. The bombs stopped
falling there in 1990, and three years later, a $460 million, decade-long Navy
cleanup effort began. But when Kahoolawe was officially transferred back to
Hawaii this past November 12, only 71 percent of the land ordnance had been
cleared. When asked what became of the unexploded underwater bombs resting off
Kahoolawe's shore, Barton, who was involved in the cleanup while he was still with
the Navy, states flatly, "They just left them there."
Culebra, another tiny Puerto Rican island, offers an additional parallel. It,
too, has precious coral reef, exquisite tropical beaches and waters sprinkled
with explosives and artillery. Culebra, a Navy bombing range until 1975, has
been waiting nearly three decades for decontamination. "We still have many
bombs here in Culebra and are trying to get the Navy to clean them," Culebra's
deputy mayor said last May.
One of the greatest frustrations for Viequenses has been the Navy's evasion
of a fundamental question--just how toxic is the material lying in the
munitions junkyards off the coast of the island? The question is hardly a trivial one.
The cancer rate for Viequenses is 27 percent higher than it is for mainland
Puerto Ricans; elevated rates of heart disease, asthma and diabetes plague the
island's population (who number around 9,300) as well. Though links are
difficult to prove, many health researchers in Puerto Rico and the United States
argue that a correlation exists between contamination from the bombing and the
high incidence of disease among Viequenses.
A few years ago, motivated largely by growing health concerns in Vieques, the
Puerto Rican government asked the Navy to investigate one particularly
littered area of ocean. The site, just off of Vieques's eastern shore, contained
hundreds of barrels of an unknown, leaking material, along with a dilapidated
target ship.
The Navy's conclusions, presented to a Puerto Rican Senate committee in
December of 2002, were dismissed by the incensed committee chairman as "defective."
The reason? The study didn't test the contents of any of the barrels, but
nonetheless declared them innocuous. Nor did the Navy mention that the decaying
ship, the USS Killen, had been used in atomic tests prior to being used as a
bombing target.
The government of Puerto Rico then commissioned a new study of the site,
which was performed last summer by Barton and Dr. James Porter, a coral reef
expert from the University of Georgia. Their findings, including the results of
toxicological tests, will soon be released by the Puerto Rican government.
Vieques need not be another Kahoolawe, as new technology promises an
alternative to the Navy's traditional approach to unexploded ordnance. After retiring
from the Navy bomb squad, Barton founded a company, Underwater Ordnance
Recovery, Inc., that has developed techniques to remove bombs from sensitive waters
nondestructively. His method removes the bombs with an unmanned platform, then
employs one of several safe disposal techniques: defusing them, detonating
them somewhere sufficiently far from inhabited areas or burying them in deep
sea. The Puerto Rican government, Barton says, supports nondestructive removal as
a viable option for cleanup--but it is the Navy that needs convincing. He
hopes to do so this coming March, at the first official exhibition of his
technology, to which the Navy has been invited.
Whether the Navy will break with its long history of environmental negligence
remains to be seen. So far, it has yet to abandon its pretense of responsible
eco-friendliness. "We pride ourselves on environmental stewardship," Navy
spokesperson Lieutenant Commander Cappy Surette said in a phone interview, "and
the Navy is taking a cautious and meticulous approach to the cleanup effort in
Vieques." For the sake of the people of Vieques, one hopes that this is
true--but it would be a radical departure from the Navy's behavior thus far.
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