United States Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico

Topographic map of the Island of Vieques, Puerto Rico 1951

The former VNTR, which comprises approximately 14,573 acres, provided ground warfare and amphibious training for Marines, naval gunfire support training, and air to ground training. The former VNTR was divided into four separate operational areas, comprising from west to east: the Eastern Maneuver Area (EMA), the Surface Impact Area (SIA), the Live Impact Area (LIA), and the Eastern Conservation Area (ECA) at the easternmost tip of the island.[2]

— CH2M Hill, Site Management Plan Fiscal Year 2015 - Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Area - Vieques, Prepared for Department of the Navy Naval Facilities Engineering Command Atlantic

Military operations on the west side of the island had been focused on storing and processing of supplies and the disposal of waste. Sites identified for environmental clean-up include the following:[2]

• A former general waste dump at a mangrove swamp in Laguna Arenas along Highway 200.
• The site of a 1970 underground storage tank for waste oil removed from the former public works area in 1996.
• A former asphalt plant on the south side of Route 200, which operated from the 1960s until 1998.

An environmental baseline survey discovered a munitions open-burn/open-detonation area on the western tip of the island surrounding Punta Boca Quebrada. Further surveying identified 16 possible open-burn/open-detonation sites in the area. As a result, 24 acres of roads and beaches were inspected for munitions, cleared of munitions with clean up completed in December 2011.[2]

President Clinton asked Secretary of Defense William Cohen to establish a special panel to study the situation. The four-member panel was chaired by Frank Rush, the then-acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for force management policy, and is consequently sometimes called the Rush panel.[7] The panel laid out history and legal situation, and released its report with 11 recommendations on October 19, 1999.[8]

In January 2000, President Clinton and then Governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro Rosselló, together called for a referendum on Vieques. This was first scheduled for November 2001, and then rescheduled for January 2002. The referendum would let voters choose to either end the military's use of the range by May 2003. Alternatively, they could vote to allow military operations to continue indefinitely.[9]

On April 27, 2001 the Navy resumed operations and protesting resumed.[10]

On June 14, 2001, the Bush Administration ordered the end of military training operations on Vieques in May 2003. The Bush decision superseded previous actions of the Clinton Administration.[11]

On April 19, 1999, a civilian employee named David Sanes Rodríguez was killed when military ordnance was dropped too close to his security post. According to a Congressional research report, a Marine Corps F-18 dropped two 500-pound bombs striking the security post killing Rodriguez and injuring four others. The F-18 was on a training mission when the incident occurred. The Congressional report states the ordnance was dropped "within the overall range perimeter." After this incident the range was temporarily closed.[12]

The death of Rodriguez triggered a wave of protests from local residents. Then U.S. President Clinton promised, later reiterated by his successor George W. Bush, that the navy would leave Vieques by May 2003.[13]

A few months after Sanes's death, small wooden structures were erected inside the practice grounds, and encampments from all over the island-municipality started to attract attention.

By that time, the protests had also started to gain international attention, and people from all over the world joined the struggle. Many celebrities, including the political leader Ruben Berrios, singers Danny Rivera, Robi Draco Rosa and Ricky Martin, boxer Félix "Tito" Trinidad, writers Ana Lydia Vega and Giannina Braschi, American actor Edward James Olmos and Guatemala's Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú supported the cause, as did Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Al Sharpton, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Pope John Paul II once said that he wanted peace for Vieques. The Archbishop of San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, was heavily involved in the protests that took place in the municipality. He managed to put together a coalition of different Puerto Rican church leaders that gathered international attention. Olmos, Sharpton and Kennedy also served jail time; while serving his prison term in Puerto Rico, Kennedy's wife Mary gave birth to the couple's sixth child, a son they named Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy.[14]

The Movimiento Socialista de Trabajadores held a series of incursions into the bombing ranges to halt the bombing without being arrested, and a few of them were successful in that second objective.

On May 4, 2000, civil disobedience encampments inside the practice grounds were evacuated by U.S. Marshals, Marines and Navy.

Five days later, in an internationally covered event, hundreds of protesters and supporters from all over the world and with different ideologies, penetrated the military practice grounds. Natives of Vieques, many Puerto Ricans, Hollywood celebrities, priests, pastors, friars, athletes, and politicians including U.S. Representatives Luis Gutiérrez[15] and Nydia Velázquez[16] were among them. The incursion had been well publicized and resulted in the arrest of the protesters by Marshals, as both sides of the struggle wanted to avoid brushes with the military.

