Crash Course

Equally pathetic, or more so, was the Navy’s performance in court during its unsuccessful defense of the EIS. Drawing from anecdotal evidence and citing studies, the Navy had reported in that document that tundra swans and snow geese are highly tolerant of jet din. The “anecdotal evidence” issued from the Navy’s designated wildlife expert, Greg Netti, who had repeated a comment made to him by someone (he couldn’t remember who) that swans are difficult to disturb. The Navy then applied this incorrect information to snow geese. The cited studies, however, plainly show that snow geese are sensitive to manmade noise. Before plaintiffs’ counsel could ask Netti about his bizarre interpretation of the studies, he volunteered that he hadn’t read them.

When a Navy attorney argued that if air traffic was going to disturb the birds, the crop dusters that operate in the area would have done so, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle, a conservative Reagan appointee, looked at him sharply and asked when he thought the crop dusters flew. “Summer,” replied the attorney, correctly, then cited heavy ground traffic on Highway 99. With that, Judge Boyle inquired if he knew from where to where Highway 99 went. The attorney allowed that he did not, at which point the courtroom erupted in laughter.

During the 10 minutes I was on that narrow road—en route to the refuge with conservation activist and PBS hunting-and- fishing-show producer Joe Albea, Audubon North Carolina Executive Director Chris Canfield, Mayor Roth, and Derb Carter of the Southern Environmental Law Center (Audubon’s counsel in the OLF actions)—I counted a total of one other vehicle. As you turn onto Route 99 on your way out from Plymouth, the first thing you see is a sign that reads: “Danger. Falling birds and $57 million jets.”

Canfield, a former Air Force and Pentagon public affairs officer, offered this: “I worked with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and rank-and-file members. I was there from 1984 to 1988, and there were some real debacles we dealt with. But in my entire career I never saw worse public affairs from the military than this OLF fiasco.”

In March 2005, Rear Admiral Don Bullard, the Navy’s director of readiness and training at Norfolk, Virginia, was quoted as follows by The Wall Street Journal: “Being a naval aviator we live and breathe and work in a maritime environment, and that environment includes birds.” He went on to aver that all the Navy’s bird experts agree that the risk of bird collisions near the refuge “is manageable.”

But two years earlier the Navy’s own bird consultant for the project—Ronald Merritt, former worldwide head of the Air Force’s Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard programs (with the apt acronym BASH)—had complained to Secretary of the Navy Gordon England about the deep-sixing of his findings. “The bird strike issue was minimized in the Final Environmental Impact Statement,” Merritt wrote. “There are very few places in the United States where this level of threat exists. The radar study at the proposed site near Pungo Lake was conducted late in the wintering season when bird populations would be declining. Even so, over a 12-day survey period, the vertical scanning radar detected over 450,000 birds moving through the 24-degree beam. . . . This represents a serious threat to aircraft safety. . . . The written decision suggests that the bird strike risk at the Washington County field site (Site C) is similar to other sites in the area and that a standard Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard Plan can be developed to mitigate this concern. This conclusion is erroneous. It completely ignores the data.”

At this writing all the Navy’s environmental review has been brazenly dishonest. In fact, once it learned that the winter sky would be full of large birds, it “reverse engineered” the EIS, to use its own words—that is, it unlawfully manipulated data to achieve desired results. In the discovery process the Southern Environmental Law Center unearthed the following September 29, 2002, e-mail from naval aviator Commander John A. Robusto, the OLF team’s principal member on operations, in which he responded to a colleague who had an “uneasy feeling” about the project: “Very uneasy,” agreed Robusto. “Up until the preferred OLF site was chosen, everything made sense and all decisions could be logically explained. Now we have to reverse engineer the whole process to justify the outcome.”

Part of the Navy’s reverse-engineering process was advancing the fraudulent claim that “split-siting” the Super Hornets—that is, moving two squadrons from Virginia to its base at Cherry Point, North Carolina—was militarily advantageous. Actually, split-siting is part of a clandestine deal in which the Navy promised to pump federal pork into North Carolina in exchange for acquiescence on the OLF from its congressional delegation. Commander Robusto understood this, and shot off this e-mail to his superiors on September 2, 2002: “We . . . are engaged in a dialogue with the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and Secretary of the Navy staffs regarding the benefits of split-siting. In a nutshell, they want us to fabricate reasons why split-siting . . . [is] beneficial to operational readiness. I have explained several times that there is zero operational benefit to split-siting.” Robusto went on to note that split-siting actually detracts from operational readiness.

The Navy’s public assurances that birds were no problem contrasted starkly with fears expressed by its pilots. Responding to an e-mail from Dan Cecchini, the EIS project manager, who had just had the epiphany that the proposed site “is smack dab in the middle” of the birds’ flight path, Robusto had written: “I totally believe you that there are a bazillion swans in the area. I’ve seen them and had to pull off at low levels several times because of them. . . . Operator’s perspective: This is a big problem.”

Robusto wasn’t kidding. Bird strikes commonly flame-out engines and implode canopies. You can even watch the takedown of a NATO CT-155 trainer by a red-tailed hawk, videotaped from inside the cockpit, at the Canadian Air Force’s Flying Training School at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on May 14, 2004. (To watch this dramatic footage, click here.) The hawk streaks across the screen and is sucked into the engine intake. Sirens. Labored breathing. “Lost the engine,” calmly intones the flight instructor. “Okay.” More labored breathing. More sirens. “Around the horn. Restart.”