Monsoons slow Camp Humphreys expansion

[unhappycamper]

Outside Camp Humphreys in South Korea, laborers and construction vehicles are preparing land for the base’s expansion.


Monsoons slow Camp Humphreys expansion
By Franklin Fisher, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, October 20, 2007


PYEONGTAEK, South Korea — When they sent in the bulldozers and dump trucks to start work on what eventually will be the expanded Camp Humphreys, planners knew to expect South Korea’s summer monsoon rains.

But rains lasted weeks longer than usual and got the ground so muddy the work crews and bulldozers sometimes were unable to get on with the job, Camp Humphreys officials said.

With the ground now dry enough to work, it’s once again “game on” at Parcel 1, a 203.6-acre portion of the expansion site where the work’s first stage began in January. The overall site measures 2,328 acres.

“Work is resuming big time,” said Fred Davis, Army Relocation Program manager at Camp Humphreys with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Far East District. “We’re back to full-scale operation.”

Plans call for Camp Humphreys to triple in size and become the U.S. military’s flagship installation on the peninsula under a South Korea-U.S. agreement. The post is in Pyeongtaek, about an hour south of Seoul.

“We normally expect a two- to three-week, very wet monsoon period, and then intermittent periods of heavy rain,” Davis said.


Rest of article at: http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=49634



uhc comment: Pyeongtaek was the site of riots last May.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyeongtaek

~snip~

Recently, there have been heightened protests against the construction of the new USFK headquarters near Pyeongtaek. Moreover, authorities evicted protestors from occupying the elementary school and working the fields where the base will be built by placing barbed wire at the boundary of the future base.<2>

Struggles erupted on May 4, when some 13,000 South Korean military soldiers and riot police arrived to guard the land where the new Camp Humphreys was to be built. Farmers could not get to their own land to cultivate their rice. When troops arrived to set up the fencing, residents moved in to block them. The activists claim South Korean military troops injured over 200 people and rounded up 500 more. However, none of the Soldiers were armed on this day and the riot police's main role was to prevent the protestors from attacking the soldiers. On May 5, a undetermined amount of unarmed Korean Army soldiers were attacked by protestors with pipes and sticks after the riot police prevented the protestors from breaching the site. After a public outcry from the parents of some of the soldiers who were attacked, the government started to equip the soldiers with bamboo sticks and armor.<3> It was the first time since the 1980 Kwangju massacre that the South Korean military, as opposed to riot police, were used against demonstrators.<4>