Gothic Music - The Eternal Forest

Millions of unexploded bombs lie in waters off US coast, researchers say

Lurking (and leaking) beneath the world's oceans are an estimated 200 million pounds of unexploded and potentially dangerous explosives -- from bombs to missiles to mustard gas.

Texas A&M oceanographers William Bryant and Niall Slowey documented two such dumpsites in the Gulf of Mexico recently. They conservatively guess that at least 31 million pounds of bombs can be found not just in the Gulf, but also off the coasts of at least 16 states, from New Jersey to Hawaii.

Thousands of gallon containers of mustard gas lie strewn off the New Jersey coast, for example. And there are a total of seven dumpsites on the Gulf seafloor, each approximately 81 square miles, one at the mouth of the Mississippi River Delta.

“The amount that has been dumped was unbelievable,” Bryant said. “No one seems to have reported seeing explosives in the Gulf. We felt it was our responsibility to report it.”

The existence of unexploded ordnance (UXO) is hardly a secret, they acknowledge: Sea disposal of munitions was an accepted international practice until quite recently. Dumping conventional and chemical munitions captured from enemies -- from Nazi Germany, for example -- was also an accepted practice.

In 1970 the Department of Defense prohibited the practice, and Congress followed up by passing the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act in 1972, generally banning sea disposal.

 But after half a century or more on the sea floor, the condition of the munitions is a dangerous unknown.

“Is there an environmental risk? We don’t know, and that in itself is reason to worry,” Bryant said. “We just don’t know much at all about these bombs, and it’s been 40 to 60 years that they’ve been down there.”

Suspicions have long circulated that undocumented munitions have been “short-dumped” -- as in dumped long before reaching their designated site, leaving them far closer to the coast than believed by authorities.

While conducting marine geology research on the sea floor of the Gulf, Bryant’s team came across the two dumpsites and vividly captured decaying canisters they believe most likely contain chemical weapons.

They presented their research at the International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions in Puerto Rico recently.

They also found themselves floating in a field of munitions as large as 500 pounds.

According to a statement published by Texas A&M University, an explosion from UXO could threaten ship traffic, commercial fishing, cruise lines and other activities, as well as the approximately 30,000 people working on the oil and gas rigs and marine life in the Gulf.

The team said Texas is closest to the bombs they have seen, which lie as near as 50 miles offshore. Louisiana was the second closest, particularly the Mississippi River Delta.

So what exactly is down there -- and is it still as lethal as the day it was created?

The Defense Department began a massive research effort in 2004, thousands of hours of labor spent reviewing several million pages of documentation, to get a grip on the location, type and quantity of weapons in the water.

While this project initially focused on chemical warfare material, it shifted to locating conventional munitions and considering where ranges and coastal artillery batteries could have deposition munitions.

Oceanographers and other experts believe no one knows for certain just what’s offshore, hence Prof. Bryant’s efforts to raise awareness about the Gulf of Mexico sites.

Sea-disposed munitions that aren’t fused or armed are called discarded military munitions (DMM). UXO have undergone the arming sequence but failed to function as intended, so are often designated the most dangerous of DMM.

There are two potential risks associated with these and any underwater munitions: immediate detonation or exposure to toxic chemical agents and long-term prolonged exposure.

Recovery from the world’s waters, either by destroying them in place or lifting them from the water, can be more dangerous than leaving them as is, however.  Bryant’s work reveals that many underwater munitions have deteriorated over time and exposure.

Yet proximity to shore means they’re hardly hidden.

Reports of Louisiana shrimpers pulling up hissing barrels in their nets have led to suspicions that the shrimpers are exposing themselves to mustard gas. The incidents haven’t been confirmed as chemical weapons, but Bryant said he “can’t imagine what else would have been dumped in those canisters and begun to hiss.”

American shrimpers finding mustard gas drums in their fishing nets -- what will they find next?

Hidden in the Glades, a giant relic of the U.S. quest for space

Less than an hour’s drive north of Key Largo, the fringes of America’s greatest swamp hide a secret; a great hulking rocket.

Get out of your car, walk south a while and you come to a bunker. Walk past the bunker down the abandoned road and you’ll arrive at a large steel shed. A close look at the surrounding asphalt reveals embedded supports for moving the entire structure back and forth. Huge air-handling equipment and ductwork snake through the structure’s roof. Industrial fans line the walls of this shed-on-steroids. Clearly, this is no ordinary building.

