Army Corps to start cleanup of a former bomb-testing site

POQUOSON

For more than 40 years, a 3,276-acre peninsula on the Chesapeake Bay served as a bull's-eye for U.S. military bombs and rockets.

But later this month, the Army Corps of Engineers will begin to clear an untold amount of ordnance - some of it unexploded - that litters the marshy landscape of Plum Tree Island.

Signs along the shoreline and at several Poquoson marinas warn of the danger, but people continue to ignore the risk and visit, officials said.

In 1958, three teenagers were seriously injured when a bomb half-buried in the sand exploded.

"This work has to be done," said Joe McCauley, the Plum Tree Island National Wildlife Refuge manager with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "It's a public-safety issue."

The Army Corps' Baltimore District will oversee the recovery project, which will include demolition of unexploded munitions. Work is scheduled to begin in mid-January and continue into April, then resume in 2010.

The island was used by the military from 1917 until 1959.

George Follett, the Army Corps' program manager for the Plum Tree Island cleanup, said the largest munitions lobbed on the island would be 2,000-pound bombs containing about 1,000 pounds of explosives.

Most of the ordnance is expected to be smaller, Follett said.

"Our mission now is to do a survey to find out the nature and extent."

Between 2 percent and 5 percent of the rockets and bombs on the island probably didn't explode, Follett said.

Shaw Environmental Inc., an Edgewood, Md., firm that has done similar work at other former Department of Defense sites, will sweep for ordnance, then detonate any remnants it finds.

"There will be some loud bangs at some point," Follett said, "but nothing to get nervous about."

The work is being done in stages because of birds that nest on the refuge, which has been managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service since 1972.