With non-violence as the main objective of the protests, the protesters behaved in a peaceful manner upon their arrest, shouting "Paz para Vieques" ("Peace for Vieques"). Others sang themes related to peace or religion. A few had to be removed by force but didn't offer physical resistance or insult the officials. Many protesters were set free a few hours after being jailed, others were released a few days later. Only a few had sentences imposed that lasted between one and six months. The official charge was trespassing on U.S. military territory.

With the continuation of bombing practices by the U.S. Navy, incursions to the practice grounds continued, until the U.S. government announced that the military would be leaving the island in May 2003.

On March 31, 2004, the United States closed its Roosevelt Roads Naval Station on mainland Puerto Rico. A skeleton staff of 200, down from approximately 1,200 civilian and 700 military personnel, stayed on at the facility until the transfer of the property was completed. The closure of the base at Roosevelt Roads resulted in a substantial financial loss to the economy of Puerto Rico that the Navy estimates at $250 to $300 million a year. Admiral Robert J. Natter, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, is on record as saying: "Without Vieques there is no way I need the Navy facilities at Roosevelt Roads — none. It's a drain on Defense Department and taxpayer dollars."[17][18]

Nevertheless, the government of Puerto Rico has announced that the airport at the base will be reopened, and will become a major Caribbean air cargo hub, relieving Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport and extending its useful life indefinitely without the need for property expansion. It will also be used to centralize general aviation activities now dispersed over several municipal airports, saving the Puerto Rico Ports Authority significant sums of money on maintenance and other costs. Other plans are in motion to make use of other sections of the former base to benefit the local economy. A large portion of the undeveloped land in the property is being set aside for ecological preservation.

On April 30, 2003 many supporters of the Cause of Vieques traveled to the island-municipality to hold a celebration inside the past bombing practice grounds. The event was recorded by national TV news. On May 1, 2003, the crowd entered the former bombing range en masse. Their celebration turned aggressive, in contrast to the peaceful protests held by some of them a few months earlier.

The Police Task force of Puerto Rico was mobilized from the main island, as were the Police of Vieques, and other previously mobilized law enforcement officials, who were unprepared for the now-violent celebration. The president of the Teachers Federation of Puerto Rico, and a leader of the cause, was recorded by TV cameras engaging in violent and destructive behavior. The crowd destroyed a former Navy guard-house and military trucks with drop hammers. The TV footage was used as evidence to criminally indict the vandals, as the property destroyed was now owned by the NRCS.

Those indicted said that their behavior was caused by the resentment and bitterness that had accumulated from the decades of suffering due to the Navy's bombing practices on the island. Norma Burgos, a Senator of Puerto Rico, who had formerly been imprisoned for trespassing on the bombing range several months earlier, justified the behavior by comparing it to the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue in the recent invasion of Iraq — in which U.S. soldiers used an Army tank (a property of the U.S. government) to tear it down. Their defense failed, and more than a dozen of those charged were imprisoned for "damages and destruction of public property."

In addition to the toxic materials that the Navy had been dropping on Vieques since the 1940s, in 1999 the Navy accidentally fired depleted uranium bullets ("DU").[22] The Navy admitted to firing just 263 rounds of depleted uranium bullets. Based on a report by RAND, a research corporation, the U.S. Department of Defense claims DU doesn't compromise human health. However, Dan Fahey, the Director of Research at the Gulf War Resource Center, points out that the RAND report was incomplete: it ignored 68 relevant sources that show clear relationships between DU and harm to human health.[25]

In 1958, the veteran World War II Fletcher Class Destroyer USS Killen (DD593) served as a target ship for wreckage during the atom bomb tests in Operation Hardtack I (shots WAHOO and UMBRELLA).[26][27] In 1962 it was engaged in highly explosive tests in the Chesapeake Bay to assess the structural effects of the ship's nuclear exposures. Killen was struck from the Naval Vessel Register and sent to the US Naval Station at Roosevelt Roads in January 1963 to be used as a target ship for missile and gunnery practice, where she was eventually sunk/scuttled in a shallow bay in 1975 and still lies as of 2010.[28]

Until 2002 the US Navy seems to have lost track of the ship's nuclear past and of the wreck site. A sizeable portion of the ship's stern is removed by a distance of 787 feet (240 m) across the bay. The wreckage is present on the bay floor and is absent all structures from its main deck including nearly all the main decking itself: essentially a shell of a ship without a lid.[28] Thousands of tons of the ship are missing.[29]

