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SAMPLE ESSAY TEXT: WHAT LIES BURIED (SAVANNA ARMY DEPOT)
Morning mists roil just before sunup on this mid-May dawn, concealing the Mississippi River valley hidden beneath. But by the time the sun gains the horizon at 5:45 a.m. as I turn off Highway 84 onto the former grounds of the Savanna (Illinois) Army Depot, the mist has largely dissipated and the valley lies exposed.
I am going mist-netting and bird-banding with Dan Wenny of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources[1] (DNR) at the Lost Mound Field Station, located within the old depot grounds along the Mississippi River in northwest Illinois. The task at hand is to track bird species; today we are studying whether the grasshopper sparrow is increasing or decreasing on the sand prairie, in the former home of bombs.
It is an intriguing, exciting, and troubling place, depending on the story one discovers out here on the prairie. I could tell you about the Army Depot, once employing over 7,000 civilians at its peak during World War II, and then shrinking, edict by edict, until its closure in March 2000. Or I could tell you about the 9,000-plus acres of wildlife refuge harboring 47 threatened or endangered species of plants and animals and the largest sand-prairie remnant in the state of Illinois. There is a story to be told about 3,000 acres of beginning and potential economic rebirth. Or should I tell another story, this one about buried contaminants, an environmental clean-up site that could cost taxpayers up to $350 million?
Over here there are coneflowers. Over there you had better not step. Just where does the treasure lie, and where does one find poison?
This morning is pure treasure. Along with student intern Josh Conroy of University of Illinois-Champaign, Wenny is setting mist nets, wispy badminton-like nets strung between upright poles in the hopes that grasshopper sparrows will absent-mindedly fly into and temporarily entangle themselves until the DNR specialist retrieves them, charts their measurements, and places an identification band on their legs before releasing them. For the prairie is returning, re-establishing itself on a unique ground, and Wenny wants to know what, in turn, is happening to the wildlife here.
But there are other intrigues to chart as well. What happens to a community when its largest historical employer—the government—packs up and leaves town? What happens when the government leaves behind an environmental mess and a clean-up process that is painstakingly slow? What happens when creative thinkers are unleashed to create a wildlife refuge and rebuild the economic base? And what if this story is played out time and time again at hundreds of closed military installations across the country?
* *
The Savanna Army Depot story begins after the onset of World War I. The U.S. Congress, recognizing the need for permanent war-readiness, authorized, among other facilities, a Midwest “proving grounds” for test-firing weapons and artillery. In 1917, according to a study conducted by nearby Augustana College historians, the 13,000-acre Savanna site was chosen for several reasons. The area was not adjacent to any cities, yet was only sixty miles from the Rock Island (Illinois) Arsenal that produced many of the large guns to be tested. The sandy river-side prairie was less agriculturally productive than the prevailing rich, black Midwestern soil. The river bottomland with its sloughs and myriad islands provided a buffer from river traffic, but the railroad passing at its eastern boundary would offer good means of importing machinery and resources and exporting munitions.
The base officially opened in December 1918, and the artillery began to fly. Many of the munitions fired were blanks, with a focus on testing the accuracy and distance of the weaponry, not the munitions. But some of it was live ammo, and not all of it exploded on impact. Within a year, the base’s mission was changed to storing munitions, but the months of test-firing had produced the depot’s first contaminant—potentially unexploded ordnance, or UXO—that still plague the base grounds today. Before any land can be cleared for private ownership or for public access, the land has to be swept and sometimes upturned and sifted for UXO.
During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the depot grew, with over two hundred warehouses built for housing munitions. More volatile munitions required over 400 “igloos,” i.e., steel-reinforced cement bunkers shaped like domed ice igloos, each with a single vertical face to house a massive steel door. The igloos ranged in size from about 1,100 to 1,800 square feet of floor space. Bulldozers plowed two feet of topsoil up over the sloping sides and roof, and grasses were planted over the tops to obscure their visibility from the air. One igloo blew up in 1948, leaving a crater one hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep, still apparent today. The blast registered on seismograph recordings 120 miles away in Chicago, and the Savanna and Hanover locals reported blown-out windows and cracked plaster. The four-ton steel door was never found. Local lore puts it somewhere at the bottom of the Mississippi.
And so it went out on the prairie, where anyone who didn’t want to work on the farm could usually find work at the depot, and many did both. Still, depot activity increased and declined according to the military needs of each era. In 1939, only143 civilians worked at the depot, but that figure rocketed to7,195 by 1942, 36% of whom were female, the renowned Rosie the Riveters of World War II. Civilian employees lived in hastily constructed rows of apartments in the quiet nearby towns of Hanover and Savanna, or commuted from towns an hour or more drive away.
During World War II, the depot’s mission expanded to include production and recycling of munitions, and later included a training school for maintenance and handling of munitions. Depot employees prided themselves on their work; munitions shipped from the depot were stamped S.O.D. (Savanna Ordnance Depot), and soldiers frequently sent word of appreciation for the job well-done. The bombs used in the Jimmy Doolittle Raid, the first U.S. retaliation on Japan after Pearl Harbor, were produced at and shipped from the Savanna Depot.
After World War II, the depot entered a slow decline, although each new military engagement produced a bubble of employment. The 1950s typically engaged about 2,000 civilian workers; by the 1960s the number stood at 1,000; in 1974 there were 750, and in 1995, when the depot was placed on the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the number of workers had dwindled to 450.
Clouds were gathering out on the prairie. In 1977, the depot was first considered for closure, but local businessmen banded together and successfully lobbied Washington to keep it open. The inevitable finally occurred, however, when a new BRAC was formed under rules preventing individual bases on the list being “rescued” by Congress. The Savanna Army Depot was placed on the list in 1995, and closure occurred in 2000.
The closing of the Savanna Depot is a story echoed across the country. At least 97 major installations have been closed nationwide since 1988 and another 33 have been included in a closure plan submitted in 2005, each presenting some mixture of economic and environmental problems and opportunities. It would be easy for an isolated outpost like Savanna to get lost in the shuffle.
A drive-through of the Savanna Depot grounds today reveals a ghost town of abandoned military buildings here on the prairie, surrounded by farms, river bluffs, and the steadfast Mississippi River. Today I enter the grounds past the offices of the Local Redevelopment Authority (LRA), cross the railroad tracks into the compound and find—mostly abandoned—the security office, fire station, NCO barracks, gym and recreation center, mess hall, bowling alley, commissary, theater, pool, and officers club.
Environmental clean-up activities are directed from the Headquarters building, and new businesses occupy the ammunitions school, commander’s and second-in-command’s houses, and a fraction of the two hundred plus warehouses and storage buildings. In an effort to make the grounds more welcoming, the guard house has recently been removed, as well as an old army sign that once warned: “All persons, their possessions, and vehicles are liable to search upon entering, during their stay, or upon leaving this installation.”
The impact of the depot closure on the nearby towns of Hanover and Savanna was muted somewhat because employee numbers had been dwindling for decades, and because many of the remaining workers were at or near retirement age. Still, the local populations suffered. From the1980 to the 2000 census (by which time many workers had already left), Hanover lost nearly 200 of its previous 1,000 residents; Savanna, slightly larger, lost 1,000 of its 4,500.
But towns survive, and people find work. I met Marty Sheehy and Marty Altensey, two long-time depot workers who found employment at one of the first new businesses on the grounds, one morning in March 2004. Proud of their work, past and present, they had stories to tell, building on and sometimes correcting each other’s memories. Sheehy, a 35-year employee, dutifully crossed the river every day from Bellevue, IA, to work in the machine shop, where he eventually became Chief of Ammunition Peculiar Equipment (A.P.E.) shop. A skilled machinist, Sheehy built A.P.E. to test the shelf-life of ammunition by exploding samples inside a safebox, x-ray machines to test ammunition for defects, and hundreds more specially-designed A.P.E. for a variety of purposes. Sheehy found work in the same machine shop for Stickle Warehousing, doing repairs and special orders for the business’ truck and ocean fleet and for other local businesses.
Marty Altensey, a 23-year employee of the depot, had worked mostly in inventory and stock, unloading ammunition into igloos and warehouses, and loading it again onto trains and trucks for shipping. He unloaded mustard gas from the igloos when it was shipped to Colorado for disposal. He worked on the ammunition lines, retrieving usable TNT from old, obsolete projectiles for use in new weaponry. He drove a fork lift, loading weapons for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He helped detonate and destroy old, decaying weapons. He, too, found work with Stickle Warehousing, one of the first fruits of economic recovery.
For Sheehy and Altensey, depot memories were never far removed from their new positions. “There are still pictures back in the machine shop from the army days,” says Sheehy, “photos of people from back then, an old phone book. You come in to work, see the fire station, the two smoke stacks from the factory areas, and it gets to you.”
Altensey agrees. “You get back in a storage area, you see someone’s name written on a wall and think, ‘I remember him.’ I expect to see a guard at the entryway. Now it’s like a ghost town.”
* *
We load the DNR pickup with supplies for the morning’s mist netting. Poles and nets, charts for data entry, and Wenny’s fishing tackle box with its supply of leg bands, banding pliers for handling the tiny bands, measuring instruments, solutions for securing the leg bands, etc. “The guys at the hardware store know not to ask me anymore what I’m using the stuff for,” he jokes. “They had a field day when I said I was catching sparrows.”
