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Lawmaker: Missing ammo poses New York harbor danger PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 16 January 2008 14:07
By RICHARD PYLE |Associated Press Writer
7:09 PM EST, January 14, 2008

NEW YORK - Before the city's Sanitation Department starts building a new garbage-transfer station on the edge of New York harbor, it may have to clean up something more potentially explosive than rancid food that stayed too long on the shelf, says a state lawmaker.

Back on March 6, 1954, hundreds of tons of Korean War-vintage munitions were being loaded off the aircraft carrier USS Bennington when a sudden storm caused a barge to capsize and break loose, spilling its cargo. By the time the barge was found upside down six miles away, it was empty.

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About 400 anti-aircraft shells were recovered by divers at the loading site eight months later, but as many as 14,000 more were strewn along the bottom and never found, said State Assemblyman Bill Colton, a Democrat from Brooklyn.

Colton said he was 'deeply concerned'that dredging for the new shoreline waste facility could detonate live shells buried in the harbor silt, even after 54 years.

'It's possible that 219 tons of anti-aircraft shells are still out there on the bottom, and we must make sure we're not digging and dredging in a place where they go ka-poof,'Colton said Monday. 'It's an unknown hazard and could be a catastrophe.'

Colton said the Sanitation Department should conduct an 'intense environmental assessment'before going ahead with plans for the waste transfer station on Gravesend Bay, a broad inlet of the harbor that already has a large fuel oil depot. The sanitation site will include a 20,000-gallon fuel tank.

A Sanitation Department spokesman did not return a call seeking comment on Colton's claims.

The Bennington, a 27,000-ton veteran of World War II and Korea, had recently suffered damage from a boiler explosion and was destined for repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where it was built in 1944.

Warships were required to offload all explosives before entering the upper harbor, a task carried out at Fort Lafayette, a tiny outpost that dated back to the War of 1812 and later would become the foundation for the Brooklyn-side tower of the Verrazano Bridge.

Petty Officer William Kirk, a New Jersey native, was supervising a work crew loading boxes of ammunition onto one of the barges and had just stepped away to get a cup of coffee when the barge suddenly broke away.

When he rushed back to the scene, 'sure enough it was my barge,'Kirk, now 77, recalled on Monday in a phone interview at his home in Winter Park, Fla.

'People later said it was rough seas. I don't know about that, but that would have explained it. It just tipped over and deep-sixed all those munitions.'

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