War Against the Elements

 

 

 

By John McWethy, ABCNEWS.COM

SHEMYA ISLAND, Alaska, June 13 — The island of Shemya in the Aleutians is a two-by-four-mile-long rock that is cold, desolate, isolated — and about to become a very hot property.

Pentagon planners say it is the perfect location for the world’s most powerful new tracking radar — the heart and soul of the new national missile defense system. Perfect because it can get an early look at any missile fired at the U.S. from North Korea, Russia or China. The plan is for the radar to guide American missiles that are fired from mainland Alaska to an intercept.


It may be a perfect location for the antiballistic missile radar, but the island of Shemya is a terrible place to try to build anything.


With the Bering Sea on one side, the Northern Pacific on the other, the island is pounded by angry waters and ripped by Arctic storms.


Reggie Crawford, the administrator for the island of Shemya, describes the conditions like this: “Snow coming in sideways, rain coming in sideways, you feel like you’re being sandblasted outside.”


“It’s the only place I’ve ever heard of that has hurricane force winds without actually a hurricane,” says Lt. Col. Peg Watkinson.


Eighty people work here — most are government contractors. They run a 25-year-old early warning radar system (left over from the Cold War), intelligence gathering antennae, satellite uplinks and an airfield.

 
It is very quiet.


But if the president says “go,” the Pentagon plans to spend half a billion dollars to build the new 10-story-high radar here. The plan would be to have the whole system up and running in less than five years, which may be a bit optimistic given the reality of doing business on this remote island. It will be a war against the elements and a logistical nightmare.


Equipment and supplies for the project will have to be hauled from Seattle, 3,000 miles away. That means hiring hundreds of enormous barges to make the trip, then lining them up at Shemya’s one dock to unload.


The beaches are already littered with boats that couldn’t manage the rough seas. Recently, an oil tanker had to wait 40 days for weather calm enough to deliver its load.


“Things coming in on a barge, things coming in on a plane, people and cargo,” says Watkinson, “just don’t get here when you expect them to.”


Engineers will be working with cranes hundreds of feet in the air and say they must have brief periods of virtually no wind to safely do critical parts of the job.
“In the three years I’ve been here,” says Toby Bedell, communications manager for the island, “I’ve probably seen three days with absolutely no wind.”
It’s what the people here call the “Shemya factor.”


“You have to figure in the Shemya factor,” says Steven Fuller, the island’s weatherman. “The weather is very unpredictable, it changes by the hour, sometimes by the minute. I’ve never seen the weather change so fast or so drastically as it does here.”