Oregon Shores, a 500 member-strong Oregon environmental group, sends out periodic emails to alert members to Oregon-related issues and actions of interest. In late January 2009 an email arrived in my Inbox stating the US Navy was conducting on January 31st an Open House and Hearing called “Northwest Training Range Complex Environmental Impact Statement”. This sounded ominous so my interest was piqued and I ended up attending both the Open House and the Hearing.

What an eye opener.

I was told by one of the Navy’s representatives that the Navy wants to take over the two training areas currently used by the Oregon Air National Guard. This includes almost the entire coastal waters of Oregon, extending from near shoreline out to over 250 miles offshore.  Their plans include using live war heads, live missiles, EA-18G Growler aircraft (which can fly at Mach 1.6), guided missile submarines, P-8 Multimission Maritime aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, air and sea surface targets, portable undersea tracking range for anti-submarine training and mid-level and high frequency active sonar.  Both live and dummy munitions are planned for use in these exercises.

The Open House and Hearing was part of the Navy’s “public outreach," which, strangely only involved one hearing in the entire state of Oregon. As evidenced from their public comments, most people learned of the hearing only 2-3 days in advance. As a result, only about 40 people attended. Six people made public comments for the official record. And only two knew about the Navy’s Environmental Impact Statement. Unless we had known in advance of the 1000+-page EIS and read part of it, our comments were somewhat irrelevant.  There was no question and answer period.

Acting from my gut that something was amiss, I decided to spend several hours every day over the next few weeks alerting as many people as I could of the Navy’s plans.

Search engines and the internet are wonderful for giving us all the contact information we need to “raise the alarm bells." Using Google, I got contact information for the entire Oregon delegation to Washington DC, the Governor, cabinet officials, state and local elected officials, all the Oregon coastal newspapers, the major Oregon TV stations and Oregon environmental groups. I sent each and everyone of them a letter outlining my concerns about the Navy’s proposals in the EIS.

By the end of my one-person campaign, others had joined in and were raising the proverbial “red flags."

The collective efforts of worried citizens has resulted our elected officials at the local, state and federal levels weighing in our behalf; the US Navy has extended the Comment Period an additional 2 weeks and they are holding an additional Open House and Hearing in Tillamook, Oregon. So one person can ignite an action in others for the collective benefit of all.