by Richard Hugus
August 27, 2020
The Massachusetts Army National Guard recently filed an environmental assessment for a proposed machine gun firing range at Camp Edwards, a 15,000 acre military base occupying large parts of Sandwich and Bourne on Cape Cod. Not surprisingly, the Army found itself innocent of any possible harm this range might pose to the people and environment around the base -- it came to a "finding of no significant impact." According to the Army, the range would require 170 acres to be clear cut, plus 29 more acres disturbed. In addition, a "surface danger zone" of 5,197 acres would be established roughly north of the range, presumably for stray bullets. The machine gun firing point is about a half mile west of Snake Pond, and 2/10th of a mile from a residential area around Snake Pond. According to the Army document, "peak usage would occur from May through June", including night firing from sundown to 2:00 AM, for up to 74 days per year.
Forestdale residents and quite a few people in the southern part of Sandwich and the northern part of Mashpee will be familiar with the sound of 50 caliber machine gun fire from the old days, when it was also considered okay to fire 155 mm Howitzer artillery shells which rattled windows everywhere on the Upper Cape, until the EPA called a halt to that practice in 1997. Apparently it's time to get ready for more sounds of warfare in quiet residential areas.
The Army environmental assessment is notable for the attention it pays to the needs of the Massachusetts National Guard and its indifference to the interests of people living around the base. Large sections of the assessment are devoted to arguing that the range is needed (their word in bold) for troop training, the importance of this training, and the idea that it can't reasonably be done elsewhere. The document couldn't avoid at least some mention of the immense damage this base caused historically in terms of pollution of the Sagamore lens of the aquifer which provides water for Falmouth, Mashpee, Sandwich, and Bourne. But it finds that the same activities which caused this damage before will not do so today -- it claims groundwater won't be affected and people won't be bothered by the noise. It's as if the change of the name of the base from "Massachusetts Military Reservation" to zero-connotation "Joint Base Cape Cod" was done in order to erase the base's entire history.
The military is not only blind to the fact that a large population has grown up around the base since it was founded. They actually consider this to be "incompatible development" and an "encroachment" on their freedom to operate. These words are in the document. While many people are lucky to have a rental or a small fraction of an acre to live on, the local military has full use of 20,000 acres of unzoned land (Otis + Camp Edwards), armed checkpoints, and is now announcing that they "have taken measures to restrict encroachment in lands adjacent to the installation." The attitude here is that the public are intruding in their space. This is why in the '90s the Pentagon treated complaints about environmental pollution as first and foremost a public relations problem, an annoyance, and not a threat to the health and safety of the people they claimed to be protecting.
There is no mention in this 111 page document of why it is permissible to pump millions of rounds of lead bullets into the trees, vegetation, and ground. Lead is a heavy metal; not good for groundwater. Indeed, lead is already present in and has not been removed from the former firing range this project is to be sited on. At one time the military said they would prevent lead contamination by using "green munitions." Now they don't even bother with that pretense.
Should Cape residents be asked to sacrifice once again for the Army National Guard's training needs? There is no war abroad that provides a convincing argument for national security -- for quite some time the US has only been involved in wars of aggression. Nor would most like the idea of Guardsmen firing machine guns in the streets of American cities.
It has been twenty years since the height of protest against the harm caused by this military base when, because if its position at the top of the region's aquifer, groundwater plumes caused by dumped aviation fuel, cleaning solvents, and explosives were found to be contaminating one water supply well after another. It seems the Army is banking on local residents forgetting or not knowing about this history. Like before, it also hopes to sneak by without the public noticing. Unless you like to read legal notices in small print in the Cape Cod Times, you might never have heard about this shameful proposal. In a just world, this base would have been closed a long time ago.