A look inside shows electronic instrument racks along the far wall. Overhead, a 20-ton crane sits silent, its chains swaying in the whistling breeze that permeates the open shed. Standing here, you begin to get that fury feeling that there is something more here.

Directly below you, there is: a silo, plunging 180 feet straight down into the earth, and in it stands a rocket, a rusting apparition 10 stories high and as wide as a two-car garage. It is the largest solid rocket motor ever built and it was intended to take us to the moon.

You can’t help but wonder, what is the story behind it all? I became determined to find out.

As my research became more and more pointed, it was obvious that a lot of people wanted to keep this place a secret. Aerojet, the company that owned the facility, would not cooperate with my story, and not one manufacturer of equipment I saw at the site would return my e-mails. Even the public information officer of Everglades National Park wouldn’t return my calls.

The secrecy surrounding the place was a story too good for me to pass up. And what could be more compelling than a hulking factory complex that once built and tested the mightiest monolithic rocket motors in history rusting away smack in the middle of the Florida Everglades?

Space age in Homestead

America’s space program came to South Florida in 1963 when the U.S. Air Force gave Aerojet General, a Sacramento, Calif. rocket builder and subsidiary of General Tire’s GenCorp, $3 million to start construction of a manufacturing and testing site in Homestead, less than five miles from Everglades National Park.

Sputnik had been launched five years earlier, sparking two space races — one between the United States and the Soviet Union, and one between the Air Force and the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration. While NASA’s Wernher von Braun worked on perfecting the smaller rockets that were part of the Mercury and Gemini programs, two schools of thought emerged regarding the rockets that would propel Apollo astronauts to the moon.

The issue was whether to use liquid-fuel rocket engines, solid-fuel rocket motors, or a combination of the two. Apollo would need massive thrust capability, enough to lift 100,000 pounds of orbital payload to space. That favored the solids. But once free of earth orbit, liquids seemed the way to go. Early on, von Braun would favor a liquid-fueled Saturn rocket, which proved prophetic for Homestead.

Homestead’s location was perfect for Aerojet and the nation; it was close to Cape Canaveral. A proposal was made to dig a canal from the plant to Barnes Sound on the Atlantic Ocean. If the C-111 canal project was approved, it would allow barges to carry NASA’s rockets from the homestead Plant to Cape Canaveral via the canal and the Intracoastal Waterway.

It was a time of economic expansion for the region. Everglades National Park had been open since 1947, but environmental conflicts were downplayed in favor of economic development. The C-111 canal would be dug for Aerojet and agricultural interests in the name of flood control. Homestead won the competition for Aerojet, beating out sites in California, Texas and Daytona Beach. South Dade residents were ecstatic; the space age was coming to South Florida!

Giant rocket parts

The first thing you need when building a moon rocket is a cylindrical chamber strong enough to withstand the monumental forces of space flight. After researching several possibilities with the assistance of the U.S. Air force, Aerojet subcontracted fabrication of a 260-inch-diameter chamber to Sun Ship and Dry dock Company of Chester, Pa. Sun’s location on the Delaware River would facilitate shipping the chamber by barge to the Aerojet facility in Florida. They were short-length designs, half the length of the planned final version; hence the test designations SL-1, SL-2, and SL-3.

Two rocket chambers were delivered to Aerojet, the first in March 1965. The C-111 canal was not yet finished, so the rocket chambers were barged down from Sun Ship to Homestead via the Intracoastal Waterway and then trucked in from Biscayne Bay.

After you’ve got a strong chamber, you need the fuel, or propellant. The fuel would be manufactured at three batch plants at the Everglades facility.

Before the chamber could be filled with fuel, it had to be insulated and lined at the General Processing building in the Everglades. Insulating the chamber is key to confining the massive pressure and heat of the burn, as well as allowing an even, non-stick curing of the fuel inside the chamber. This was done inside the huge processing building that still stands at the site.

Then the chamber was trucked three miles down the straight asphalt road linking the General Processing Building and the silo.

Meanwhile, the solid propellant was being mixed and analyzed at the batch plants and quality-control lab adjacent to the General Processing facility.

After officials were satisfied with the propellant, it would be produced in sufficient quantities to fill the rocket motor chamber now standing ready, placed vertically in the underground silo.

Test firings

Three static test firings were done between Sept. 25, 1965 and June 17, 1967.

SL-1 would produce more than 3 million pounds of thrust, as measured by the silo’s accelerometers and other instruments. An ignition motor, a knocked-down Polaris missile B3 first stage known as “Blowtorch,” was used to jump-start the motor. Remnants of all this — cables, poles and concrete slab anchors — are all still on the site.