Out in the pickup the windshield fogs against the morning’s still-brisk air. We detour en route to the study area, around a “demolition circle” from the 1930s which is being cleaned of the contaminants left behind when obsolete weapons were disassembled, detonated, and sometimes burned. On the detour we pass hundreds of empty igloos. Today a deer races down from the top of one of the igloos as we pass.
At the prairie site, Dan and Josh set up about ten mist nets, usually around aromatic sumac bushes, where grasshopper sparrows often perch and sing. Most of the nets are set out singly in a variety of locations within a short walk, but two or three are set at angles to each other around larger bushes. The birds fly into the netting from their various perches and get entangled. “They’re easier to catch in early spring when the males chase each other around and don’t notice the net,” Wenny says. Later in the season, Wenny uses “Frank,” a stuffed grasshopper sparrow accompanied by a CD of a male bird song, to lure his catches. Other sparrows will come to chase it away, attack it, and get caught in the netting. “Frank’s had to be sewn up a number of times,” Wenny explains.
Dan easily identifies bird calls. “That buzzy trill is the grasshopper sparrow’s song,” he says. The prairie is seeing an increasing population among many of its bird species since the closing of the depot. The grasshopper sparrow, however, is in comparative decline, but ironically its decline signifies the prairie’s recovery. The sparrow, a short-grass bird, was well-adapted to the well-clipped turf of the army days when cattle were grazed in and around the igloos to reduce the chances of prairie fire. Cattle grazing was discontinued in 1999. Since then, tall grass species have been able to grow to full stature, and tall-grass birds have increased in population.
The first bird entangled in the net is a male grasshopper sparrow, already banded in 2002. Dan marks the location of the catch on his map, and then measures the bird. Wing length: 63 mm. The tail measures 45 mm., the leg 19.7 mm. He measures its fat deposit near the sternum: not much in spring, but by fall the bird will have stored up fat for migration. Its bill measures 12.7 mm in length, 5.4 mm in width, 6.1 mm in depth. Wenny puts the bird in a cloth bag and measures its weight at 18 grams. He checks for parasites and finds small mites on the wings, not unusual. He inspects the feathers (which wear down from abrasion, and are thus replaced every year), but these look good. He shows Josh how to check for gender by blowing on the belly feathers. Females have a fleshy brood patch beneath the feathers that fills with blood when they are sitting on eggs, providing warmth for incubation. Finally, all measurements and checks taken, Wenny releases the bird, which flies off eagerly to a nearby sumac.
* *
When the Savanna Depot was put on the BRAC list in 1995, the Army directed Jo Daviess and Carroll Counties to establish a nonprofit Local Redevelopment Authority (LRA)—following the closure procedure typical for other bases boarded up during the 1980s and 90s—to devise an economic plan for re-use of the land.
Environmental and economic interests often found themselves at odds in the early post-military years. Federal agencies have first rights to request lands vacated by other federal agencies, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) initially asked for 11,000 of the 13,000 acres, according to Ed Britton, current Manager of the Upper Mississippi River National Fish and Wildlife Refuge—Savanna District. “This set off an anti-fed atmosphere in the community,” says Britton, as people worried that economic interests were going to be squeezed out. Unfortunately, says Britton, the USFWS was then between regional managers, and no one was there to explain that this was merely the first phase of a long negotiation.
Economic interests were hardly on the ropes, however, and the LRA hired a lawyer in its quest to obtain all the uplands as well as the lower post, where roads and existing buildings were concentrated. The first LRA board drafted an ambitious plan that included a mix of commercial development, golf courses, and upscale homes situated on top of the sand dunes adjacent to the river. Only 600 remaining acres were designated for industrial development. The Army questioned whether the reuse plan was realistic. However, they recommended the LRA let the planning phase mature and then resubmit their reuse plan within a year, says David Ylinen, former LRA Executive Director. Later, after investigating the feasibility for major housing and green space development, the LRA determined that the original plan was probably too ambitious.
In addition, says BRAC Environmental Coordinator John Clarke, standards for environmental cleanup vary according to the use planned for the land. A residential area needs to be “clean enough for kids to play in the dirt for twenty years and not be harmed.” Cleanup standards for commercial and industrial use are less rigorous, and for recreational use even less so. Thus the irony emerges that the excessive environmental contamination has made more lands available for the wildlife refuge, even though public access is severely restricted.
A second early controversy between environmentalists and economic interests stemmed from members of the first LRA who wanted to build a prison on the depot grounds. According to Bob Wehrle, who describes himself as one of the few early LRA members who “took the environmental perspective to blend economic development and preservation,” the issue wasn’t whether a prison was appropriate use of the land, but where it ought to be located. A region on the southern end of the depot, or south post, had been identified for economic development because it already had some basic infrastructure, with roads, water and electrical service, and many existing buildings.
However, says Wehrle, environmentalists were stunned when then-Illinois-Governor James Edgar announced that the northern sand prairie would house what would soon be dubbed, derisively, as the “prison on the prairie.” The site selection was particularly distasteful to environmentalists, as it would not only destroy the rare sand prairie but would also disrupt the largest uninterrupted continuum of bio-regions—from river bottomland to prairie to wooded blufflands—along the entire upper Mississippi River valley.
Environmentalists suspected the motives of the prison proponents. Placing the prison in the upper sand prairie would remove it from the southern economic zone, whose development might be hampered by the inclusion of a prison.
But most of all, the three self-identified LRA environmentalists—Wehrle, John Rutherford, and Jim Rachuy—were dismayed over the process. The prairie site had never been discussed and agreed upon by the full LRA board. Soon another local resident, Harry Drucker, helped form the Friends of the Depot—which Wehrle, Rutherford, and Rachuy joined—and secured legal help from the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. The environmental lawyers discovered that the original LRA Director (prior to Ylinen) and a few additional members obtained and submitted application forms to the Illinois Dept. of Corrections (IDOC) requesting the prison be considered for this site. Drucker says the Friends were “outraged that the decision-making had been done secretly, behind closed doors.”
The Friends began writing letters to government officials and alerted the Chicago Tribune to the matter. The new revelations caused the governor to drop his endorsement of the prison proposal. The governor shifted the location of the prison site to the nearby town of Thomson, Illinois, away from the depot but still within commuting distance for potential workers from the community.
For several years the 1600-bed prison stood empty, save for a single security watch guard, due to state budget cuts in prison funding. By 2008—seven years after its completion—the facility housed only 140 inmates and provided employment for 72 individuals, rather than the 600 anticipated jobs.
When the Prison-on-the-Prairie controversy was at its height, the original LRA had met an impasse between those members with environmental interests and those with economic development interests. For harmony’s sake, the Jo Daviess and Carroll County boards reconfigured the LRA membership, a move that had been planned anyway to transition from a “planning LRA” to an “implementation LRA,”—and the new board began making headway. A few more plan drafts were made and a few land trades occurred. They agreed on the current distribution of land. Subject to environmental cleanup, the USFWS will receive 9,715 acres for the Lost Mound Unit Refuge, the Illinois DNR 270 acres, the Army Corp of Engineers 145, and the LRA 2,947 acres for the economic zone first named Eagles Landing Development and then renamed Savanna Depot Business, Industry and Technology Park. “Things are working cooperatively now,” says Britton, and those involved in economic development tend to agree.
Several economic ventures were already underway at the depot when I first visited with business owners and planners in 2004. By 2008 a new LRA Director, Diane Komiskey, reported new names and new ventures, but was quick to point out that the average closed military facility takes about twenty-five years to be re-established for other uses. “And we’re not average,” she says, with the depot’s status as a superfund cleanup site and the economic disadvantage of low population in Jo Daviess and Carroll counties.
Bit by bit, however, turn-around is on the horizon. One of the first developments was Stickle Warehousing, owned and operated by Rick Stickle when I visited in 2004. Stickle made the first actual land purchase transaction at the depot. In December 2003, he presented Ylinen’s LRA with a check for $948,535 for 14 warehouses on 44 acres of environmentally-clean property. Stickle also had a lease-purchase agreement for an additional 200 buildings—mostly warehouses—on the depot grounds, about 100 of which he was using to store more than 6,000 truckloads of materials.
The operations required significant re-investment. Some of the warehouses lacked electricity, so Stickle installed lines and transformers to 50 buildings at a cost of $185,000, and then wired the buildings internally, repaired masonry, sanitized and patched floors, installed safety features and replaced overhead doors. In all, he had invested about $1.5 million in repairs and upgrades. By 2008, the Warehousing operation was run by Midwest 3PL (Third Party Logistics), storing materials brought in by rail or truck.
Another early entrepreneur was Warren Jackman, a maritime lawyer by trade who started his international practice in 1951, and who has lived in the nearby Galena Territory for over twenty years. Jackman’s office at the depot in 2004—located on the first floor of a handsome brick home formerly used by an army officer—was adorned with paintings and drawings of ships, sailors, and mermaids. But if his walls reflected his past, his thinking was poised for the future. The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad passes along the depot’s eastern boundary, and 68 miles of rail track wind through the property itself, a remnant of the days when munitions would be shipped in and out of the yard by rail. Jackman seized the opportunity to create Riverport Railroad, storing excess railcars for customers of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe.
By 2008 Riverport Railroad had 57 miles of track available that could store 2,000 railcars. In 2007, for example, the company’s tracks were filled to capacity with new tanker cars that had been built for ethanol transportation but had not yet been pressed them into service. For older rail cars, another rail company, RESCAR, offers repair and cleaning services. RESCAR has become the Depot Park’s largest employer, with 32 of the 53 persons currently employed there—still a far cry from the civilian employment in the glory days.
