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Crowd Protests Weapons Station Project : Military: A Navy plan to extend the east jetty in Anaheim Bay 4,000 feet to handle new and larger warships using the Seal Beach base comes under fire.

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About 100 people turned out Tuesday night to mostly criticize the U.S. Navy’s controversial plans for a $200-million expansion of its port facilities at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

“This would destroy Seal Beach,” said Chi Kredell, a Seal Beach resident and member of the Seal Way Improvement Group, a homeowners group. “This would definitely create an uproar.”

Tuesday night’s hearing was the first step in the preparation of an environmental impact statement for a proposal to base a new class of fast combat-supply ships on the West Coast, with possible home ports in Long Beach and San Diego.

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A key component of that proposal is expansion of the east jetty at the Naval Weapons Station, a project that has already attracted opposition though it could be years before it receives federal funding.

Seal Beach City Councilman Frank Laszlo predicted at the hearing that the City Council will approve a resolution opposing the project, which he said threatens decades of good relations between the city and the Navy.

“I really feel that if this project is going to come to pass, the citizens will be opposed to the Navy,” he said “There will be boisterous and real loud opposition and protests and people will ask that the Naval Weapons Station be shut down.”

The hearing also drew comments from other area officials.

Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays asked the Navy to consider the project’s impacts on beaches, traffic and local businesses. However, he did not take a position on the project.

U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach), whose district includes Seal Beach, said he is prepared to vote against the project should it come to a vote in Congress.

“I do not believe the positive benefits of the jetty expansion will outweigh the negative impact on the surrounding coastal area,” Rohrabacher said.

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Navy spokesman Tom Thomas said all concerns raised by the public about the potential impact of the project will be addressed in the study, a first draft of which will be made available for public review and comment next spring.

“We will cover whatever they want us to cover,” Thomas said.

The Navy has contracted with Turner Collie & Braden Inc., a Houston-based planning and engineering-consulting firm, to prepare the environmental impact statement.

But project opponent David Skelly, a coastal engineer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in an interview that he doubts that the study will determine whether the project will proceed or be substantially modified.

“Once they spend all this money on the EIS, they almost feel obliged to do the project regardless of what the EIS says,” Skelly contended.

Skelly said that beaches as far away as Huntington Beach could be affected by the project, which would add a 4,000-foot extension to the east jetty in Anaheim Bay. The jetty is used by the Navy to load and unload ammunition at the weapons station. Anaheim Bay is between Seal Beach and Huntington Harbour.

“It will interrupt the flow of sand along the area,” Skelly said. “Surfside Beach could become wider, which means it’s eroding a little further down the coast.”

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Skelly also said pollutants could become trapped in a “pond-like area” formed by the giant, L-shaped structure a mile off Surfside Beach, which would enable warships too large to enter Anaheim Bay to load and unload munitions onto a new wharf.

Art Shak, a civilian coastal engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, agreed that beach erosion could move further south if the jetty extension was built but said it would probably not be any worse than that which now occurs at Surfside Beach.

The Corps of Engineers replenishes the sand at Surfside every five years to combat erosion caused by the existing Anaheim Bay jetties, which were built during World War II. The sand-replenishment program costs the federal, state and county governments several million dollars each time it is done.

Shak said the Navy has asked the Corps of Engineers to build a physical model of the local coastline to study the potential effects of the proposal. The model is now under construction at the corps’ laboratory in Vicksburg, Miss.

Navy spokesman Thomas said the massive movement of ships and supplies to the Persian Gulf demonstrates the need for both the Seal Beach project and the new class of supply ships.

The project would greatly speed the servicing of large ships, which must now anchor three miles away from the weapons station and wait for small barges to transport their munitions to and from the base, Thomas explained.

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“If our project had been completed, a battleship that potentially right now takes five days to load could be loaded in two days and that battleship could get to its assigned mission three days earlier,” he said.

“The Navy’s always the first to be called on (in a crisis),” Thomas added. “Therefore the Navy needs a greater degree of flexibility to move on a moment’s notice and the (Seal Beach) modernization would give us that flexibility.”

Anaheim Bay Now The Navy plans to unveil a $150-million proposal to change the entrance to Anaheim Bay. And As Proposed The Navy proposes to change the jetties by 1997. Source: U.S. Navy

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