Here Comes the Navy!

The United States Navy is coming to town!

The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
— a newspaper that’s
about to fold
, incidentally — reports that the United States Department of the Navy
will hold a public hearing in Eureka on Feb. 2
.

Concerning what, you ask? Concerning the proposed
Northwest Training Range Complex
, the department’s plan to designate most of the Pacific Northwest coast as training grounds for naval operations. (
UPDATE:
The NWTRC already exists — news to me, anyway. The current proposal is to increase training operations in its bounds.)

What sorts of training? According to
this brochure
:

Training Activities

Training activities involve activities in the range complex where Navy personnel learn skills they need to operate machinery or weapons. These activities provide realistic experience and include:

Operating vehicles, aircraft, submarines, and surface ships;

Conducting live fire training against surface and air targets at sea;

Conducting airborne surveillance activities;

Detecting, locating, and countering threat electronic signals;

Finding and removing underwater mines;

Training Navy divers in a cold water environment;

There’s a mass of material, including the full Enivronmental Impact Statement for the project, on the
“documents” section of the project’s site
.

Map below. More to come, obviously.

This article appears in Hobart’s Children.