One of the most out-of-the-box developments, however, involves the igloo-shaped ammunition bunkers out on the prairie. In the aftermath of 9-11, major financial institutions and corporations recognized the need to keep back-up computer data storage far away from metropolitan sites. “Bunkertown” arose with plans to transform the old munitions bunkers into safe, secure and survivable computer-data centers, connecting them to the outside world through fiber optic cable and other redundant high-tech modes. The igloos’ two-foot thick concrete and earthen roof cover combine to produce a cave-like, near-constant year-round cool temperature, perfect for computer facilities. And because the venture will have relatively low environmental impact, the USFWS agreed to allow the bunker project on the refuge grounds, epitomizing the current level of cooperation between environmental and economic interests. Besides, no one was quite sure what to do with the igloos. They would have been expensive to tear down, and to do so would have disturbed the prairie as much as than letting them stand.
Another hi-tech entrepreneur, Gary Frederick, was drawing considerable interest by 2008. Frederick, a mechanical engineer who’d spent his career doing research and development in Arizona, retired to his family’s home farm in the local hills, but “couldn’t keep still,” and continued with his engineering research in his home basement. By October of 2007 he’d purchased an old educational building at the Depot and had begun Fluidic Micro-controls, which designs and machines tiny air-powered sensors, controls, and actuators that can be used in micro-machining tools, aerospace business, industrial automation, etc. Another product in the works is a pneumatic pillow that can set under micro-machines for super-stable vibration resistance.
But Frederick found himself forming another business venture when a neighboring farmer stopped in his driveway one day and proclaimed, “I want to make lightning in the back of my pickup.” When the farmer explained what he meant, Frederick joked, “You’ve just ruined my retirement,” and set out to work with the man and another farmer, another retired engineer, and a host of researchers from Northern Illinois University to develop a process by which farmers could create their own nitrogen fertilizer on-site at their farms. Using centuries-old knowledge that lightning strikes can fertilize the soil, the process involves jolting an electrical current at air passing through a tube, which separates out nitrogen from the oxygen. The nitrogen is channeled into a water bath, creating nitric acid, which then can be mixed with lime to create a slurry to be spread as nitrogen fertilizer on farm fields, replacing anhydrous ammonia that must be made at commercial sites and dangerously transported on the highway by farmers taking it to their fields. The on-site nitrogen producer, running continuously for a year, could produce enough fertilizer for a 1,000 acre farm and could be powered by plugging it into the traditional electrical grid, by on-site wind energy from wind turbines small enough to be hidden in barn cupolas, or through a power-generating system that converts biomass to electricity. Frederick’s company, N-Ovation, has received a three-year $1 million USDA grant to work with Northern Illinois University on the biomass conversion alternative.
Frederick’s vision is to create a farm alternative-energy center at the Depot. Six to eight to technicians from NIU will soon visit the Depot to consider establishing research space there. The fledgling N-Ovation company takes note of Illinois Senator Barak Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucuses, in which he proclaimed that the U.S. must “harness the ingenuity of farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all.” The N-Ovation project hits all of these fronts.
Frederick is convinced that the way to attract jobs to the Depot is to “attract professionals to the beauty of this area,” as reflected in his first full-time hire, Drew Wittey, a mechanical engineering graduate from Northwestern University. Typical of a new generation of professionals, Drew likes the laidback, innovative style of a small company doing cutting-edge technology in a rural setting. Drew is the first full-time resident at the Depot Park since the closing of the military facility, as he lives in housing that formerly served married army personnel, rides his bike to the office, and works in jeans and sandals.
And there were other tenants setting up shop at the Depot Park as of April 2008 as well, including: Bryer Productions, a photographer; Ancient Tree Builders, a cabinetry industry; BNC Bulletproof, building bullet-proof enclosures for ATMs and bank tellers; and A & B Holdings, which is converting the Commander’s and Second-In-Command’s houses into corporate retreat centers. Also, the non-profit Rock Island Technological Society has opened up a railroad museum and Welcome Center for the Savanna Depot Park and has plans to develop an Army Depot Museum as well.
The first property sale had occurred in 2003. By 2008, 80% of the property within the economic zone had been sold or leased. Even so, projections for the final transfer of property to the LRA keep shifting to the future, largely due to environmental cleanup. The Army originally expected to disperse the final acres by 2007. Now that estimate is for 2016.
The LRA is “a twilight organization,” said former LRA Director Ylinen “When the last property is sold, the LRA turns the lights out and disappears.”
Progress toward fulfilling the economic goals of the LRA has been slow, especially so in generating jobs for new employees, but appears to be gaining momentum. “There were false expectations, initially,” says current LRA Director Komiskey. But looking at the array of current tenants, she surmises, “I’m not looking for a home run. I’m looking for a lot of base hits. You can win the game that way, too.”
Even so, beneath the local optimism lies a persistent worry that maybe, just maybe, the dream will not come together as planned. Will location, government cutbacks for environmental cleanup and wildlife management, and economic competition from the larger nearby communities conspire to scuttle the hard work and vision of environmentalists and developers alike? Chuck Wenstrom, of the Natural Area Guardians, says that he is optimistic “but those concerns are also blowing in the wind and can be felt out on the prairie. Some days the wind and her song is bittersweet.”
And not everyone agrees that the economic and environmental interests are meshing as nicely as it would appear. Some have worried that the igloo technology project may not be as environmentally friendly as perceived, due to the ground disturbance from laying fiber optic line and the likelihood of frequent visits by technicians. Some worry whether rail-car cleaning will create new environmental problems. And Dan Wenny laments that the best section of prairie is located within the LRA footprint, slated for future development.
And every once in awhile, a tempest still flairs. Recently, the LRA wanted to plant a row of austrees, a fast-growing, non-native willow to act as a screen. Environmentalists expressed concerns that the trees will be a new invasive species, quick to spread in the sandy soil. The trees were planted anyway.
But the general mood is positive that economic and environmental interests can cooperate at the depot. When environmentalists expressed concern several years ago that proposed gyroplane security flights over the server farm (computers in the igloos) would disturb rare birds in the fly zone over the refuge, the plan was nixed. Warren Jackman, himself a member of the Natural Area Guardians, says, “I don’t really believe that there ever was an uneasiness between conservation and development interests. It was simply that conservationists were not sure of what economic developers had in mind. What’s important is to have an educated dialog going on at all times.”
Diane Komiskey sounds a guardedly optimistic note. Economic and environmental interests will mesh, she says, “as long as we each respect one another’s territory. I respect their responsibility to protect species and habitat. I would in turn expect them to respect our responsibility to create jobs.
* *
My own introduction to the depot occurred in October of 2003. Like many people who grew up within an hour’s drive, I had vaguely heard about the depot for most of my life, had read in the newspaper about its closure and about the plans and controversies surrounding its re-use, but had never set foot within these previously heavily-secured grounds. By 2003 the guard house stood empty at the entryway, but chain-link fences and warning signs still kept the public away from all but a few hundred acres that had been cleaned.
October 2003: My wife and I are birding with the Natural Area Guardians on the depot grounds. Most of the group is looking up—at bald eagles, Tennessee warblers, kinglets, turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, barn swallows, goldfinches, blue jays, and—everyone’s favorite—cedar waxwings. A few among the group prefer to look down, at prairie plants, delighting to show us Indian grass with its yellow tint; aster, looking like little white daisies; purplish little bluestem and big bluestem with its trademark turkey foot seedhead; prairie milkweed with pods about to let loose; mullein, a small velvety plant which can be used as a medicinal tea for respiratory problems or—depending on one’s needs—as a “poor man’s toilet paper.” One of the women crushes the leaf of an aromatic sumac to let me smell the mint-like fragrance. But most startling is the prickly pear cactus, unusual in this Midwestern climate but enjoying the sandy soil. The cactus, in October, is fruiting, bearing a grape-sized fruit that one of the women says makes great jelly.
But I can’t keep my eyes away from the signs that line the road way. In a grass field, amid some rail cars: Caution—Contamination Area. On a fence lining the roadway, in faded letters: U.S. Army—Danger: Keep Out. On the door of a deteriorating building, identified to me as the old TNT recovery unit: Danger—Explosives, Keep Away. And again: Restricted Area.
Damnedest wildlife refuge I’ve ever seen.
* *
Army Headquarters at the Savanna Depot once resided in a stately, though modest, brick building at the top of a small hill, situated next to the parade grounds, across from the depot health clinic and just down the blacktop drive from the commander’s and second-in-command’s homes and the officers’ club. “Headquarters” is still spelled out in large silver-colored letters across the front, but today the building is headquarters for the environmental cleanup effort.
Shortly after I meet John Clarke, BRAC Environmental Coordinator, in his office, he shows me some photos of unexploded ordnance found on the grounds. The items are mortar shells that have lain unexploded since test-firing ceased at the depot six months after its opening in 1918.
But the UXO are just the first of the contaminants. Others are chemical toxins. For example, the buildings once used to recover TNT from obsolete and decaying munitions used to be washed down daily to reduce the risk of accidental explosion, and the resultant raw TNT worked its way into the shallow water table. The TNT “rides like a plume on the water table,” says John Rutherford.
Obsolete and decaying munitions of all types were safely detonated or otherwise destroyed in demolition circles. Again, the resultant ash has rendered the soil toxic. At the “old burning grounds,” munitions were incinerated and the ashes dumped on an island in the river backwaters. “You can dig there and find ashes ten feet down,” says Randy Nÿboer of the Illinois DNR. “Old photos show how the island grew in size due to the buried, toxic ash.” Debris at the site included 1,578 “live ordnance items,” including mortar rounds, grenades, rockets, land mines, projectiles, and fuses
Next there is the “hand grenade burial pit,” one of the more poetically named sites. Or the “Washout Facility” site, where over 67,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed and 10 million gallons of contaminated surface water were treated. At the Fire Training Area 26,000 tons of solvent- and petroleum-contaminated soil were incinerated.
