While I found the article on the Sound Defense Alliance meeting on Orcas Island to cover the bases pretty well, there were a couple of inferences and elisions that need correction.

The current suit filed by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson requires the Navy to complete a thorough Environmental Impact Statement rather than the perfunctory assessment of impact. This would include impacts not only on human beings but orcas, marbled murrelet and other creatures of the realm. The perfunctory environmental analysis done by the Navy used averages including time NOT flying — to determine noise levels.

The comments following Susan Shannon’s letter accounting the meeting were abysmally ignorant. The Growlers are not — at least yet — here to “patrol” our skies or keep us “safe.” The Olympic Mountains and the ONP were here long before NAS Whiney.

We are not at war with either Russia nor China, both nuclear powers, nor should we be planning for such an eventuality. The military industrial complex is an insatiable beast with a maw beyond the breadth of the Grand Canyon. And last, but far from least, the avionics that controls the planes is manufactured by our inept and profit-driven friends at Boeing.

By the way, harms go beyond “noise” to include poisoned well water and mental illness arising from helplessness. Use the infrastructure for the Coast Guard Base that should be mid-Sound and chill with the bad public relations officers who can’t write.

Mostly, I wonder what it is about the concept of “sacred” that NAS Whidbey and their ignorant supporters don’t understand? To this lifelong resident of this obscenely overmilitarized realm the Olympics are just that — sacred — and are being defiled and, indeed, blasphemed by the ingress of arrogance and noise.

When push comes to shove, the only way in which NAS Whidbey can restore the balance and become a good neighbor is by folding up their tent and leaving us be.

Joseph Murphy

Eastsound