Studies and site visits made in 1999 by a Puerto Rican marine archaeologist and the University of Georgia discovered nearly two hundred steel barrels of unknown origin and contents among the wreckage of the Killen. Based on government descriptions of the nuclear tests in the Pacific,[27] some scientists and Vieques environmental activists have been concerned that nuclear-fallout cleaning materials were stored inside those barrels and improperly disposed, possibly entering the local environment prior to sinking or exposing contaminants to the animals and habitat of Bahia Salina del Sur in Vieques after sinking.[29]

In 2003, a team from the University of Georgia conducted radiological and toxicological tests of the wreckage using underwater detection equipment. The report discussed testing the interiors of the steel barrels at the wreck site of four intact barrels and five 'open' ones, that were probed with a siphon-extraction tube. They found that the wreck site did not present elevated radiological signatures in the ship's hull or in the interior components of the barrels. The report raised concerns about possible contamination from ordnance at the site.[29] As of 2010 the origin and contents of the barrels are still unknown.[30]

It had been asserted that the noise created by the Navy's testing had negatively affected the health of civilians living on Vieques. In a study conducted for Puerto Rican Governor Calderon, 48 of the 50 Vieques residents tested were diagnosed as suffering from vibroacoustic disease — a thickening of heart tissue caused by exposure to sonic booms.[24] Simultaneously, the Ponce School of Medicine conducted an independent study and found other data to confirm the presence of vibroacoustic disease: 79% of Viequenses fishermen have thickened heart tissue, which is the main symptom of vibroacoustic disease. This disease is said to lead to heart arrhythmia, or even death.[24]

The Ponce School of Medicine study was reviewed by the United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The tapes of echocardiograms, which measured the pericardial thickness, were blind-coded and sent to the Mayo Clinic to repeat without knowledge of whether study subjects were from Vieques or from the control group. It concluded in 2001 that "there is no evidence from the Vieques Heart Study to indicate clinically significant heart disease".[31]

The ATSDR tested for hazardous materials in the water, air and soil in order to determine whether the health of the Viequenses were at risk. It found that either the Navy had not affected the environment or that the Navy had affected it so minimally that the contamination would pose no threat to human health.[32] However, other scientists contend that ATSDR's studies were incomplete. The ATSDR is notorious for denying links between community contamination and health affects. After monitoring the ATSDR for ten years, Linda King of the Environmental Health Network reported that only one ATSDR study among hundreds has found contaminants in the community to be the cause of health problems.[24]

In 2003 the ATSDR determined that it is safe to eat seafood from all waters and coastal lands around the island of Vieques. Even though several metals were detected in the local seafood, ATSDR concluded that the metals would not pose a health risk even if a person ate fish and shellfish every day for 70 years.[32]

It acknowledged that Navy training has elevated the levels of some metals in the soil of the former Live Impact Area, but holds that the levels are too low to harm humans.[32] It concluded that "the public had not been exposed to depleted uranium contamination above normal background (naturally occurring) levels". It found that the air does not contain dangerous levels of chemicals. It claimed that at eight miles, the Live Impact Area is too far from residential areas for airborne dust and contaminants from training activities to be concentrated enough to cause harm when coming in contact with civilians.[32] It determined that Naval training and testing has in no way affected the drinking water on Vieques. Usually most of the island's drinking water comes through an underwater pipeline from mainland Puerto Rico. The ATSDR report concluded that groundwater from the former Live Impact Area cannot contaminate the wells due to geological barriers, and although there were high levels of nitrates in some wells, this was due to local, most likely agricultural, sources. It cautioned that it is not safe for children and pregnant women to drink water from the contaminated wells.[32]

The ATSDR avoided drawing links between the navy training and health concerns on Vieques. For example, the agency neglected to test several relevant wells, including the Sun Bay Wells, which serve as the backup water supply for Vieques in case the pipeline from mainland Puerto Rico breaks down. Furthermore, the navy's claim that groundwater from the testing site cannot reach residential groundwater supplies may be false. At a public meeting, when asked why the navy had installed monitoring wells designed to track the spread of explosive contaminants between the impact area and the civilian area, the ATSDR refused to comment. The ATSDR also did not adequately emphasize negative findings in their report, such as the high levels of benzene —more than four times the maximum allowed, which were found in a groundwater well on the navy's property.[24] By 2009 the ATSDR had rescinded many of their early conclusions in the face of mounting criticism.[35][36][37]