But perhaps the most frustrating toxic site—now cleaned up—is one not in any way connected to the depot mission. In the early 1950s, says Clarke, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) obtained permission from the Army to bury 860 tons of a banned orchard pesticide (Dinitrolorthocresole, a larvacide) on the depot grounds. The Army dug a trench 250 feet long by 50 feet wide and 20 feet deep, and then hired three local high school students one summer to slit open the pesticide bags, one by one, and dump them into the trench from the back end of a truck. The three teenagers, covered in pesticide and sweat, ended up in the local hospital with respiratory problems.
This particular site was cleaned in the summer of 2002, the soil removed and taken to an incinerator in Texas. The groundwater, which showed traces of the pesticide, will be tested again every quarter for two years to determine whether the water has cleaned itself through filtration, or whether further cleanup will be required.
Over 100 contamination sites of soil and groundwater have been identified, and a large fan-shaped swath of the depot may potentially harbor UXO, having been within the firing range. $78 million has been spent on environmental cleanup between 1996 and 2008, says Clarke, and his best-guess estimate is that $150 million more will be required, although the USFWS has pegged the total cost closer to $350 million.
Clarke outlines the cleanup process as follows. First, due to a scarcity of records, the environmental team interviewed former depot employees to identify potential contamination sites. A site investigation follows, and a soil sample is lab-tested. Next, investigators determine the risks posed by a particular site’s toxin. If the risk exceeds acceptable parameters, Clarke will do a feasibility study to choose among a variety of alternative remedies for cleaning up a particular site, and finally, execute the cleanup, which may involve excavating the soil, shipping it to an incinerator, and sending it to an EPA-approved landfill. The area is then backfilled with clean topsoil, and prairie grasses planted.
The process for cleaning up UXOs includes doing a visual walk-over of the surface area, as well as using geophysical instruments (essentially metal detectors), radar, and sound instruments to detect anomalies underground or on the surface “that could be metallic, explosive, and worth the trouble to dig up.” The process, says Clarke, “is less of a science than is cleanup for other contaminants, so it is harder sometimes to get everyone’s agreement that a particular parcel is OK.”
Environmental cleanup is a slow process. Procedures must be agreed upon by the federal and Illinois EPA, and communication maintained with the Illinois DNR, the USFWS, and the LRA.
Economic and environmental interests both credit Illinois Congressman Don Manzullo, however, with having created a process that helps move the process forward. Frustrated by slow initial progress and the Army’s early reluctance to accept responsibility for cleanup of UXOs in particular (which are not considered a superfund waste), Manzullo formed a SMART (Strategic Management Analysis Requirements Technology) Team in August 2000 to help prioritize cleanup sites and to decide “how clean is clean,” according to Ed Britton. The SMART team includes members of the Department of Defense, the USFWS, the U.S. and Illinois EPA, as well as some local citizens. According to Britton, “With high ranking members [of each of these groups] on the team, decisions made by the team would stick and not be overturned by persons higher up on the chain of command.”
Even so, cleanup efforts are further complicated by the unpredictable availability of funds. “Funding depends on dollars appropriated by Congress and approved by the President,” says Clarke, who then points out that the Savanna Depot competes with hundreds of other closed installations, many of which face similar environmental cleanup issues. And, adds Britton, the Homeland Security and Defense Act has put cleanup at the bottom of the list of priorities for the Department of Defense.
An average of $4 million dollars per year has been appropriated since 2004, up from a scant $1 million in 2004. Bit by bit, section by section, the cleanup crawls forward. Site use determines the level of cleanup. Sometimes the Army will issue a Land Use Control (LUC), stipulating that a site has been cleaned to industrial standards, and that if future owners want to convert the property to higher levels—a school or residential use, for example—the sellers would be responsible for more intensive cleanup.
The summer of 2008 was shaping up to be a critical year for environmental cleanup and public access, says Ed Britton, as the Army intended to investigate areas alongside the river road that runs almost the length of the property up to a Mississippi overlook. The road lies within the fan-shaped swath of artillery-shelling from the Depot’s early days. The overlook has been cleared for the public, but not the areas to the side of the road itself. You can drive to the overlook, but you can’t stop along the way. “We keep finding surprises. And they’re not good surprises,” says Britton, explaining for example that two 75 mm. mortar rounds were recently found two feet off the road. Investigation of the river road “will clear—or complicate—so many things,” he adds.
Still, Britton predicts the Depot “will never be 100 % clean. That’s the nature of unexploded ordnance.”
* *
About once every half hour, a Burlington Northern and Santa Fe train lumbers past the prairie where Dan Wenny and Josh are bird banding. In between, the only sounds are the twitters and trills of grasshopper sparrows, eastern and western meadowlarks—all of which Dan identifies with a keen ear—and the honking of some geese playing in a distant backwater.
There isn’t much talking. Dan and Josh are by nature quiet. Josh, the junior from the University of Illinois-Champaign who is majoring in Integrative Biology, came to his interest in birds when he nursed one back to health on his college campus. Wenny holds a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida, and is now the Avian Ecologist for the Illinois Natural History Survey and Director of the Lost Mound Field Station.
Birds are getting caught in the nets now as quickly as Dan and Josh can untangle, measure, and band them. Josh takes a turn untangling the second bird, a male grasshopper sparrow, making slow deliberate moves as if untangling a fishing line. The bird is un-banded, so Dan demonstrates how to slip the tiny white band over the bird’s leg and dissolve the slit in the plastic (“so the bird won’t snag the band and entangle its leg in something later on”) with a drop of acetone.
Dan explains that 75% of male grasshopper sparrows are mated and territorial, guarding about a half-acre site. Twenty-five percent are unmated, and wander from territory to territory. Birds are mostly monogamous, though unmated males may sneak in from time to time. It is not uncommon to find at least one egg in a nest fertilized by a different male. Male sparrows are territorial, and have a slight variation in their songs. A male will listen, then, to see whether its neighbors are in their correct spots or are encroaching. In the spring, young males will come in and sing in different locations to see whether they’ll get chased out.
The third bird entangled is a female, identified by the brood patch on the breast. The female is taken back near to the catch site for release after processing, so she is nearer to her nest.
The fourth is a savanna sparrow, rare here, as this is the southern extremity of its range. Dan invites me to release the bird from the bag when all the measurements are taken.
Fifth is an adolescent redwing blackbird, not yet possessing the rich, red wing markings. The bird is common and is released without banding.
Next, a chipping sparrow, a small bird with a red-brownish head. Dan and Josh search to find a small enough band.
Seventh and eighth, more chipping sparrows. “These will make good practice for Josh,” Dan says. One breaks loose from Dan’s grasp before he completes measurements.
Ninth, a grasshopper sparrow.
Tenth, a grasshopper sparrow, one already caught and banded earlier this day.
Nets, fishing tackle box, and catch-and-release. Sort of like sky-fishing.
* *
Lost Mound Refuge—i.e., the 9,715 acres designated for the USFWS subsequent to environmental cleanup—is supposedly named for a mound adjacent to the premises that appeared on early maps and then somehow disappeared from later renditions. Local residents, however, say the name derives from Native American burial mounds on the same hills.
With 370 additional acres set aside for or purchased by the Illinois DNR, almost 10,000 acres will be preserved in managed wildlife refuges. Much of the acreage includes Mississippi backwaters and islands, but 4,000 of the upland acres are home to Illinois’ largest sand prairie.
Ironies abound. The sand prairie made the land less attractive to early pioneers and farmers, which in turn made it more attractive for the Army in 1916 as it scouted land for a proving grounds. When the base closed in early 2000, clean-up costs reduced the pressure to develop larger tracts for economic purposes.
Still, Lost Mound hardly signifies land “lost,” forgotten, or abandoned. The land harbors 47 species of threatened or endangered animals and plants, and includes rare sand prairie, sand savanna, dunes, tallgrass prairie, swamp, marsh, sedge meadow, sand pond, and blowout communities. Most significantly, the refuge contains an unbroken ecological continuum from forested bluffs to prairie to river bottomlands.
The sand prairie itself is an unusual feature in the Midwest, an area more usually known for its dark, rich soil. The sand hills—up to 70 feet deep along the river banks and extending 7.5 miles—resulted from an ice dam located forty miles downstream on the Mississippi near the present day Quad Cities as the continental glaciers were melting 12,000 years ago. The ice dam re-routed the river’s flow through western Illinois and created a glacial river pool backed up all the way to Savanna. Meltwater entering the glacial pool dropped its sandy sediment, bits of rock ground up by the glaciers scouring across Wisconsin and Minnesota granite. When the ice dam finally broke, the river re-established its course, the pool drained, and great sandy bluffs and river plains were left exposed at Savanna.
Even before the military began its work at the Savanna Depot, early biologists were interested in the special features of the area. In 1908, Dr. Henry Allan Gleason of the Illinois Natural History Survey traveled to the sand prairie to photograph and catalog the landforms, plants, and animal species. His work provides contemporary biologists excellent comparative data. The sand prairie of Gleason’s day harbored far fewer trees than at present, says Wenny. The area has lost thirty plant species since the 1908 study. Grasses have declined, while forbs and shrubs, like aromatic sumac, have increased.
