[CPEO-MEF] FORMER SITES: Porter (IN) Nike Missile Site

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Army Corps and IDEM to tell remediation plan for old Nike missile site here

By KEVIN NEVERS
Chesterton Tribune (IN)
January 12, 2018

For more than 15 years the U.S. Department of Defense operated in Porter a surface-to-air missile battery--the Nike C-32 site, part of the Chicago-Gary Defense ring--on property which today is either privately owned or part of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

Nike C-32 was built in 1957 at two locations: a control/housing area off South Mineral Springs Road, now the National Lakeshore headquarters; and the launch area itself, located immediately east of Wagner Road and north of West Oak Hill Road, on acreage subsequently sold by the General Services Administration to private parties.

The installation, however, was decommissioned in 1974, and over the last 40 years or so much of the facility has been demolished and removed, including five radar tracking towers, 3,300 linear feet of barb-wired chain-link fence, a trio of 35-foot tall brick smoke stacks, and five 10,000-gallon underground storage tanks.

Because the Ajax and later the Hercules warheads--as well as booster and sustainer motors--were shipped to Nike C-32 fully assembled, any release into the environment of explosive and propellants chemicals (including radioactive materials from the nuclear-armed warheads--was “probably very limited,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers believes.

…

For the entire article, see
http://chestertontribune.com/Environment/army_corps_and_idem_to_tell_reme.htm

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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