Compiled by Ewa Historian John Bond
Why Are So Many New Army and Navy Munitions Missile Magazines Being Built at West Loch?
This also includes moving ALL of the weapons and munitions stored at Lualualei
and nuclear weapons which would have been stored at closed Waikele,
closest To Pearl Harbor
The 1995 Hawaii Military Land Use Master Plan (HMLUMP)
Cost of Compliance on Graduate School of Business & Public Policy Thesis, December 2017, Naval Postgraduate School, Munitions Consolidation from Lualualei to West Loch
https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/58904
In 1967, the Naval Ordnance Safety and Security Activity (NOSSA) came out with more restrictive safety standards mandating that the distance between each magazine must be greater than what is currently installed at West Loch (NAVSEA, 2017). Due to the lack of permissible net explosive weight (NEW) allowed per the NOSSA standards, Navy Munitions Command has been using several magazines in Lualualei to store smaller-sized ordnance.
The 1995 Hawaii Military Land Use Master Plan (HMLUMP) recognized the importance of Hawaii’s strategic location as a “bridge to Asia” and, as a result, recommended the release of the Lualualei Annex due to its aging magazines and its consolidation with West Loch pending construction of new facilities.
The 2002 Commander, Navy Region Hawaii (CNRH) Ordnance Facilities Plan, proposed a significant investment in new ordnance infrastructure for new magazines near West Loch. Additionally, in 2003, PACFLT identified that only four out of 299 magazines in Hawaii are capable of storing modern missiles for naval destroyers and submarines.
Rising tensions in the Pacific with China, North Korea, and Russia
could lead to combat operations in the Pacific.
The West Loch Hawaii’s will need to store additional prepositioned munitions, hold ordnance for ships undergoing repairs, and resupply more deploying ships to the Pacific. The West Loch channel has already been expanded to handle large newer Navy ammunition ships, such as handled by the Army MOTSU site in North Carolina which has a 3.5 mile ESQD safety arc, compared to West Loch which has a very much smaller ESQD and is located right next to many suburban homes in Ewa West Oahu.
See Figure 3 for the layout of West Loch and shows the explosive safety boundaries associated with ammunition operations. Unlike Lualualei, West Loch is closer to residential areas. Ordnance operations in both Lualualei and West Loch are contracted out and are renewed annually by the Navy.
Major Missile Munitions Complex Plan Cites Just Two Alternatives Available
The two courses of action according to the Navy’s analysis are as follows:
Option 1. Navy builds new magazines, Army builds new magazines, and both consolidate in West Loch in accordance with NOSSA standards.
Option 2. Current magazines at Lualualei are upgraded to NOSSA standards and current operations remain the same for Navy and Army.
Option 1 may sound reasonable but does not take in account the required ESQD – safety zone, according to information made available to the public in 2018 by the Army MOTSU presentations. The Army munitions complex will be just .5 (1/2 mile) from the nearby communities.
All US Navy destroyers will get hypersonic missiles, says Trump’s national security adviser
The U.S. Navy plans to put hypersonic missiles on all Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, President Donald Trump’s top national security official said Wednesday.
The Navy wants to field hypersonic missiles first on the Virginia-class attack submarine, then on the new Zumwalt-class destroyers, and then finally across the Burkes, national security adviser Robert O’Brien told an audience at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine.
“The Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program will provide hypersonic missile capability to hold targets at risk from longer ranges,” O’Brien said in prepared remarks. “This capability will be deployed first on our newer Virginia-class submarines and the Zumwalt-class destroyers. Eventually, all three flights of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will field this capability.”
West Loch ESQD (safety arc blast zone) Revealed From A Recently Published 2017 Public Document
For the first time the West Loch Blast Zone ESQD has been found. The Navy in Hawaii has never released this map before. All maps shown and documents used here are from US government publications, project analysis and environmental assessments, and are NOT secret or disclosing anything to China and Russia which actually know a lot more about all this than does the local West Oahu community. The communities near these munitions sites deserve to know this information because all this could have a large impact on home construction, building codes, schools, insurance, evacuations, emergency response and much, much more. This was extensively revealed in the 2018 MOTSU disclosures to the communities near it in North Carolina.
The Navy in Hawaii disclosed the West Loch ESQD in 2003 in an unpublished report. The Navy very often keeps important community information in unpublished reports documents. Sometimes these documents can be found using a FOIA process (Freedom of Information Act.) However the West Loch blast zone safety arc of 2003 was revealed and can be found in this university thesis: Cost of Compliance on Graduate School of Business & Public Policy Thesis, December 2017, Naval Postgraduate School, Munitions Consolidation from Lualualei to West Loch.
The thesis is a rationale for moving Army munitions to West Loch and consolidating them all with new Navy Type D storage units that will be built for missiles. In the analysis a number of significant new maps were revealed for the first time in a public document.