The changes are due to a number of factors. Fire, of course, is needed to maintain a prairie and keep the trees at bay. By 1908, and certainly thereafter, there was little contiguous prairie to sustain wildfires, and the Army, for understandable reasons, wanted to minimize the risk of fire in the ammunition storage areas. When cattle were brought in to graze the grasses, particularly around the igloos, one might have expected them to mimic the effects of buffalo, the other great maintainers of natural prairie. But, says Wenny, “cattle are wimpy compared to bison, and they seek shade,” and as a result they disperse tree seeds through their droppings, leading to more forest encroachment on the prairie.
Cattle produced another significant change on the prairie landscape. Despite the sandy soil, Illinois is a region of tall grass prairie, but the cattle grazing encouraged short grasses and kept the tall grass species trimmed. When cattle grazing ceased in 1999, tall grasses made a comeback, and bird species counts began to shift back to those Gleason would have observed in 1908. Birds preferring shorter vegetation, including the grasshopper sparrow, western meadowlark, killdeer, horned lark, and vesper sparrow, have declined in recent years. But birds preferring taller vegetation—the bobolink, henslow’s sparrow, dickcissel, northern harrier, and sedge wren—are on the increase.
Discontinuing cattle grazing was a first step in the prairie restoration. But is intervention intended to produce a more “natural” prairie itself unnatural? Wenny ponders the question, and notes that many prairie fires were actually set by Native Americans to run bison into a catch and entice others back again when the fresh and luscious grasses re-sprouted.
Even so, the goal of prairie restoration is to re-establish a prairie more like the one observed by Dr. Gleason in 1908. Forest encroachment, for example, has been battled a number of ways, including girdling the bark of trees by cutting a circular swath around the girth to cut off the flow of nutrients between the roots and leaves. Girdled trees were left standing, in the hope that dead trees would provide good roosting places for birds. However, that approach backfired, as the roosting birds actually spread new tree seedlings through their feces. Recent conversations have centered around having a commercial operator bring in a small number of bison to graze the prairie, although the discussions are currently on hold. Fencing for the bison would be a major expenditure for the operator, and with cleanup funding only known on a year-to-year basis, it would be hard to predict what lands will be available. Currently there are no such locations where the bison could be safely viewed by the public, either, another stumbling block.
Prescribed burns would provide the best prairie maintenance, but that is complicated, due to the UXOs. “Explosives and fire don’t get along too well,” says Randy Nÿboer. But by Spring 2008, the USFWS and Illinois DNR received clearance to burn 945 acreas. “We scorched a lot of cedars and locusts encroaching on the grasslands,” says Britton.
The prairie and surrounding forest provide excellent habitat for all sorts of species. Two hundred thirty-five bird species have been recorded at Lost Mound, including 118 breeding species, 107 species seen only during spring or fall migration, and 10 species present only in winter.
Lost Mound Refuge is a particularly important haven for the bald eagle, recently upgraded from endangered to threatened status due to a significant rebound in population in the past two decades since the pesticide DDT was banned. By the 1960s, the entire population in the lower 48 states was down to as few as 417 nesting pairs. In recent winters, nearly 600 bald eagles have been counted in the Lost Mound Refuge alone, and several year-round nesting sites have been discovered.
Plant species, including a wide range of wildflowers, include the hairy puccoon, Indian grass, June grass, porcupine grass, prairie dandelion, sour dock, little bluestem and big bluestem, prairie milkweed, mullein, aromatic sumac, prairie dropseed, James clammyweed and, as mentioned before, the most seemingly out-of-place plant in this temperate zone, common and fragile prickly-pear cactus. Indeed, the fragile prickly-pear is not found in any other location in Illinois.
Lost Mound Refuge is also a cross-roads of species boundaries. It is a southern boundary for northern plants and birds, and a northern boundary for southern species. It overlaps eastern and western species as well. The result is a particularly rich environment of intermingled species.
Illinois, like much of the Midwest, was largely a prairie in its natural state, with 22 million grassland acres. Today, only a fraction of a percent of pure prairie remains. Lost Mound Refuge will harbor 4,000 acres of prairie/savanna, though much of it is dotted with warehouses and igloo bunkers. And with The Prairie Enthusiasts also buying lands and conservation easements on uplands bordering Lost Mound—and restoring those lands to prairie and savanna—a continuous ecosystem from the forested bluffs to the prairie to the river bottomlands has been preserved. Jim Rachuy explains that the area is large enough that “it won’t ‘leak species.’ He explains, “Think of a small island that is a completely natural place, but which has been recently cut off from the mainland. If the island too small it will lose species even without human intervention simply because it is too small to maintain a large variety. This is called ‘leaking species.’ You need a certain size of place in order to maintain the variety of species, and too often a piecemeal approach to preservation doesn’t preserve large enough spaces. Lost Mound and its adjacent grounds will be of a large enough size, however, to maintain its rich variety.”
The interesting variety of plant and animal species along with the sand prairie terrain make the Lost Mound Refuge particularly rich for scientific study, often by university biologists or their students. One interesting and useful study looked at how prairie restoration techniques can themselves disturb the prairie. According to Ed Britton, there is a stand of red cedars on the Refuge that one might have “guessed” should be removed in the interest of sand prairie restoration, but an external wildlife study showed that the stand is an important roosting site for long-eared owls. “Without this study, we might possibly have taken some ‘restoration’ action counter-productive to the owls,” Britton says.
Environmentalists are excited about Lost Mound’s future. They hope to build a migratory bird education center on the grounds. Harry Drucker envisions eco-tourism. A bicycle path may wind through the grounds in the near future. The Prairie Enthusiasts of Northern Illinois in partnership with the Natural Area Guardians will soon manage a 200-acre prairie site on the DNR grounds.
According to Dan Wenny, “Lost Mound presents a unique opportunity to combine ecological restoration, biological research, and educational experiences in a way not currently available at any other site.” Randy Nÿboer thinks of it in narrative terms. “I want our children’s children to be able to see what the land was like when Abraham Lincoln lived in Illinois.”
And Nÿboer includes development in his vision for the ideal future. “We have an opportunity to make this a showcase. It takes a lot of effort and money, but I really think we can do it. It depends on people working together who want to preserve and develop the land. There is room for both.”
* *
Beth Baranksi, a Galena resident who became involved early on as a consultant for the town of Hanover as it tried to recover from the impact of the Depot’s closing, describes the Depot as a “Rubik’s cube, with lots of faces, and where each face is affected by decisions made by the other sides.” Persons involved with economic redevelopment, environmental cleanup, and conservation each have their own vision for the Depot, and sometimes their independent actions can collide with the others’, or their individual goals may not carry as much clout as they would in a concerted effort.
In November 2007, the individual sides of the Rubik’s cube came together to form the Lost Mound Action Team, with representatives from the LRA, USFWS, Army clean-up force, local conservationists and other committed individuals. The Action Team, says member Ed Britton, is “trying to tackle problems together rather than individually.” The Action Team’s current projects include pursuing the introduction of bison onto the prairie; bringing tour buses into specifically approved areas; creating a comprehensive map that will show ownership, UXO, endangered species, trails, etc., with overlays rather than having separate maps for separate purposes; garnering public and political support for the Depot plans and activities; gaining public access to as much of the Depot as possible; getting volunteer support for projects such as trail-building; establishing a bike trail and a migratory bird education center; and reviewing on a yearly basis the cleanup projects that should receive priority funding. Baranski, an Action Team member, is particularly interested in one of the Team’s side-projects to determine whether they can save the Beaty House, an 1840s-era ferry inn that sits in the flood plain and needs to be moved.
“We’ve been at this for thirteen years,” says Britton in regard to the various interests needing to work together. “I think we’re getting it down now.”
* *
By 10 a.m. the mist netting excursion is completed. Dan and Josh carefully slide the nets off the poles, fold them, and seal them into zip-lock bags, as a knotted or torn net may cost as much as $75 to replace. I help by pulling out the poles and depositing them in a single location on the prairie, since Dan and Josh will return in a few days for another count.
When we leave, I snap a few photos of the igloos, and imagine computers one day whirring away inside them while grasshopper sparrows go about their business outside on the prairie.
I take a few detours as I leave the depot. I drive slowly past Headquarters and the parade grounds, past the health clinic and the officers’ club, past the officers’ and the commander’s homes, past the machine shops, fire station, and security house, and exit past the squarish indentation in the pavement where the guardhouse once stood.
I never knew these grounds when 7,000 civilians and a thousand Army personnel swarmed about. I never knew the prairie in its natural state or sailed the icy waters of a glacial lake. I never saw artillery fly or trucks dumping toxic loads into gouged trenches, and never felt the sting of panic when the nearby communities realized the loss of jobs. I never saw the exodus of military wares and munitions.
But you can feel it all here, feel it all. It’s out there, buried, on the prairie. Some of it is toxic, I’ll grant you that. But much of it, very much, is pure treasure.
SOURCES CONSULTED
“Base Re-Alignment and Closure.” GlobalSecurity.Org. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/brac.htm. 27 September 2004.
Division of Conservation Planning. “Lost Mound Unit, Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge Environmental Assessment.” http://www.fws.gov/Midwest/planning/LostMound/index.html . 14 April 2008.
Erikson, Kurt. “Tiny Thomson Still Waiting for Prison to Pay Off.” http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2007/12/il_tiny_thomson.html.
