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Disarming Nomans Land

By Jack Stewardson, Standard-Times staff writer

It's aptly named.

As one rounds the western corner of Martha's Vineyard and passes the cliffs of Gay Head, Nomans Land arises as a pencil-thin line on the horizon, gradually emerging as an island of green rolling hills and stark beauty.

It has rarely been marked by the tread of footsteps of man, but today a line of trailers stands just up from the beach, a work boat is anchored along its lee shore, heavy equipment and four-wheel drive vehicles traverse it and workers in hard hats comb its contours.

The uninhabited island, long used as a military target range, is being cleared of ordnance under a $1.6 million Navy contract. It is destined to be turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a national wildlife refuge.

So far 9,759 items of ordnance have been uncovered, according to Jim Ennis, site manager for Foster Wheeler Environmental Corp., the New Jersey firm hired by the Navy to remove debris.

The ordnance runs the gamut: 33 millimeter rounds, 7.5 inch rockets, aircraft flares, 250- and 500-pound bombs.

The island has been divided into 640 grids, and sweep teams of hard-hat workers headed by bomb disposal experts cover the area with metal detectors, marking each discovered target.

"The sweep teams come through first and flag and ID" the targets, Mr. Ennis told a visiting group of journalists yesterday.

"The next team is the recovery team, which will move some materials safe enough to be transported to the staging areas,' he said.

Blue flags are for inert ordnance. red is for live ammunition and yellow is when the inertness is at question.

Those that can't be identified as non-explosive or those identified as live rounds will be detonated and disposed of later.

Surprisingly, the island does not appear to be pock marked with craters, although the remains of sea buoys brought ashore as land-based targets is testimony to some of the accuracy of the Navy and Air Force aircraft that used the target range over the years.

So far 578,000 pounds of material has been recovered, and Foster Wheeler anticipates the total will run to over 1 million pounds. They hope to complete the work by the end of July.

Ordnance disposal is a job that brooks no carelessness, said George Bridgeman, the health and safety coordinator on site, and an Army veterans who has spent 23 years in ordnance disposal.

"You could end up medivaced out of here in a body bag," he said.

Foster Wheeler, however, has never had such a casualty.

It has worked at ordnance disposal in such remote locations as Adak Island in the Aleutians in Alaska.

Mr. Bridgeman calls working at Nomans Land working "at a bare base.

"If you want a nail you better bring it with you," he said.

The company mobilized for the job at the beginning of May, bringing over heavy equipment, vehicles, trailers and port-a-johns to establish a beachhead.

A floating pier was erected, although it washed up on the beach once during stormy weather.

Foster Wheeler has a crew of 30-40 workers out in the field daily.

In addition to removing ordnance, they also will remove a 6,000-gallon underground tank placed there by Navy Seabees. They have found three more tanks that also are being removed,

In the spring seals occupy a long spit of beach facing Martha's Vineyard and in summer cormorants come to roost. Peregrine falcons come by in the fall, and there are a wide variety of birds, such as warblers and hawks, which will often pass through the area.

There are even two hard-to-find sheep inhabiting the island, but no one knows when or how they got there.

But mostly there as seagulls that nest in the grass and do not take kindly to the intrusions of humans.

"We had taken up bird watching and the seagulls have taken up human watching,' said Roger Alves, of Freetown, a laborer with Local 271 of the International Laborers Union, one of many local hires on the project.

He said in one case an enraged seagull dive-bombed one worker and hit his hard hat so hard he was almost knocked over.

The 628-acre island lies about 2.7 miles southwest of Martha's Vineyard and 10.2 miles southeast of Cuttyhunk.

It was once a summer camping area for the Wampanoag Indians, and in 1714 became part of the township of Chilmark. By the early 1800s it was being used for farming and sheep-raising.

In 1914 Joshua Crane purchased the island, and in 1942 decided to lease it to the Navy as a live bombing range. The Navy bought it in 1954 and ended live bombing but continued to use it as a range for dummy ordnance, such as concrete-filled bombs, up until 1996 when the closing of the naval air station in Weymouth made it obsolete.

At one time a Navy construction battalion was based on the island but for most of its recent history it has been seldom visited.

In 1997 a Navy explosive ordnance disposal team conducted an initial surface sweep of the island. Foster Wheeler has been contracted to remove surface ordnance but not any that may be buried.

Material that is collected is separated and will be barged back to New Bedford where it will be loaded onto container trucks for shipment to disposal or recycling centers.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will take over the island once the disposal work has been completed, but the island will continue to be restricted because of its history as a bombing range.

The Navy also still maintains a restrictive navigation zone around the island.

"A lot of folks would run helter skelter over here, and it is too much of a liability," said Bud Oliveira, who works for U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

Photos by Jack Stewardson
(Top to bottom):
1) A Foster Wheeler worker inspects a group of 225-pound bombs.
2) A sweep team fans out with metal detectors.
3) Foster Wheeler site manager Jim Ennis goes over the island's grid system.
4) Sea gulls perch on the no-trespass signs posted on the island.
5) Buoys used as shore-based targets on Nomans Land show the effects of bombing runs.
6) A yellow flag indicates that this pile of ordnance might be explosive.