The Navy 2003 blast zone arc map has been annotated in red to show the public what is currently there and what is planned to go in soon. None of this is classified information and details can be found in public documents on the internet. The Navy policy concerning “special weapons-AKA nukes” is that they will neither “confirm nor deny” that nuclear weapons are stored in a specific location. The obvious indicator most used is to look for a double high security fence around the site. Waikele was once also a known site for storing nuclear weapons and had very high security and double fencing. Today it is generally known that intercontinental ballistic missiles for Navy submarines are stored and loaded in a remote area in Bangor, Washington.
Unsafe ESQD - Why Do Other Army and Navy Ammunition Piers and Weapons Areas Have Much Larger Safety Arcs?
Naval Magazine Indian Island is the only deep water ordnance facility on the West Coast with no access restrictions, such as shallow bridges or water. The island has a 1,650-foot-long pier with 55 feet of draft available at the average low-tide height of water, making it so the Navy can load munitions onto any vessel in the fleet docked at the island's pier.
It has more than 100 magazines that store conventional weapons, ranging from small arms ammunition to aircraft ordnance and is located in a fairly remote area of Washington State on an island.
E. NMCPAC CWD DET INDIAN ISLAND Indian Island is a command located in the Pacific Northwest that has the same roles and responsibility as NMCPAC EAD DET PH.
The island itself is 2,700 acres and serves as the Navy’s only deep water port on the West Coast of the United States with the capability of loading munitions for all U.S. military branches. Indian Island is also the U.S. military’s largest ordnance storage site on the West Coast, handling small arms ammunition, artillery shells and missiles (P. Guerrero, 2016).
Although Indian Island does not have the same volume of vessels as Pearl Harbor, their ordnance tonnage is very similar. Indian Island comprises active-duty military and government civilians who handle all the ammunition and explosives.
Naval Ammunition Depot Earle
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Naval_Weapons_Station_Earle
On August 2, 1943, construction began on Naval Ammunition Depot Earle, named after Rear Admiral Ralph Earle, the chief of the Bureau of Ordnance during World War I. The depot was commissioned on December 13, 1943, though work continued on the military road and railway connecting the mainside complex, the waterfront complex and the pier, which stretches 2.9 miles (4.7 km) into the Sandy Hook Bay.
Earle continued to develop after World War II, keeping pace with the changing needs of the navy. In 1974, the depot's name was changed to Naval Weapons Station Earle.
Pier Complex: The station's pier complex is one of the longest "finger piers" in the world. A two-mile (3 km) trestle connects to three finger piers. One mile from the shore the trestle branches off to Pier 1. At the junction of Piers 2, 3 and 4, a concrete platform supports a forklift/battery-recharging shop and the port operations building. This area is known as the "wye."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion
http://members.trainweb.com/bedt/milrr/earlenws.html
https://fas.org/man/dod-101/fac/port/earle.htm
https://tworivertimes.com/land-conservation-surrounding-nws-earle-could-grow/
https://americasfireboat.org/history/ss-el-estero/
Due in large part to the secrecy surrounding the events of El Estero’s loss, her story remains largely unknown to the general public, but her untimely demise has left a very visible legacy in the waters around New York, specifically in Sandy Hook Bay. In August 1943, the U.S. Navy began high-priority construction of a new ammunition depot now known as Naval Weapons Station Earle which features a 2.9-mile pier designed to move the hazardous activity of loading and unloading munitions away from densely populated areas.
NMCPAC EAD DET PH Headquartered in Ewa Beach, HI
https://dair.nps.edu/bitstream/123456789/2273/1/NPS-LM-18-023.pdf
NMCPAC EAD DET PH Headquartered in Ewa Beach, HI, on the island of Oahu, NMCPAC EAD DET PH consists of two branches: the Lualualei Branch on the western side of Oahu 35 miles northwest of Honolulu, and the West Loch Branch (West Loch and Waipio Point) located about 20 miles west of Honolulu.
Combined, these facilities contain 386 magazines—large, earth covered storage facilities—with a storage capacity of approximately 98,830 short tons (NAVSUP Fleet Logistics Center Pearl Harbor, 2017). Figures 1 and 2 present some of the storage magazines located on Lualualei and West Loch. The Command safely and effectively receives, stores, segregates, and issues ammunition stock for the military and other government entities.
NMCPAC EAD DET PH also provides pier-side ordnance handling in the Pearl Harbor area for military and commercial vessels of all types, foreign and domestic, as well as services to other military commands at their respective sites.
Material is on/off-loaded onto a variety of ships at various locations on and around Pearl Harbor. The West Loch wharves, Pearl Harbor piers, and Ford Island are common locations for on- and off-loading material. Types of ships include various combatant ships, small boats and submarines; Navy cargo and supply ships (T-AKE and T-AOE); chartered vessels; and U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps roll-on/roll-off (RORO) vessels.