15 December 2007.
Kunke, RuthAnne, Inga Olsen, and Ross E. Paulson. 80 Years of Service—Savanna Ordnance Depot: In the Defense of Our Nation. Augustana College, 1996.
“Lost Mound National Wildlife Refuge.” Illinois Department of Natural Resources & Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge publication.
“Lost Mound National Wildlife Refuge: Environmental Assessment.” United States Fish and Wildlife Service. http://midwest.fws.gov/planning/lostmoundtop.htm. 8 September 2003.
Reber, Craig. “Lost Mound Unit Makes Progress, Faces Challenges.” The Telegraph Herald. 27 August, 2003.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Region 5 Superfund—Savanna Army Depot Activity.” http://www.epa.gov/R5Super/npl/illinois/IL3210020803.htm. Accessed 4 April 2008.
I would like to thank the following persons for allowing me to interview them, tag along with them on their work, and return with follow-up questions:
[1] Dan Wenny was Associate Research Scientist for the Illinois Natural History Survey, a division of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources at the time of writing.
Morning mists roil just before sunup on this mid-May dawn, concealing the Mississippi River valley hidden beneath. But by the time the sun gains the horizon at 5:45 a.m. as I turn off Highway 84 onto the former grounds of the Savanna (Illinois) Army Depot, the mist has largely dissipated and the valley lies exposed.
I am going mist-netting and bird-banding with Dan Wenny of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources[1] (DNR) at the Lost Mound Field Station, located within the old depot grounds along the Mississippi River in northwest Illinois. The task at hand is to track bird species; today we are studying whether the grasshopper sparrow is increasing or decreasing on the sand prairie, in the former home of bombs.
It is an intriguing, exciting, and troubling place, depending on the story one discovers out here on the prairie. I could tell you about the Army Depot, once employing over 7,000 civilians at its peak during World War II, and then shrinking, edict by edict, until its closure in March 2000. Or I could tell you about the 9,000-plus acres of wildlife refuge harboring 47 threatened or endangered species of plants and animals and the largest sand-prairie remnant in the state of Illinois. There is a story to be told about 3,000 acres of beginning and potential economic rebirth. Or should I tell another story, this one about buried contaminants, an environmental clean-up site that could cost taxpayers up to $350 million?
Over here there are coneflowers. Over there you had better not step. Just where does the treasure lie, and where does one find poison?
This morning is pure treasure. Along with student intern Josh Conroy of University of Illinois-Champaign, Wenny is setting mist nets, wispy badminton-like nets strung between upright poles in the hopes that grasshopper sparrows will absent-mindedly fly into and temporarily entangle themselves until the DNR specialist retrieves them, charts their measurements, and places an identification band on their legs before releasing them. For the prairie is returning, re-establishing itself on a unique ground, and Wenny wants to know what, in turn, is happening to the wildlife here.
But there are other intrigues to chart as well. What happens to a community when its largest historical employer—the government—packs up and leaves town? What happens when the government leaves behind an environmental mess and a clean-up process that is painstakingly slow? What happens when creative thinkers are unleashed to create a wildlife refuge and rebuild the economic base? And what if this story is played out time and time again at hundreds of closed military installations across the country?
* *
The Savanna Army Depot story begins after the onset of World War I. The U.S. Congress, recognizing the need for permanent war-readiness, authorized, among other facilities, a Midwest “proving grounds” for test-firing weapons and artillery. In 1917, according to a study conducted by nearby Augustana College historians, the 13,000-acre Savanna site was chosen for several reasons. The area was not adjacent to any cities, yet was only sixty miles from the Rock Island (Illinois) Arsenal that produced many of the large guns to be tested. The sandy river-side prairie was less agriculturally productive than the prevailing rich, black Midwestern soil. The river bottomland with its sloughs and myriad islands provided a buffer from river traffic, but the railroad passing at its eastern boundary would offer good means of importing machinery and resources and exporting munitions.
The base officially opened in December 1918, and the artillery began to fly. Many of the munitions fired were blanks, with a focus on testing the accuracy and distance of the weaponry, not the munitions. But some of it was live ammo, and not all of it exploded on impact. Within a year, the base’s mission was changed to storing munitions, but the months of test-firing had produced the depot’s first contaminant—potentially unexploded ordnance, or UXO—that still plague the base grounds today. Before any land can be cleared for private ownership or for public access, the land has to be swept and sometimes upturned and sifted for UXO.
During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the depot grew, with over two hundred warehouses built for housing munitions. More volatile munitions required over 400 “igloos,” i.e., steel-reinforced cement bunkers shaped like domed ice igloos, each with a single vertical face to house a massive steel door. The igloos ranged in size from about 1,100 to 1,800 square feet of floor space. Bulldozers plowed two feet of topsoil up over the sloping sides and roof, and grasses were planted over the tops to obscure their visibility from the air. One igloo blew up in 1948, leaving a crater one hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep, still apparent today. The blast registered on seismograph recordings 120 miles away in Chicago, and the Savanna and Hanover locals reported blown-out windows and cracked plaster. The four-ton steel door was never found. Local lore puts it somewhere at the bottom of the Mississippi.
And so it went out on the prairie, where anyone who didn’t want to work on the farm could usually find work at the depot, and many did both. Still, depot activity increased and declined according to the military needs of each era. In 1939, only143 civilians worked at the depot, but that figure rocketed to7,195 by 1942, 36% of whom were female, the renowned Rosie the Riveters of World War II. Civilian employees lived in hastily constructed rows of apartments in the quiet nearby towns of Hanover and Savanna, or commuted from towns an hour or more drive away.
During World War II, the depot’s mission expanded to include production and recycling of munitions, and later included a training school for maintenance and handling of munitions. Depot employees prided themselves on their work; munitions shipped from the depot were stamped S.O.D. (Savanna Ordnance Depot), and soldiers frequently sent word of appreciation for the job well-done. The bombs used in the Jimmy Doolittle Raid, the first U.S. retaliation on Japan after Pearl Harbor, were produced at and shipped from the Savanna Depot.
After World War II, the depot entered a slow decline, although each new military engagement produced a bubble of employment. The 1950s typically engaged about 2,000 civilian workers; by the 1960s the number stood at 1,000; in 1974 there were 750, and in 1995, when the depot was placed on the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the number of workers had dwindled to 450.
Clouds were gathering out on the prairie. In 1977, the depot was first considered for closure, but local businessmen banded together and successfully lobbied Washington to keep it open. The inevitable finally occurred, however, when a new BRAC was formed under rules preventing individual bases on the list being “rescued” by Congress. The Savanna Army Depot was placed on the list in 1995, and closure occurred in 2000.
The closing of the Savanna Depot is a story echoed across the country. At least 97 major installations have been closed nationwide since 1988 and another 33 have been included in a closure plan submitted in 2005, each presenting some mixture of economic and environmental problems and opportunities. It would be easy for an isolated outpost like Savanna to get lost in the shuffle.
A drive-through of the Savanna Depot grounds today reveals a ghost town of abandoned military buildings here on the prairie, surrounded by farms, river bluffs, and the steadfast Mississippi River. Today I enter the grounds past the offices of the Local Redevelopment Authority (LRA), cross the railroad tracks into the compound and find—mostly abandoned—the security office, fire station, NCO barracks, gym and recreation center, mess hall, bowling alley, commissary, theater, pool, and officers club.
Environmental clean-up activities are directed from the Headquarters building, and new businesses occupy the ammunitions school, commander’s and second-in-command’s houses, and a fraction of the two hundred plus warehouses and storage buildings. In an effort to make the grounds more welcoming, the guard house has recently been removed, as well as an old army sign that once warned: “All persons, their possessions, and vehicles are liable to search upon entering, during their stay, or upon leaving this installation.”
The impact of the depot closure on the nearby towns of Hanover and Savanna was muted somewhat because employee numbers had been dwindling for decades, and because many of the remaining workers were at or near retirement age. Still, the local populations suffered. From the1980 to the 2000 census (by which time many workers had already left), Hanover lost nearly 200 of its previous 1,000 residents; Savanna, slightly larger, lost 1,000 of its 4,500.
But towns survive, and people find work. I met Marty Sheehy and Marty Altensey, two long-time depot workers who found employment at one of the first new businesses on the grounds, one morning in March 2004. Proud of their work, past and present, they had stories to tell, building on and sometimes correcting each other’s memories. Sheehy, a 35-year employee, dutifully crossed the river every day from Bellevue, IA, to work in the machine shop, where he eventually became Chief of Ammunition Peculiar Equipment (A.P.E.) shop. A skilled machinist, Sheehy built A.P.E. to test the shelf-life of ammunition by exploding samples inside a safebox, x-ray machines to test ammunition for defects, and hundreds more specially-designed A.P.E. for a variety of purposes. Sheehy found work in the same machine shop for Stickle Warehousing, doing repairs and special orders for the business’ truck and ocean fleet and for other local businesses.
Marty Altensey, a 23-year employee of the depot, had worked mostly in inventory and stock, unloading ammunition into igloos and warehouses, and loading it again onto trains and trucks for shipping. He unloaded mustard gas from the igloos when it was shipped to Colorado for disposal. He worked on the ammunition lines, retrieving usable TNT from old, obsolete projectiles for use in new weaponry. He drove a fork lift, loading weapons for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He helped detonate and destroy old, decaying weapons. He, too, found work with Stickle Warehousing, one of the first fruits of economic recovery.
For Sheehy and Altensey, depot memories were never far removed from their new positions. “There are still pictures back in the machine shop from the army days,” says Sheehy, “photos of people from back then, an old phone book. You come in to work, see the fire station, the two smoke stacks from the factory areas, and it gets to you.”
