An Inside Look At Camp Edwards' Explosive Ordnance Disposal
Standing 295 feet above Camp Edwards at Observation Point One, trees stretched as far as the eye could see—pitch pine and scrub oak, with a thick understory of lowbush blueberries. A dirt road sliced through the landscape below, separating the forested land, called the impact area, from the blackened earth left over from last month’s prescribed burn.
“I think a lot of people just expect it to be like a war zone, but it’s more like a nature park,” said Colonel Matthew Porter, installation commander at Camp Edwards. He, along with Massachusetts National Guard State Public Affairs Officer Donald Veitch and Camp Edwards Community Outreach Officer Kathleen Kolva, led the Enterprise on a tour of Joint Base Cape Cod to discuss the process for the disposing of unexploded ordnance, or UXOs, found on base.
“That’s the impact area,” Col. Porter said. He pointed out over the road to the lushness beyond, where the pollen billowed up from the trees in the distance while he spoke. “It used to be void of trees for the most part—in fact, most of the Cape used to be void of trees. This was always kind of void because of how much training and ammunitions were in there.”
Of the base’s 22,000 acres, there are 3,000 acres in what is called the impact area, which is where artillery, mortars, and explosives were historically fired during training. Of those 3,000 acres, 300 are considered to be in the central impact area, which is where most of the past munitions had landed. The base stopped firing into this area during the 1990s but has spent the decades since combing the area for leftover munitions. No one is allowed into the impact area for safety reasons, aside from the US Corps of Engineers contractors who work out there with the Army as part of one of the base’s two water cleanup programs.
“The impact area is important,” Col. Porter said. “We have two water cleanup programs: one specifically for that impact area, and a few other surrounding areas. They dispose of ordnance on a regular basis.”
Most people may not think that unexploded ordnance would have anything to do with water quality but because Cape Cod is served by a sole source aquifer, Joint Base pays special attention to any potential contaminant that could damage the water quality, which is one of the main reasons for ordnance disposal. Perchlorate and RDX—an acronym for royal demolition explosive, also known as cyclonite—have historically been problematic contaminants that tend to come from military munitions. These have caused major environmental issues for the base, which has since stopped using those chemicals under mandate.
The water cleanup team uses different kinds of modeling, including hydrology modeling, and other techniques such as radar to find source contamination, determine where the ordnance is and dispose of it, Col. Porter said.
The reason for disposing of the ordnance is actually quite simple: to remove any potential or actual contaminants. Although the Army only gained official control of the area in the 1930s when it was built up for World War II, the impact area has been a training ground for a long, long time.
“We find cannonballs out there from the Revolutionary and Civil War times,” Col. Porter said. “We no longer contribute to it; we’re just getting rid of all that legacy stuff.”
In the past, Observation Point One was actually where observers of a specific skill set would watch for the impact of rounds fired from one of the many gun positions on the base. From there, Col. Porter said, they had the vantage point to see where munitions landed and adjust their aim accordingly. Now, the wooded area serves as a perfect habitat for 43 species listed as threatened or endangered in the state.
“It’s pretty amazing because not a lot of people go in there, so it’s pristine,” Col. Porter said. “You’ll see that all around here; it’s very pristine as we walk through it. We have soldiers here training once a month in very specific areas but most of the areas are untouched for years unless we’re in there doing active habitat management or restoration.”
Habitat management and regeneration are a major part of what goes on at the base. Prescribed burns are done regularly on the training lands surrounding the impact area, burning between 50 to 70 acres at a time for a lofty goal of 600 acres per year—although Col. Porter said they usually fall short of that due to poor weather conditions. Prescribed burning helps keep the forested areas from becoming too choked up to the point that they do not serve as viable habitats.
“The same habitat that these rare species need is the kind of habitat that our soldiers need, too,” Col. Porter said. “It actually is very symbiotic, and that’s kind of by design. It’s compatible [with] military training.”
He explained that military regulations allow training practices that are compatible with protection of the habitat and protection of the aquifer, something the base strives to do and do correctly.
Ordnance found in the training area—besides being a long-term environmental risk—also pose a health and safety risk to anyone using the land, Col. Porter said. With soldiers actively training in these areas, any ordnance located there is a potential risk.