Wernher von Braun himself came to the test of SL-2, a spectacular night test firing. The flames could be seen as far away as Miami. Thrust measurements were even higher than SL-1.

By the third test, however, von Braun and NASA had decided that liquid fueled engines would power Apollo’s Saturn V moon rockets.

The last test had problems, ejecting the rocket nozzle and tons of propellant made of hydrochloric acids across wetlands and avocado fields. In Homestead, people complained of damage to their automobiles’ paint from the fallout. By then, however, Aerojet and Homestead had too much invested to stop and walk away.

When Aerojet came to Homestead and Southern Dade County, people wanted it there. Local, county and state government paved the way, literally. The federal government even carved out the C111 canal — later to be known as the Aerojet Canal — for the company. The Senate expedited the appropriation through Congress, calling it a “National Security Priority.” Nearby Everglades National Park and the National Park Service said little or nothing and the locals opened their arms in the name of economic development.

Aerojet acquired land for the plant with the help of real estate giant Arvida, paying $2.50 an acre per year for an annual lease with an option to buy up to 25,000 acres more at nickels on the dollar. After Apollo’s Saturn V went liquid, the site sat vacant and abandoned, its workers laid off.

Later, in 1986, after NASA had awarded the Space Shuttle booster contract to Morton Thiokol of Utah, Aerojet sued the State of Florida, exercised its options and pulled out of South Florida for good.

Land returns to swamp

The company sold most of its land holdings to the South Dade Land Corporation for $6 million. After unsuccessfully trying to farm it, the corporation sold it to Florida for $12 million. County and federal courts were kept busy for years with lawsuits between Aerojet, Dade County and the State of Florida.

After losing the Shuttle contract in 1986 Aerojet later traded its remaining 5,100 acres in the wetlands of South Dade for 55,000 acres of environmentally sensitive land belonging to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico. That 5,100 acres surrounding the factory site is now controlled by South Florida Water Management District.

Some folks say the Aerojet site should be a museum, but water management district officials are land and water managers. They told me they do not have the resources nor the inclination to run a museum. To date, no private or joint effort has been forthcoming.

In February 2010, the Homestead City Council entertained a proposal by Rodney Erwin, representing the Omega Space Systems Group, to resurrect the Aerojet facility as a new rocket plant. Homestead Mayor Steve Bateman voiced support for the plan, stating “jobs, jobs, jobs.” The water management district immediately shot down the idea.

I visited the Aerojet site four times. For my last visit, I contacted the South Water Management District and met its director of communications at the site.

One very interesting thing happened during one of those visits. Exactly 1.5 miles from the General Processing facility, as you head south towards the silo, a mound appears out of nowhere. But there is a gravel “driveway” up to it. Approach, and you’ll see a concrete block sticking out of both sides of the mound and through the block run three 6 inch PVC pipes. A vent of some sort? Maybe a forward observation post for the tests, protected by earth? No. Not a door or hatch to be found. Just that “vent.”

What’s in there that has to be vented?

An eeriness pervades here. Everything is quiet except for the wind whistling through broken windows and the distant thunder of the ever-present Everglades rain machine.

Rust blows across the concrete floors and dislodged aluminum siding swings and bangs in the breeze. My first impression of the place was Tombstone brought forward; a space-aged ghost town, with the biggest, baddest ghost of all lurking in that 150-foot-deep hole out on the edge of town.

To walk amongst the dials and switches, the bunsen burners and boilers, and then finally to bend to my knees and look down at the mighty rocket itself, all that history looming up at me, was something I will never forget — even if others would like me to.

How to Transform a Broken Heart

How can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
……Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again.
-  Lyrics from the Bee Gee’s 1971 Hit Song 
When we suffer a deep loss or trauma our hearts can literally feel that they have been shattered into a million pieces. Or we feel that our heart has broken open and we are bleeding metaphorically. At times it can even be difficult to breathe. Our heart is both a living organ that is our life source as well as an emotional mind/body metaphor referred to when we experience heartache and sorrow. It’s as if the heart that beats to an electrical energy wave becomes short circuited and burns out, flares out or is broken into many tiny pieces.
After the initial shock of a loss many feel the need to push aside their grief lest it overwhelms them with its intensity. This is understandable, but the longer you avoid your pain and attempt to push it away, the more difficult it will be to break out of the paralysis. Just as birds are drawn to bread crumbs on the ground, the pain will keep returning after you shoo it away.