Altensey agrees. “You get back in a storage area, you see someone’s name written on a wall and think, ‘I remember him.’ I expect to see a guard at the entryway. Now it’s like a ghost town.”
* *
We load the DNR pickup with supplies for the morning’s mist netting. Poles and nets, charts for data entry, and Wenny’s fishing tackle box with its supply of leg bands, banding pliers for handling the tiny bands, measuring instruments, solutions for securing the leg bands, etc. “The guys at the hardware store know not to ask me anymore what I’m using the stuff for,” he jokes. “They had a field day when I said I was catching sparrows.”
Out in the pickup the windshield fogs against the morning’s still-brisk air. We detour en route to the study area, around a “demolition circle” from the 1930s which is being cleaned of the contaminants left behind when obsolete weapons were disassembled, detonated, and sometimes burned. On the detour we pass hundreds of empty igloos. Today a deer races down from the top of one of the igloos as we pass.
At the prairie site, Dan and Josh set up about ten mist nets, usually around aromatic sumac bushes, where grasshopper sparrows often perch and sing. Most of the nets are set out singly in a variety of locations within a short walk, but two or three are set at angles to each other around larger bushes. The birds fly into the netting from their various perches and get entangled. “They’re easier to catch in early spring when the males chase each other around and don’t notice the net,” Wenny says. Later in the season, Wenny uses “Frank,” a stuffed grasshopper sparrow accompanied by a CD of a male bird song, to lure his catches. Other sparrows will come to chase it away, attack it, and get caught in the netting. “Frank’s had to be sewn up a number of times,” Wenny explains.
Dan easily identifies bird calls. “That buzzy trill is the grasshopper sparrow’s song,” he says. The prairie is seeing an increasing population among many of its bird species since the closing of the depot. The grasshopper sparrow, however, is in comparative decline, but ironically its decline signifies the prairie’s recovery. The sparrow, a short-grass bird, was well-adapted to the well-clipped turf of the army days when cattle were grazed in and around the igloos to reduce the chances of prairie fire. Cattle grazing was discontinued in 1999. Since then, tall grass species have been able to grow to full stature, and tall-grass birds have increased in population.
The first bird entangled in the net is a male grasshopper sparrow, already banded in 2002. Dan marks the location of the catch on his map, and then measures the bird. Wing length: 63 mm. The tail measures 45 mm., the leg 19.7 mm. He measures its fat deposit near the sternum: not much in spring, but by fall the bird will have stored up fat for migration. Its bill measures 12.7 mm in length, 5.4 mm in width, 6.1 mm in depth. Wenny puts the bird in a cloth bag and measures its weight at 18 grams. He checks for parasites and finds small mites on the wings, not unusual. He inspects the feathers (which wear down from abrasion, and are thus replaced every year), but these look good. He shows Josh how to check for gender by blowing on the belly feathers. Females have a fleshy brood patch beneath the feathers that fills with blood when they are sitting on eggs, providing warmth for incubation. Finally, all measurements and checks taken, Wenny releases the bird, which flies off eagerly to a nearby sumac.
* *
When the Savanna Depot was put on the BRAC list in 1995, the Army directed Jo Daviess and Carroll Counties to establish a nonprofit Local Redevelopment Authority (LRA)—following the closure procedure typical for other bases boarded up during the 1980s and 90s—to devise an economic plan for re-use of the land.
Environmental and economic interests often found themselves at odds in the early post-military years. Federal agencies have first rights to request lands vacated by other federal agencies, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) initially asked for 11,000 of the 13,000 acres, according to Ed Britton, current Manager of the Upper Mississippi River National Fish and Wildlife Refuge—Savanna District. “This set off an anti-fed atmosphere in the community,” says Britton, as people worried that economic interests were going to be squeezed out. Unfortunately, says Britton, the USFWS was then between regional managers, and no one was there to explain that this was merely the first phase of a long negotiation.
Economic interests were hardly on the ropes, however, and the LRA hired a lawyer in its quest to obtain all the uplands as well as the lower post, where roads and existing buildings were concentrated. The first LRA board drafted an ambitious plan that included a mix of commercial development, golf courses, and upscale homes situated on top of the sand dunes adjacent to the river. Only 600 remaining acres were designated for industrial development. The Army questioned whether the reuse plan was realistic. However, they recommended the LRA let the planning phase mature and then resubmit their reuse plan within a year, says David Ylinen, former LRA Executive Director. Later, after investigating the feasibility for major housing and green space development, the LRA determined that the original plan was probably too ambitious.
In addition, says BRAC Environmental Coordinator John Clarke, standards for environmental cleanup vary according to the use planned for the land. A residential area needs to be “clean enough for kids to play in the dirt for twenty years and not be harmed.” Cleanup standards for commercial and industrial use are less rigorous, and for recreational use even less so. Thus the irony emerges that the excessive environmental contamination has made more lands available for the wildlife refuge, even though public access is severely restricted.
A second early controversy between environmentalists and economic interests stemmed from members of the first LRA who wanted to build a prison on the depot grounds. According to Bob Wehrle, who describes himself as one of the few early LRA members who “took the environmental perspective to blend economic development and preservation,” the issue wasn’t whether a prison was appropriate use of the land, but where it ought to be located. A region on the southern end of the depot, or south post, had been identified for economic development because it already had some basic infrastructure, with roads, water and electrical service, and many existing buildings.
However, says Wehrle, environmentalists were stunned when then-Illinois-Governor James Edgar announced that the northern sand prairie would house what would soon be dubbed, derisively, as the “prison on the prairie.” The site selection was particularly distasteful to environmentalists, as it would not only destroy the rare sand prairie but would also disrupt the largest uninterrupted continuum of bio-regions—from river bottomland to prairie to wooded blufflands—along the entire upper Mississippi River valley.
Environmentalists suspected the motives of the prison proponents. Placing the prison in the upper sand prairie would remove it from the southern economic zone, whose development might be hampered by the inclusion of a prison.
But most of all, the three self-identified LRA environmentalists—Wehrle, John Rutherford, and Jim Rachuy—were dismayed over the process. The prairie site had never been discussed and agreed upon by the full LRA board. Soon another local resident, Harry Drucker, helped form the Friends of the Depot—which Wehrle, Rutherford, and Rachuy joined—and secured legal help from the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. The environmental lawyers discovered that the original LRA Director (prior to Ylinen) and a few additional members obtained and submitted application forms to the Illinois Dept. of Corrections (IDOC) requesting the prison be considered for this site. Drucker says the Friends were “outraged that the decision-making had been done secretly, behind closed doors.”
The Friends began writing letters to government officials and alerted the Chicago Tribune to the matter. The new revelations caused the governor to drop his endorsement of the prison proposal. The governor shifted the location of the prison site to the nearby town of Thomson, Illinois, away from the depot but still within commuting distance for potential workers from the community.
For several years the 1600-bed prison stood empty, save for a single security watch guard, due to state budget cuts in prison funding. By 2008—seven years after its completion—the facility housed only 140 inmates and provided employment for 72 individuals, rather than the 600 anticipated jobs.
When the Prison-on-the-Prairie controversy was at its height, the original LRA had met an impasse between those members with environmental interests and those with economic development interests. For harmony’s sake, the Jo Daviess and Carroll County boards reconfigured the LRA membership, a move that had been planned anyway to transition from a “planning LRA” to an “implementation LRA,”—and the new board began making headway. A few more plan drafts were made and a few land trades occurred. They agreed on the current distribution of land. Subject to environmental cleanup, the USFWS will receive 9,715 acres for the Lost Mound Unit Refuge, the Illinois DNR 270 acres, the Army Corp of Engineers 145, and the LRA 2,947 acres for the economic zone first named Eagles Landing Development and then renamed Savanna Depot Business, Industry and Technology Park. “Things are working cooperatively now,” says Britton, and those involved in economic development tend to agree.
Several economic ventures were already underway at the depot when I first visited with business owners and planners in 2004. By 2008 a new LRA Director, Diane Komiskey, reported new names and new ventures, but was quick to point out that the average closed military facility takes about twenty-five years to be re-established for other uses. “And we’re not average,” she says, with the depot’s status as a superfund cleanup site and the economic disadvantage of low population in Jo Daviess and Carroll counties.
Bit by bit, however, turn-around is on the horizon. One of the first developments was Stickle Warehousing, owned and operated by Rick Stickle when I visited in 2004. Stickle made the first actual land purchase transaction at the depot. In December 2003, he presented Ylinen’s LRA with a check for $948,535 for 14 warehouses on 44 acres of environmentally-clean property. Stickle also had a lease-purchase agreement for an additional 200 buildings—mostly warehouses—on the depot grounds, about 100 of which he was using to store more than 6,000 truckloads of materials.
The operations required significant re-investment. Some of the warehouses lacked electricity, so Stickle installed lines and transformers to 50 buildings at a cost of $185,000, and then wired the buildings internally, repaired masonry, sanitized and patched floors, installed safety features and replaced overhead doors. In all, he had invested about $1.5 million in repairs and upgrades. By 2008, the Warehousing operation was run by Midwest 3PL (Third Party Logistics), storing materials brought in by rail or truck.
