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Taking Another Look At Location of OLF

The only thing that opponents of the Navy’s outlying landing field project in eastern North Carolina have ever asked for is a fair and impartial hearing.

They seem to have gotten one the other day before U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle.

Lawyers for three environmental groups and two counties joined in seeking a preliminary injunction to make the Navy suspend its process of buying up 30,000 acres. At least they wanted the delay to last long enough for the judge to decide whether the Navy is complying fully and faithfully with legal requirements in preparing an environmental impact statement.

Also at issue was the basic question of whether the government put enough study into the question of whether the area for the proposed OLF, in Washington and Beaufort counties near the Pocosin Lakes National Refuge, was really the best-suited place on the Eastern Seaboard for the noisy and ecologically disruptive training facility. The project will also displace 75 rural families.

Not only does OLF represent a massive environmental intrusion, but the presence of huge flocks of wintering protected waterfowl — including thousands of hefty tundra swans and snow geese — poses obvious dangers to the fast-flying F/A-17 Super Hornets that will be using the field. One of those things sucked into a jet engine is not easily digested.

Another factor: Only recently has the Navy agreed to put representatives on a study commission appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to conduct a 60-day study of OLF’s short- and long-term effects. Surely letting that study run its course is another argument for delay.

Opponents didn’t come away from the court hearing with the injunction they wanted to put the Navy’s land purchasing on temporary hold. Nor did Boyle promise a speedy ruling in the case. But he did say he would not shrink from issuing a temporary restraining order if it seemed warranted. And he asked a enough tough, skeptical questions of the Navy’s lawyers to indicate that he is no pushover.

For instance, when Justice Department attorney Stephen Bartell argued that the Navy can avoid fatal confrontations with swans and geese through “bird management programs,” the judge pointedly asked: “How do you coordinate that with the birds?”

The purpose of OLF is to provide a place where combat pilots can perform touch-and-go landings to help prepare them for aircraft carrier missions. The military wants to get the field in operation by 2007. The thing has to go somewhere — which means it’s going to go in somebody’s back yard, with inevitable resultant screams of protest.

Still, you do have to wonder if the site near Pocosin, seasonal home of tens of thousands of waterfowl, is the ideal place to plop OLF down. Surely it would not seriously endanger national defense to take a few more weeks to make sure that such an irreversible decision has received the due consideration it cries out for.