Florida bombing to increase at Avon Park...turning Florida into Vieques.

[madfloridian]

The people of Puerto Rico protested, and we left there. It is hard to find out the extent of the damage done there. I am sensing Floridians will just shrug and accept this. I fear much harm to just the physical nature of the peninsula which is already nearly sea level. Add the use of live ammunition, and noise factor, and the loss to the economy and it spells real problems for Central Florida.

I have posted on this before, and very few seem that concerned.
There is a hearing on this next week, but it just seems pre-ordained. It is going on in the panhandle as well, but this will be a larger scale.

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050227/NEWS/502270377/1004
".....the planes would be dropping 13,731 practice bombs and as many as 1,545 high-explosive bombs. Military aircraft also would fire as many as 27 Hellfire missiles at targets on the ground.

Helicopter flights would increase from 1,098 to 1,418.

In addition to the bombs and missiles, military training exercises would involve firing thousands of mortar shells and other ordnance between 25 mm and 105 mm and strafing ground targets with 30,000 20 mm shells...."

Avon Park is in Highlands County, just below Polk County in Central Florida.

[IndianaGreen]

1. They asked for it!

Many of these folks wanted the military in their backyard. They are now going to get a taste of what the people of Vieques had to endure. Watch out for cancer clusters!

[katmondoo]

2. Bombing

We are a country gone bonkers.

[oneighty]

3. Pinecastle

near Umatilla was a bombing range in 1959. Is it still there?

WW2 and later there was offshore bombing range off Ceder Key and Aripeka. We cleared the off shore ranges in the late Fifties.

And there is another at Eglin AFBase. (Or used to be).

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[madfloridian]

4. Pinecastle in Ocala National Forest....here is a page about it.

There is no date on the page...will check further.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/pinecastle.htm

SNIP..."The Navy's Pinecastle Impact Range in the Ocala National Forest is the only place on the East Coast where the Navy can do live impact training. The Navy drops nearly 20,000 bombs a year at the site, a few hundred of which are live. The Navy has used nearly 6,000 acres of the 382,000-acre forest for target practice for 50 years under a special use permit from the US Forest Service.

The Ocala National Forest is the oldest national forest east of the Mississippi and contains the largest forest of sand pine in the world. Located near Orlando, Florida, the Ocala National Forest receives more visitors than any other national forest in the Sunshine State. Millions of visitors annually escape to this forest, which is one of central Florida's last remaining traces of forested land.

The word Ocala is thought to be a derivative of a Timucuan Indian term meaning fair land or big hammock. The Ocala's vegetation lives up to its name, as you will discover towering palms, large live oaks and scrubby sand pines dominating forest's scrub oak ecosystem. Native to the Ocala, the sand pine is the only tree capable of growing to a usable timber size in this forest's dry, sandy soil. The Ocala's sand pine scrub ecosystem is the world's largest continuous forest of this type...."

[madfloridian]

5. Quote: "only a few uppities in Eustis complain"

This is from 2002. This quote blows my mind.
SNIP..."The pro-bombing sentiment is shared by many area residents, including Sylvia Parker, who works part time at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post and whose husband once worked on the range's small staff, digging up used bombs from the forest floor. Parker, 62, lives in Astor, a town of 1,500 about 6 miles east of the range.

"We ain't going to worry about them," she said of the people who want the range gone. "It's only a few of the . . . uppities down in Eustis that want to grumble and complain. And if the guys don't have a place to practice, how are they going to hit what's-his-face in the caves?"

http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/2002/vol6n06/BombsAway-en.shtml

[oneighty]

6. I was there

in early 1960 on a bombing exercise. We were to destroy those bombs which did not function as designed. Much to our pleasure they all went BOOM!

It is a really rugged exciting forest with a lot of bomb craters and no doubt some unexploded ordnance.

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