Mission is to move training

Editor,

Today’s social media overload of alternative realities, bogus “truths” and disparaging remarks not only discourages meaningful dialog, it demeans what Americans have always enshrined: truth, honor, respect.

A recent Oak Harbor letter writer wants people to think that Citizens of Ebey’s Reserve hasn’t won a single lawsuit.

Well, actually there was only one and that forced the Navy to honor its documented plans for 6,100 operations at the OLF instead of 2011-12 levels, which were moving steadily beyond 10,000. The Navy had to hang its head in front of the judge and say OK, yeah, no more than 6,100.

What else has COER done? That lawsuit was actually fundamental to getting the Navy to do an EIS on the expanded Growler numbers. No small feat. We helped to invigorate over 4,000 comments into the public record on that draft of the EIS last year.

In that effort we hired an environmental health expert, two national experts on noise, and a Seattle company that completed two independent noise studies at six sites around the OLF.

With those expert’s input COER was able to motivate the Washington State Department of Health to declare jet noise as a public health issue, something the EPA and the Governor’s office subsequently underwrote.

And COER has been hard at work with other similar groups from the San Juan’s to the Olympic Peninsula, building an alliance that is now very active in protecting the sanctity of our environs and the threatened and endangered species trying to cope with being sonar’d to death or body-hammered by underwater explosions, or displaced by intimidation to habitats that don’t meet their needs.

Yet, here as elsewhere, no matter how devastating a proposed Navy action, the finding always ends up: “no significant impact.” COER does not buy that and when the final EIS comes out, we won’t buy it then either.

This growing alliance of like-minded groups defeated two bills in the Washington State Legislature last month sponsored by the Washington Military Alliance that would actually have given the Navy power over local land use planning.

In January, a film on Growler impacts, “Plane Truths,” premiered. On April 27, COER will be co-sponsoring the film Sonic Sea on Earth Day weekend at the Unitarian Church in Freeland.

Our mission to move Growler trainings to suitable and safer training locations remains front-and-center as the only way to achieve a sensible and safe solution for pilots and Whidbey Islanders.

Because that is doable, we will not rest until we are assured of clean water and quiet skies, an honest analysis of health and safety risks, real protection for threatened and endangered fauna and a credible examination of the effects of jet noise on our children’s learning environment.

The members of COER, and the wise activists who came before us, have lived the basic principle of citizenship and civilian activism, and we encourage others impacted and concerned to join us.

Robert Wilbur

Coupeville