Bombs Away From Penobscot Bay - Seal Island cleanup priority rises

The Seal Island parties of interest met last Monday. It was a small party, though: US Army Corps of Engineers, US Fish and Wildlife, Maine DEP. While invited to attend as observer, I was unable to make it to Portland.

Word from Ted Wolfe in Maine DEP's Division of Remediation is that his agency
"...shares your concern regarding any potentially unexploded ordinance in the waters surrounding the island. " Wolfe is confident however, that "as the site moves through the established investigative process, these issues will be discussed."

Also noted was the success that Maine DEP and US Fish and Wildlife (specifically the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife refuge, of which Seal Island is part) had in convincing the Corps of Engineers to uptick Seal Island's priorities score in the review process, virtually ensuring that a cleanup of some sort will indeed be carried out.

Next up: developing a Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study An RI/FS is a geophysical survey performed to characterize a suspected UXO area, develop a sampling strategy to characterize areas suspected of containing UXO, and use the info garnered to come up with a site-specific response action. The decision as to whether or not the seafloor around Seal Island will be cleaned up will take place during this process. RI/FS's are also used for organizing cleanups at nuclear wastes sites.


The draft Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study will then made available for public comment to get input on the potential response and on reasonably anticipated future uses. After the Corps of Engineers has responded to the public comments, the response action is finalized in a Record of Decision (ROD) or Decision Document (DD), and, presuming funds available, gets carried out.

Citizens need to be involved in this process. The agencies welcome such participation.

Seal Island clean up: out of sight, out of money, out of mind.

The congressionally funded interagency group planning the cleanup of bomb waste from two marine islands off Maine used for bombing practice during WW2 and Korean War, may have the will, but not the way, to actually search for and clean up the suspected thousands of rounds of cannon shells and rockets that trainee pilots rained upon, not these islands themselves, but the hundreds of acres of seafloor surrounding them. To this day, aging bombs and rockets continue to wash ashore from this ghostly undersea cache.

But the 'Cleanup' as presently planned ignores this toxic hoard. See the official public notice

The word from the two program managers running the planning project - Sheila Holt of US Army Corps of Engineers and Ted Wolfe of Maine DEP - is that despite the suspected presence of 100s of bombs and rockets on the seafloor around the island, and the near total absence of ordnance remaining on the island itself, the Seal Island munitions cleanup will be restricted to topside. or at most the intertidal areas.

Above the tideline only? Why? After all, several generations of student bomber-trainees frequently missed the slender W-shaped island during their practice bombing runs.

To this day, scores of bay-area fishermen can recount encounters with sunken ordnance during their careers. Note that this statement has been rejected as false by at least three area fishermen with extensive experience with those waters and the area fishing communities, who state that apart from a few metal fragments, there have been no unexploded shells or rockets washed up, towed up or snarled up from the waters around Seal Island, and consider it highly unlikely that any shells or rockets remain intact in the subtidal around seal Island

The agencies' explanation -- waters too deep round the island for scuba-diving UXO hunters-- doesn't...ahem... hold water.


At least one third of the seafloor (about 2 square miles) in the munitions danger area is less then 120 feet deep, the diving depth limit set out in the federal Munitions Response Site Protocol.

Regardless, the plan being worked out for possible adoption this month would set a no-dive precedent for cleanup of ex-bomb range islands in marine waters. Duck Island, in the Maine part of the Isles of Shoals archipelago, comes next, and then other marine islands that were used for bombing practices off the US coast.

BOTTOM LINE?
A cleanup program that excludes mapping and cleaning up marine bomb waste from seafloors adjacent to island bomb ranges is unacceptable.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Contact the federal and state leaders of the project. (See contact info below).

Explain that it is
their duty under the Protocol to evaluate and clean up submerged unexploded ordnance in the public waters around Seal Island. The plan should not be finalized until it includes this activity.

Remind them that

* At least a third of the seafloor within the Seal Island Danger Area is shallower than 120 feet, the official safe scuba diving limit set by the federal government for UXO cleanups;

* UXO continues to wash ashore the island from these waters.

* Fishermen continue to report encounters with unexploded ordnance in the vicinity.


Who to contact:

Sheila Holt
Geographical District Project Manager
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
New England District 696 Virginia Road Concord , MA 01742-2751
Phone: 978-318-8174
Email: shiela.d.holt AT usace.army.mil

&

Ted Wolfe
Program manager
Military Munitions Response Program
Bureau of Remediation and Waste management
Maine Department of Environmental Protection
Phone: 207-287-2651 or 287-8552
E-mail: Theodore.E.Wolfe AT maine.gov

Getting your concerns on the record quickly is critical. Be brief and to the point. The draft plan goes before the cleanup committee on Monday June 11th, The two officials above need to have things emailed to them before the close of that day, if not sooner.

