Crews searching for dangerous pieces of history at AEDC

  • Published
  • By Patrick Ary
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  It started with an Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) security officer reporting unexploded ordnance (UXO) on a two-track trail in September 2009. The UXO was lying under and next to a tree near the boat ramp off South Hap Arnold Drive. It was round, brown and about eight inches in diameter.

It was a mine. More specifically, it was a training version of an M1 anti-tank mine.

AEDC's Operations Center sent out a team to investigate. Denny Timmons, AEDC's manager of the base's Military Munitions Response Program (MMRP), was one of the people who went out with Jim Raabe from AEDC Safety.

Timmons stood in the woods where the mine was located and tried to get a GPS signal so he could record where the device was found, but he was unable to secure one because of the tree coverage overhead. He crossed a ditch to get a better reading about 15 feet away.

"I'm standing there and I say 'Hey Jim, I got coordinates,'" Timmons recalls. "And Jim says 'Well you might as well get the coordinates there, because you're standing right next to another one."

And he was; a second mine was right next to his foot.

An EOD team from Eglin Air Force Base was called in to handle the ordnance. They decided the mines weren't safe enough to move and detonated both on-site.

If they could find two mines in the area so easily, Timmons wondered, how many more were there? And why were they there?

Unexploded ordnance is nothing new at AEDC. An MMRP project ongoing since April has been cleaning up UXO in the areas formerly used as artillery and firing ranges for Camp Forrest. The Air Force teamed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Omaha to contract Bay West, Inc., a firm that specializes in munitions cleanup, to handle the work.

But the two mines found in 2009 were well outside the Camp Forrest historical ranges boundary that was identified by a comprehensive range inventory base survey in 2003; in fact, they were located in the old Camp Forrest Maneuver Area (CFMA) and in close proximity to base housing - just a two-minute walk from a road frequented by hikers and mountain bikers.

Last spring, during a kick-off meeting for the current surface clearance project, Timmons showed USACE-Omaha and Bay West the UXO location and requested the team make a run along the two-track trail where the two mines were found to see if there was anything else in the area.

They found seven more mines, including one less than two feet from where the first was found.

The number of mines and their location was enough to spur another cleanup project that the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment quickly signed off on.

The good news was the mines they found weren't meant to do serious damage. They were practice mines from the World War II era that discharge red smoke when triggered.

"They had a smoke charge, so when a tank would run over them it would emit smoke like it was an actual mine and simulate battlefield conditions," Timmons said.

While a mine that just smokes sounds relatively benign when compared with one designed to put holes in a tank, there is still a charge that has to detonate before the smoke can discharge, said Bay West site manager Dave Egbert. The smoke is also a concern.

"Those aren't super-dangerous per se, but they're dangerous enough to put an eye out because of the fuse that's still in there," Egbert said. "And then the red phosphorous filler can be particularly nasty, too."

AEDC Restoration and Weapons Safety, along with USACE-Omaha and Bay West, began to research historical records and old aerial photographs. The part that still eluded explanation to everyone involved was why the mines were found in a location outside the previously designated ranges used at Camp Forrest.

"Before, we had concentrated on the Camp Forrest historical range areas because that's where you would expect the UXO to be after firing, and that is where we have found UXOs in the past," Timmons said. "There were never any tank training ranges identified in the CFMA during past investigations."

He and his team started looking at current and historic area satellite photos and historic Camp Forrest maps as well as overhead shots that had been taken in 2006 using Light Imaging Detection and Radar (LIDAR). The images show terrain in a way that made it easier to identify craters and other delineations.

They plotted the coordinates of the found mines and realized they were along the visible two-track ditch that could be seen in the aerial photos taken in the early 1940s, when Camp Forrest was active. The two ruts, Timmons was told by Eglin EOD team members, were about the width of an Abrams tank and probably were the ruts of an M4 Sherman tank.

The team started putting more puzzle pieces together when they overlaid their LIDAR images with an aerial photo of Camp Forrest taken in 1941.

What they found was a large cantonment area located east of what is UTSI Road today. Several of the two-track trails radiate out from that area, Timmons said. But because of the resolution it's hard to tell whether the image is tents, tanks or something else.

Timmons and his team found more delineations within the CFMA. Those two-track trails, they determined, were most likely made by tanks practicing maneuvers sometime during the 1940s - a time when one of the most famous U.S. military figures in history was in Middle Tennessee training with his tank corps: Army Maj. Gen. George S. Patton.

Timmons said he knew of General Patton training his Second Armored "Hell on Wheels" Division in Middle Tennessee in the early 1940s for the Tennessee Maneuvers, but there was no specific documentation on whether or where he may have conducted any exercises at Camp Forrest - and no way to know for sure whether the famed general set up camp in the cantonment area seen on the old map.

"We went to the AEDC, Manchester and Tullahoma libraries and searched as much as we could," Timmons said. "We talked to several people here on base and out at Motlow and they said yes, they remember he was here. But as far as trying to find any evidence of training areas ... we have old range fans and we have maps of those, but we couldn't find anything that could show exactly where a tank training course was set up."

They've been left to put two and two together, but Timmons said after talking with UXO experts from Eglin AFB, OSACE-Omaha and Bay West, they know that the mines they have found were used during that era to simulate battlefield conditions. Their belief is they were planted as training exercises for Patton's men.

"I think we're pretty confident that's what they were used for," he said.

Tech Sgt. Marvin Gardner, AEDC's weapons safety expert, says investigating where the mines came from has gotten him more interested in the base's history. Sergeant Gardner says he knows more today than he ever thought he would learn when he came to the base six years ago.

"Whenever I go TDY (on temporary duty) people always ask what Arnold is," Sergeant Gardner said. "I tell them where Arnold is in Tennessee and then, being the weapons safety guy, I throw my UXO story in there about Patton."

History or not, the mines have to go. Bay West crews got started on Jan. 11, and they're expected to finish around the end of February. They have 18 miles of recreation trails that need to be swept for similar conditions for a total of 504 acres total to survey.

"The priority is the sweeping the 35 acres immediately surrounding the two-track trail where the nine UXO training mines were previously found, and then go ahead and start surveying the rec trails," Timmons said. "And once we do the rec trails, we'll go out and look at these other features that showed up on the LIDAR and are still visible on the surface."

Timmons said the hiking, biking and horseback trails in the area won't be closed off because there is not a high density of the devices, and the ones already found have been stable enough to move to a remote corner of the base for detonation.

Sergeant Gardner said his main concern is not people affiliated with AEDC, because they are more likely to be familiar with the ongoing UXO cleanup through communication at work. He's concerned about people from outside the AEDC community who decide to spend the day hiking or riding on one of the trails.

"We try to mitigate the hazard by placing and maintaining the UXO warning signs and the briefings, but people that aren't associated with the base, they don't get those briefings," Sergeant Gardner said. "They don't get that information."

And he says even though it's interesting to think about the amount of history that could be out there under the leaves, no one should ever go looking for it.

"The main thing from us on the safety side is that people don't go out hunting for souvenirs and take something home," he said.

Sergeant Gardner says anyone who comes in contact with a device that looks explosive or dangerous should mark the area in some way before leaving. They should then contact authorities through one of several channels: base security at 454-5662, the Operations Center at 454-7752, Weapons Safety at 454-7293 or by reporting to the guard at the main gate of the base. If reporting by cell phone, the caller should not be within 50 feet of the device when making the call, out of an abundance of caution.