When I work with my patients in the initial stage of sorrow I suggest that at first they just sit with their pain and grief, simply noticing it as if they are sitting on a riverbank watching these heavy feelings float downstream. During this time many of them ask, “Why is this happening to me?”  While it is impossible for us to see the big picture, I suggest to them that when they are ready to use this experience to honor themselves by learning, and growing from it. A translation of a Rumi poem says, “When your heart breaks (open), journey deep inside.” So if you are going to be courageous and take that journey it’s helpful to be guided by the following seven steps for overcoming and transforming a broken heart.

Step 1: Struggle with Denial

Denial is the first round of defense that we immediately enter into like the first chamber in the heart that breaks. In this inner chamber we face the demons of trying every which way to not accept the loss. It’s as if a visitor with bad news has entered our home and we try to push him/her back outside so we don’t have to listen to the painful message.

Step 2: Acknowledging your Brokenness 

You must start to acknowledge to yourself that your heart has been broken by someone, something or some event. Step into the experience of attempting to tolerate the unbearable quality of this sorrow. I say “attempt” to deal with the sorrow as you must acknowledge that your pain in order over time to learn to manage, handle, and heal it.

Step 3: Overcoming Rationalization 

We rationalize this is not happening, it can’t be so, it's only a terrible nightmare, things will change and everything will be as it was! The denial of pain. We pray to God that if this experience is taken from us we will repent, we will change, we will dedicate our life to a great cause. Anything but to feel this deep, aching wound of hurt and sorrow. So often when our heart is breaking we want someone, anyone to tell us what to do, or where to go, or how to instantly heal.

Step 4: Surrender

The Beatles insightful song Tomorrow Never Knows says, "Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream ….That you may see the meaning of within.”  The step of entering into the chamber of Surrender is an essential stage in order to allow the self to begin the arduous process of mending a broken heart.  When we surrender, we enter the state of not knowing and not doing. Since we do not know just how long the journey will take it is helpful to accept what I write about in my book on finding meaning and purpose in times of challenges that we never fully get over a loss but instead we learn to navigate through it. “Taking as long as it takes” is a phrase I use with my patients while they are in this stage.

Step Five: Acceptance 

It takes great courage to pull yourself up off the floor, bed, or couch and get back into the world when your heart is broken. Acceptance gives us the first few steps we need to begin to slowly scratch and claw our way back into the land of the living.  One of the most painful aspects of when I had a broken heart was going out to the movies or dinner or on a vacation and all I ever saw was couples or families but still we need to exercise the organ of the emotional heart with fierce grace in order to step forward and go back outside into the world of possibilities.

Step Six: Embrace the Now  

The Buddha said what is past is now dead and gone; the past is the past, the present is now, and the future is yet to arrive. When grieving we tend to live in the past reliving the trauma or memories of the one we lost. Now memories are important to maintain but within reason. In order to take the next step we must embrace the present to manifest the future. One of the easiest and most effect techniques that I recommend to my patients is to develop a mindfulness meditation practice (see the video below for tips on how to meditate). By practicing mindfulness we can learn to slowly tolerate, pace the painful feelings, and slow down the afflictive and repetitive thought patterns. In my book, Wise Mind, Open Mind I have a specific meditation to overcome a broken heart. Mindfulness is both an ancient and modern non sectarian method for teaching us to follow our breath in and out and to relax, to let go of the pain and eventually release and transform it into vitality, acceptance and equanimity. Other methods to help one become more present are yoga, Tai Chi, walks in nature, jogging or visiting museums.

Step Seven: Create a New Future

There is a field of thinking within positive psychology that says the way through pain includes becoming your own architect and actively engaging and involving yourself in the planning of a new future. The victim in us will want to remain on the floor curled up in agony, wishing to avoid any future painful experiences that life may present to us. One who is engaged and empowered realizes and accepts that the past is the past and all we have now is the present moment and the future.  It’s all in the next breath in and the next breath out and creating in your mind’s eye a future storyline for yourself.  Dare to dream and be wild with your imagination. Have the courage to dream any positive, loving, creative future with no bounds. Remember after Death comes Rebirth!  

It’s your storyline you are creating, like writing the next chapter of your life in a novel. But in your story I challenge you to JUMP into the water, catch the next wave and maybe you will just be surprised and delighted to experience yourself riding that new wave with confidence, joy and possibility!!!