Seal Island munitions "cleanup" plan leaves 100s of bombs behind.

Updated June 14, 2007.
Out of sight, out of money, out of mind.

The congressionally funded interagency group planning the cleanup of bomb waste from two marine islands off Maine used for bombing practice during WW2 and Korean War, may have the will, but not the way, to actually search for and clean up the suspected thousands of rounds of cannon shells and rockets that trainee pilots rained upon, not these islands themselves, but the hundreds of acres of seafloor surrounding them. To this day, aging bombs and rockets continue to wash ashore from this ghostly undersea cache.

But the 'Cleanup' as presently planned ignores this toxic horde. See the official public notice

The word from the two program managers running the planning project - Sheila Holt of US Army Corps of Engineers and Ted Wolfe of Maine DEP - is that despite the suspected presence of 100s of bombs and rockets on the seafloor around the island, and the near total absence of ordnance remaining on the island itself, the Seal Island munitions cleanup will be restricted to topside. or at most the intertidal areas.



Above the tideline only? Why? After all, several generations of student bomber-trainees frequently missed the slender W-shaped island during their practice bombing runs. To this day, scores of bay-area fishermen can recount encounters with sunken ordnance during their careers.

The agencies' explanation -- waters too deep round the island for scuba-diving UXO hunters-- doesn't...ahem... hold water.


At least one third of the seafloor (about 2 square miles) in the munitions danger area is less then 120 feet deep, the diving depth limit set out in the federal Munitions Response Site Protocol.

Regardless, the plan being worked out for possible adoption this month would set a no-dive precedent for cleanup of ex-bomb range islands in marine waters. Duck Island, in the Maine part of the Isles of Shoals archipelago, comes next, and then other marine islands that were used for bombing practices off the US coast.

BOTTOM LINE?
A cleanup program that excludes mapping and cleaning up marine bomb waste from seafloors adjacent to island bomb ranges is unacceptable.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Contact the federal and state leaders of the project. (See contact info below).

Explain that it is their duty under the Munitions Response Site Protocol to evaluate and clean up submerged unexploded ordnance in the public waters around Seal Island. The plan should not be finalized until it includes this activity.

Remind them that

* At least a third of the seafloor within the Seal Island Danger Area is shallower than 120 feet, the official safe scuba diving limit set by the federal government for UXO cleanups;

* UXO continues to wash ashore the island from these waters.

* Fishermen continue to report encounters with unexploded ordnance in the vicinity.


Who to contact:

Sheila Holt
Geographical District Project Manager
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
New England District 696 Virginia Road Concord , MA 01742-2751
Phone: 978-318-8174
Email: shiela.d.holt AT usace.army.mil

&

Ted Wolfe
Program manager
Military Munitions Response Program
Bureau of Remediation and Waste management
Maine Department of Environmental Protection
Phone: 207-287-2651 or 287-8552
E-mail: Theodore.E.Wolfe AT maine.gov

Getting your concerns on the record quickly is critical. Be brief and to the point. The draft plan goes before the cleanup committee on Monday June 11th, The two officials above need to have things emailed to them before the close of that day, if not sooner.

Seal Island Bomb Range cleanup planners to meet Monday in Portland.

Seal Island is about 6 miles east of Matinicus Island. The mile-long W-shaped island had thousands of artillery shells and rockets rained upon it by trainee pilots during World War Two and the Korean war. About Seal Island

An interagency group meets Monday in Portland, using funds that
Congress recently appropriated for a federal/state joint effort to survey first this old marine gunnery range, home now to seals and seabirds, for unexploded ordnance (UXO) and other military wastes, and, using the Munitions Response Site Prioritization Protocol, decide what form of cleanup, if any, to do. About UXO. (DoD website) .

This protocol "is used to assess sites that may have unexploded ordnance, discarded military munitions or munitions constituents, and to assign priorities for any additional investigation or muni­tions removal that may be required."

According to MDEP military munitions cleanup specialist Ted Wolfe, a brush fire that swept the island several years ago cooked off most of the unexploded ordnance; wave action, however, continues to bring additional UXO ashore from the many bombs and rockets that fell short of the island during training exercises. Area fishing history is rich with stories of encounters with UXO around Seal Island.

Despite this identification of the island's nearshore waters as a continuing source of explosive ordnance, cleanup planning has focused solely on UXO wastes above the tideline; the depth of water around the island apparently makes removal of submerged UXO problematic.

A Plan Development Team will give a presentation to the June 11th meeting of state and federal agencies in Portland. According to project manager Sheila Holt of the Army Corps of Engineers, the planning process has moved along swiftly; there are high hopes that the evaluation and cleanup of Seal Island's miltary wastes will serve as a prototype for further marine gunnery range cleanups in other ocean locations around the United States.

The next assessment site will be Duck Island, Maine, Isles of Shoals; it, too was used as a naval aircraft bombing target area.