This National Security stuff is causing us to lose access to valuable information on the web.
Recently, I noticed that the Corps of Engineers Project Information Retrieval System (PIRS) is gone. The somewhat obscure PIRS provided valuable information concerning 9,300 formerly used military sites (FUDS), including Cold War Era Nike missile sites that were evaluated under the Defense Environmental Restoration Program (DERP), or - DERP-FUDS.
Before the Corps took PIRS down you could print out the entire Inventory Project Report prepared under the DERP-FUDS Program for thousands of old military sites. It was a great source of historical information.
One military history researcher was told by a Corps of Engineers Public Information Officer that this information could help the terrorists. While there may have been truly sensitive information available through PIRS, removing the DERP-FUDS Reports which are largely about former military sites that haven’t been used for a half century, makes it difficult to understand the threat created by making this information public.
The Inventory Project Report is a formatted report that contains information about the site name, location, site history, site deactivation and current use, site visits, environmental design section, category of hazard, project description, available studies and reports, findings of fact, an appendix containing photographs and diagrams, and maps, and a Risk Assessment Procedures for Ordnance and Explosives (RAC). Each project is assigned a project number.
The RAC is one of the most important documents in the report. It consists of a check-off list of all kinds of ordnance and toxic material likely to be found at a former military site. Each type of material is assigned a number with the most dangerous stuff getting the higher numbers. The site investigator checks off the various things that have either been found at the site or would have been present at the site based upon inventories, documents, and interviews conducted during the study of the site’s history. The site is then assigned a risk category which determines the site’s priority for clean up.
The Corps replaced all of this with a one page summary on a system that is not very well designed. There is no way to find a site by the project number, I couldn't find a way to link to a specific page of information, and navigating around the map is very slow. There’s very little history and no access to the RAC. For example, the current one page summary for the Bodega Head Gunnery Range replaced a twenty-eight page report .
The report for Bodega Head, which is a California State Park states, "This property is known or suspected to contain military and explosives of concern (e.g. unexploded ordnance) and therefore may present an explosive hazard." Since we no longer can see the Risk Assessment documents, we can't know what "explosives of concern" may be out there.
There are hundreds of other parks and other public lands that were former military sites. And now, it’s no longer possible for you to discover if any ammunition, bombs, grenades, land mines, rockets, detonators, blasting caps, fuzes, boosters, bursters or toxic chemicals may lying around in your neighborhood park or undeveloped land because, apparently, the Corps of Engineers doesn't’t believe you should be trusted with this kind of information.
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