short stories / By Heidi Walters

Naval Gazing

Brian Wauer, the Navy’s military operations specialist for the DEIS, reiterates that a lot of the work done in the complex, especially down here, is far out to sea and at high altitude. The closest aircraft may fly to shore is three miles. Right now, he says, our area may get 20 to 30 sorties a year, and that number isn’t going to change.

Likewise, he says, sonar exercises probably won’t take place in our area. But Navy ships en route to some of these activities may pass by, at times, he says.

“But primarily the ships are just in transit,” he says. It wouldn’t make sense, he adds, for them to stop and get in a workout in our waters, because the ships are based out of Puget Sound, where the sailors live. So they prefer to go out and do their exercises then come back in and sleep in their own beds, he says.

One unknown is that undersea minefield. “The draft EIS covers the potential impact of training that could take place in that range, but we don’t know yet where that range could be,” Wauer says. “Very likely it wouldn’t do a lot of good to put it in Northern California, because the submarines are based out of Puget Sound.” Dinner and the bed at home, again.

One Humboldt resident who showed up to a meeting in Eureka when the Navy first put out the proposal, in 2007, says he went away from that event feeling at ease. Commercial crab and salmon fisherman David Helliwell, who operates the F.V. Corregidor, says he was concerned at first when he heard about the Navy’s plans to increase its exercises. So he went as a representative from the Humboldt Fishermen’s Marketing Association.

“They were very forthcoming, very engaging,” he says. “My impression was most of their practices would be 50 to 100 miles offshore.”

He’s more worried about the possible impacts to fishing from wave energy projects, and especially irked by the efforts of those soft-headed environmentalists (as he would characterize them) who are pushing for Marine Protection Areas up and down the West Coast. “It’s a lobby by environmentalists to save the ocean in their own image, and it’s not based on sound science,” he says. “It’s anathema to this area.”

The Eureka public hearing is this Monday, Feb. 2 at the Eureka Women’s Club. An open house session is from 5-7 p.m., followed by a presentation and the formal comment period from 7-8:30 p.m.

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