Jet Noise Erodes Military’s Long Welcome in Nevada

Before Navy aircraft carriers put to sea, the pilots fly to central Nevada to hone their attack skills by steering low over desert mountains and sagebrush valleys--and sometimes over ranches and Indian ceremonial grounds.

Being startled by sonic booms and pasture-skimming fighters has long been an accepted price of life in Nevada, where military jets fly over 70% of the state. But a new plan to double the Navy’s aerial territory for war games has heightened a growing intolerance of the military’s presence.

Citizen Alert, the leading opponent of military flights over Nevada, says it has doubled in size to 1,400 paid members and a budget of $140,000 in two years. A national toll-free hot line started last year to take complaints about military jet noise has received nearly 200 calls from rural Nevada residents, a spokeswoman said.

The group’s leaders say that as the state grows, more residents are wearying of Nevada’s role as a dumping ground for unpopular federal activities. Besides Navy flights, the state is home to the large Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas and the nation’s test site for nuclear weapons. Nevada also is favored by the U.S. Department of Energy for a high-level nuclear waste dump.

“Five years ago the Navy or Air Force could come to Nevada and say we want this and this,” said Grace Bukowski, a former “Navy brat” who is the military expert for Citizen Alert. “That is no longer true. Nevadans have become very aware of the negative aspects of the military.”

The new attitude was on display last week when Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, both Nevada Democrats, won Senate approval to block new military expansion in the state for at least two years. Reid also is carrying a bill that would make it harder for the Navy and Air Force to set aside new aerial “military operating areas,” which now require only the blessing of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reid says the military remains welcome in Nevada, so long as accommodations are made to the state’s growing population.

“Nevada has a tradition of being very supportive of the military,” Reid said by telephone from Washington. “But I think people are asking ‘when is enough enough?’ ”

Natural Protection

The military has been a potent economic force in Nevada since World War II, when West Coast bases were moved inland to take advantage of the natural protection from Japanese attack offered by the 14,000-foot peaks of the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains. Four million acres of Nevada landscape are under military control.

Fallon Naval Air Station, a former Army Air Corps base 70 miles east of Reno, is at the center of the recent controversy. The Navy announced this year it plans to double the 10,000 square miles of airspace devoted to training exercises at Fallon, and wants to add 380,000 acres of desert and grazing land to the bomb and missile ranges used by pilots from Fallon.

The new flight areas would allow Navy jets above several proposed wilderness areas approved this month by the Senate and over national forests, Indian reservations and historic ghost towns where the military does not now fly. The Navy also wants to fly more night and supersonic missions.

Fence signs along Interstate 95 that warn of eye hazard from lasers offer evidence of the Navy’s $260 million investment at Fallon since 1983, when the Navy decided after its experience in Lebanon that its pilots needed better training for striking at targets on land.

Navy carriers on both coasts send their pilots to Fallon for three weeks of training on the Navy’s most sophisticated electronic warfare range just before they ship overseas, base spokesman Olin Briggs said. “We put the sharp edge on the sword,” he said.

Fallon also has the Navy’s longest U.S. runway--designated as an emergency space shuttle landing strip--and ideal flying weather for its bombing ranges, which also serve as landing zones for cruise missiles fired from Point Mugu on the Ventura County coast. “Fallon is a national treasure,” said Capt. Rex Rackowitz, the new base commander.

Rackowitz contends the Nevada airspace given to the Navy in the 1970s was never sufficient for realistic training and has become unacceptable as the planes fly faster. He said the new airspace would let pilots train in more real-life conditions.

“We have proven that if we can’t train realistically we leave prisoners of war behind and dead men around the target,” Rackowitz said. “If you’re trying to make a political statement you can’t do it if you leave POWs behind.”

The Navy announced the expansion plans in advance of an unprecedented report to Congress on the impact of decades of military operations in Nevada. The “Special Nevada Report,” due in mid-1991, is expected to list the military’s plans as well as address the health and environmental effects of the repeated jet flyovers and occasional stray bombs.

Rackowitz said the requirement to produce the report--and the Navy’s decision to publicize its plans before the report is issued--is the result of growing intolerance of the military in Nevada.

“We’re meeting with a lot of resistance that we didn’t see in the past,” Rackowitz said. “My opinion is it’s kind of a fallout from the Vietnam War, when people started questioning what the military was doing. We can no longer tell the citizens of Nevada ‘this is what the military wants and now shut up.’ We have to convince them.”

Citizen Alert contends that Navy flights have upset the peace and quiet that attracted people to rural Nevada. Low-flying jets and sonic booms from a new supersonic bombing range have driven people from their homes and caused health problems, Bukowski said.

Training over the Ocean

The group wants the Navy to hold more flight training over the ocean and, where necessary to simulate missions over land, have the federal government move out residents and declare national “sacrifice areas.” But the groups wants no more Nevada airspace devoted to military exercises.

“I think Nevada has suffered enough,” Bukowski said.

Citizen Alert has built a network of Indian reservations and activists in the rural expanses of central and eastern Nevada. Some are former residents of Dixie Valley, an area where the Navy recently spent $10 million buying out owners of property beneath a new range set aside for low-flying supersonic jets. After the residents moved out, the Navy set fire to the town hall and some homes.

“It was a beautiful area with Artesian wells, some of the best water around,” said William Rosse Sr., a Western Shoshone leader from the Yomba Reservation.

Gabbs physician Richard Bargen, a Citizen Alert supporter, has produced two books that theorize rural Americans are being blasted out of their life style, and sometimes out of their sanity, by the “sphincter-puckering sight of an F-18 coming through their front yard at 50 feet and the speed of heat. . . . Rural America is under aerial assault by its own military.”

Although the group does not primarily conduct demonstrations, Bargen and Bukowski last year protested the Air Force acquisition of a new bombing range in the Groom Mountains by filing a mining claim on the land.

Bukowski and the executive director of Citizen Alert, Bob Fulkerson, were convicted in March of trespassing when they tried to exercise the claim, which was disallowed. They were fined $500 each and are appealing.

“There’s a great feeling of helplessness among rural people,” Bukowski said.

Good Neighbor?

The Navy, meanwhile, says that it has learned to be a good neighbor in Nevada. Rackowitz said the Navy suspended an unpopular plan to fly missions over Walker Lake, a popular fishing and recreation lake bordered by a Paiute reservation and the nearby town of Hawthorne.

Objections also caused the Navy to delay plans to launch cruise missiles from Point Mugu that would be included in training exercises at Fallon.

“Sen. Reid has made it very clear that the military can’t just do whatever they want,” Rackowitz said.