“We know there was training going on [here since at least the 1930s],” he said. “They weren’t always as deliberate with where they fired and their ranges, way back when, so we do find munitions in the training areas that we would not suspect to be there because it was never an official range there, not that we know.”
Prescribed burns are done to mimic natural fires and help maintain and regenerate the mosaic of ecological life on the base, but when the fire has cooled and the ground is flat, it makes it a lot easier to spot any ordnance that might have been left behind.
“That’s why I brought you up here—because this is oftentimes how we find it,” Col. Porter said from atop Observation Point One. From here, it’s easier to spot a piece of metal—a tail fin or a fragment, perhaps. From there, team members are advised to mark it, cordon it off, and step away.
Some ordnance might be buried in the softer soil, making it hard to locate.
“Most of these things that they’re finding are not sitting on the top,” Ms. Kolva said. “They’re looking down underneath the ground because you have to imagine that these munitions are going down into soft soil. They have special equipment that helps them look under the ground so it’s not like we’re just walking around and it’s an Easter egg hunt.”
Additionally, it is hard to know just by looking at an ordnance whether it is an active threat or contaminant. Some of the munitions are inert while others may not be. Because the naked eye cannot tell the difference, ordnances found in the training area are always considered to be a potential threat and treated as such.
Col. Porter explained the disposal process for ordnance found in the training ground: once the fire from the prescribed burn cools, Massachusetts State Police will come in because they have jurisdiction.
“They’ll respond first and they’ll take a look at it,” he said. “If it can be moved or if they determine that it’s nothing, then we’ll just get rid of it, recycle it or we’ll move it to [another] location. Or, they’ll call Navy EOD in, and they come out of Newport.”
The Navy EOD Team—short for exploded ordnance disposal—will then come in and take jurisdictional control of the area and dispose of the ordnance how they see fit, which must be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. Once the ordnance has been disposed of, the area is then excavated and tested for contaminants.
“Oftentimes, there’s nothing detected because either it didn’t have high explosives in it and they just couldn’t determine if it did or didn’t,” Col. Porter said. “Or, because of the explosion, it completely changed the molecular chemistry of it and it’s no longer something that’s in the ground anymore.”
If contaminants were found, the EPA would take over and excavate further to determine a solution.
“Talking to the groundwater program, they do ordnance disposal once a month and they are strictly regulated by the EPA,” Col. Porter said. “I don’t think there is an occasion yet where they found any contamination from a blow-in-place that has exceeded a [typical] excavation.”
The process is remarkable, Col. Porter said. He emphasized the relationship with the EPA and the key role it plays in disposing of ordnance, which over time has created best practices.
“The Army doesn’t decide what it’s going to do. The EPA approves whatever method is going to be used,” he said. “The EPA is very involved in that process with the impact area because that is the major source of the contamination. They already have the modeling; they know where the contamination is coming from. Most of it radiates from the impact area and that’s from those two constituents that we’re concerned about.”
As more prescribed burns are done, Col. Porter said they will likely find more ordnance in the training grounds. For example, last month they found three 3.5-millimeter rockets which were then safely detonated. But because of the dense cloud coverage on that day, the sound of all three being detonated reverberated off the low ceiling and sounded much, much louder than intended. Residents throughout the Upper Cape reported hearing the explosion.
“We actually had one the day before that, but no one heard that one,” Col. Porter said. “In the future, we will likely have them tamp it with sandbags or something in order to deaden it a little bit and we’ll take into consideration the cloud cover and as much as possible, get as much early warning out to police and fire. But up until that point, we’ve had several, and it didn’t really have the same sound signature, so we weren’t anticipating it to be that loud.”
Ordnance disposal continues to be done on a regular basis at the base in an effort to keep the ground free from any potential dangers that could come from old artillery or rockets.
Col. Porter asks that the public excuse a few booms now and then. He said the base will look into new techniques it can implement in the future to tamp the sound and ideally provide advanced notification to local law enforcement.
“We can make sure the town isn’t worried that something bad happened that really wasn’t bad,” he told the Sandwich Select Board earlier this month. “It’s actually something that’s very good—we get more ordnance out of the way.”