UH Study Shows Thousands of Weapons Buried at Sea

UH Study Shows Thousands of Weapons Buried at Sea

Reported by: Gina Mangieri
Email: gmangieri@khon2.com

Last Update: 9/25 7:46 pm

A U.H. study of weapons buried at sea decades ago is yielding interesting results both for what is and is not being found.

Army records say within miles of Oahu’s coast 16,000 chemical munitions were discarded decades ago. Tom Clark knows, he was on one of the barges. “When they did that back then they thought it was right, or correct, and as time went along, the environment gets affected by that.”

So the military now wants to know where it landed and how to deal with it. The University of Hawaii is conducting the Hawaii Undersea military munitions assessment extended through the end of this year. They set out based on old records that weren’t on the money in terms of the map.That’s where Tom comes in. “I told her you’re looking in the wrong spot. I told her it’s past Barbers Point.”

Redirected with his help, three people set off tucked into a 7-foot spherical submersible and found scores of weapons, but “We actually have not found very many things that we thought were chemical, so again that 16,000 remains elusive in terms of finding the bulk of them,” said Margot Edwards of the University of Hawaii Ocean Sciences.

The hunt continues. Meanwhile they’re seeing all sorts of other junk. Mylar balloons, plastic bags and kids toys show today’s litter comes from all of us. “If you want to know what fishermen in Hawaii drink it’s Budweiser beer, because we must have seen a billion Budweiser beer cans at the bottom of the ocean,” said Edwards.

Bigger waste like cars and huge nests of metal could prove tricky for the state’s planned undersea power cable to link wind-generated electricity from Molokai and Lanai to Oahu.

Chris Kelley with the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory says, “Particularly if we want the cable to landfall in Honolulu or Pearl Harbor or somewhere, it’s got to go through a gauntlet of exposed vehicles and bombs and frames down there.”

Source: http://www.khon2.com/news/local/story/UH-Study-Shows-Thousands-of-Weapons-Buried-at-Sea/bDd9lab4PEaqQ6lxqgd6Mw.cspx?rss=2065