Another early entrepreneur was Warren Jackman, a maritime lawyer by trade who started his international practice in 1951, and who has lived in the nearby Galena Territory for over twenty years. Jackman’s office at the depot in 2004—located on the first floor of a handsome brick home formerly used by an army officer—was adorned with paintings and drawings of ships, sailors, and mermaids. But if his walls reflected his past, his thinking was poised for the future. The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad passes along the depot’s eastern boundary, and 68 miles of rail track wind through the property itself, a remnant of the days when munitions would be shipped in and out of the yard by rail. Jackman seized the opportunity to create Riverport Railroad, storing excess railcars for customers of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe.
By 2008 Riverport Railroad had 57 miles of track available that could store 2,000 railcars. In 2007, for example, the company’s tracks were filled to capacity with new tanker cars that had been built for ethanol transportation but had not yet been pressed them into service. For older rail cars, another rail company, RESCAR, offers repair and cleaning services. RESCAR has become the Depot Park’s largest employer, with 32 of the 53 persons currently employed there—still a far cry from the civilian employment in the glory days.
One of the most out-of-the-box developments, however, involves the igloo-shaped ammunition bunkers out on the prairie. In the aftermath of 9-11, major financial institutions and corporations recognized the need to keep back-up computer data storage far away from metropolitan sites. “Bunkertown” arose with plans to transform the old munitions bunkers into safe, secure and survivable computer-data centers, connecting them to the outside world through fiber optic cable and other redundant high-tech modes. The igloos’ two-foot thick concrete and earthen roof cover combine to produce a cave-like, near-constant year-round cool temperature, perfect for computer facilities. And because the venture will have relatively low environmental impact, the USFWS agreed to allow the bunker project on the refuge grounds, epitomizing the current level of cooperation between environmental and economic interests. Besides, no one was quite sure what to do with the igloos. They would have been expensive to tear down, and to do so would have disturbed the prairie as much as than letting them stand.
Another hi-tech entrepreneur, Gary Frederick, was drawing considerable interest by 2008. Frederick, a mechanical engineer who’d spent his career doing research and development in Arizona, retired to his family’s home farm in the local hills, but “couldn’t keep still,” and continued with his engineering research in his home basement. By October of 2007 he’d purchased an old educational building at the Depot and had begun Fluidic Micro-controls, which designs and machines tiny air-powered sensors, controls, and actuators that can be used in micro-machining tools, aerospace business, industrial automation, etc. Another product in the works is a pneumatic pillow that can set under micro-machines for super-stable vibration resistance.
But Frederick found himself forming another business venture when a neighboring farmer stopped in his driveway one day and proclaimed, “I want to make lightning in the back of my pickup.” When the farmer explained what he meant, Frederick joked, “You’ve just ruined my retirement,” and set out to work with the man and another farmer, another retired engineer, and a host of researchers from Northern Illinois University to develop a process by which farmers could create their own nitrogen fertilizer on-site at their farms. Using centuries-old knowledge that lightning strikes can fertilize the soil, the process involves jolting an electrical current at air passing through a tube, which separates out nitrogen from the oxygen. The nitrogen is channeled into a water bath, creating nitric acid, which then can be mixed with lime to create a slurry to be spread as nitrogen fertilizer on farm fields, replacing anhydrous ammonia that must be made at commercial sites and dangerously transported on the highway by farmers taking it to their fields. The on-site nitrogen producer, running continuously for a year, could produce enough fertilizer for a 1,000 acre farm and could be powered by plugging it into the traditional electrical grid, by on-site wind energy from wind turbines small enough to be hidden in barn cupolas, or through a power-generating system that converts biomass to electricity. Frederick’s company, N-Ovation, has received a three-year $1 million USDA grant to work with Northern Illinois University on the biomass conversion alternative.
Frederick’s vision is to create a farm alternative-energy center at the Depot. Six to eight to technicians from NIU will soon visit the Depot to consider establishing research space there. The fledgling N-Ovation company takes note of Illinois Senator Barak Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucuses, in which he proclaimed that the U.S. must “harness the ingenuity of farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all.” The N-Ovation project hits all of these fronts.
Frederick is convinced that the way to attract jobs to the Depot is to “attract professionals to the beauty of this area,” as reflected in his first full-time hire, Drew Wittey, a mechanical engineering graduate from Northwestern University. Typical of a new generation of professionals, Drew likes the laidback, innovative style of a small company doing cutting-edge technology in a rural setting. Drew is the first full-time resident at the Depot Park since the closing of the military facility, as he lives in housing that formerly served married army personnel, rides his bike to the office, and works in jeans and sandals.
And there were other tenants setting up shop at the Depot Park as of April 2008 as well, including: Bryer Productions, a photographer; Ancient Tree Builders, a cabinetry industry; BNC Bulletproof, building bullet-proof enclosures for ATMs and bank tellers; and A & B Holdings, which is converting the Commander’s and Second-In-Command’s houses into corporate retreat centers. Also, the non-profit Rock Island Technological Society has opened up a railroad museum and Welcome Center for the Savanna Depot Park and has plans to develop an Army Depot Museum as well.
The first property sale had occurred in 2003. By 2008, 80% of the property within the economic zone had been sold or leased. Even so, projections for the final transfer of property to the LRA keep shifting to the future, largely due to environmental cleanup. The Army originally expected to disperse the final acres by 2007. Now that estimate is for 2016.
The LRA is “a twilight organization,” said former LRA Director Ylinen “When the last property is sold, the LRA turns the lights out and disappears.”
Progress toward fulfilling the economic goals of the LRA has been slow, especially so in generating jobs for new employees, but appears to be gaining momentum. “There were false expectations, initially,” says current LRA Director Komiskey. But looking at the array of current tenants, she surmises, “I’m not looking for a home run. I’m looking for a lot of base hits. You can win the game that way, too.”
Even so, beneath the local optimism lies a persistent worry that maybe, just maybe, the dream will not come together as planned. Will location, government cutbacks for environmental cleanup and wildlife management, and economic competition from the larger nearby communities conspire to scuttle the hard work and vision of environmentalists and developers alike? Chuck Wenstrom, of the Natural Area Guardians, says that he is optimistic “but those concerns are also blowing in the wind and can be felt out on the prairie. Some days the wind and her song is bittersweet.”
And not everyone agrees that the economic and environmental interests are meshing as nicely as it would appear. Some have worried that the igloo technology project may not be as environmentally friendly as perceived, due to the ground disturbance from laying fiber optic line and the likelihood of frequent visits by technicians. Some worry whether rail-car cleaning will create new environmental problems. And Dan Wenny laments that the best section of prairie is located within the LRA footprint, slated for future development.
And every once in awhile, a tempest still flairs. Recently, the LRA wanted to plant a row of austrees, a fast-growing, non-native willow to act as a screen. Environmentalists expressed concerns that the trees will be a new invasive species, quick to spread in the sandy soil. The trees were planted anyway.
But the general mood is positive that economic and environmental interests can cooperate at the depot. When environmentalists expressed concern several years ago that proposed gyroplane security flights over the server farm (computers in the igloos) would disturb rare birds in the fly zone over the refuge, the plan was nixed. Warren Jackman, himself a member of the Natural Area Guardians, says, “I don’t really believe that there ever was an uneasiness between conservation and development interests. It was simply that conservationists were not sure of what economic developers had in mind. What’s important is to have an educated dialog going on at all times.”
Diane Komiskey sounds a guardedly optimistic note. Economic and environmental interests will mesh, she says, “as long as we each respect one another’s territory. I respect their responsibility to protect species and habitat. I would in turn expect them to respect our responsibility to create jobs.
* *
My own introduction to the depot occurred in October of 2003. Like many people who grew up within an hour’s drive, I had vaguely heard about the depot for most of my life, had read in the newspaper about its closure and about the plans and controversies surrounding its re-use, but had never set foot within these previously heavily-secured grounds. By 2003 the guard house stood empty at the entryway, but chain-link fences and warning signs still kept the public away from all but a few hundred acres that had been cleaned.
October 2003: My wife and I are birding with the Natural Area Guardians on the depot grounds. Most of the group is looking up—at bald eagles, Tennessee warblers, kinglets, turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, barn swallows, goldfinches, blue jays, and—everyone’s favorite—cedar waxwings. A few among the group prefer to look down, at prairie plants, delighting to show us Indian grass with its yellow tint; aster, looking like little white daisies; purplish little bluestem and big bluestem with its trademark turkey foot seedhead; prairie milkweed with pods about to let loose; mullein, a small velvety plant which can be used as a medicinal tea for respiratory problems or—depending on one’s needs—as a “poor man’s toilet paper.” One of the women crushes the leaf of an aromatic sumac to let me smell the mint-like fragrance. But most startling is the prickly pear cactus, unusual in this Midwestern climate but enjoying the sandy soil. The cactus, in October, is fruiting, bearing a grape-sized fruit that one of the women says makes great jelly.
But I can’t keep my eyes away from the signs that line the road way. In a grass field, amid some rail cars: Caution—Contamination Area. On a fence lining the roadway, in faded letters: U.S. Army—Danger: Keep Out. On the door of a deteriorating building, identified to me as the old TNT recovery unit: Danger—Explosives, Keep Away. And again: Restricted Area.
Damnedest wildlife refuge I’ve ever seen.
* *
Army Headquarters at the Savanna Depot once resided in a stately, though modest, brick building at the top of a small hill, situated next to the parade grounds, across from the depot health clinic and just down the blacktop drive from the commander’s and second-in-command’s homes and the officers’ club. “Headquarters” is still spelled out in large silver-colored letters across the front, but today the building is headquarters for the environmental cleanup effort.
Shortly after I meet John Clarke, BRAC Environmental Coordinator, in his office, he shows me some photos of unexploded ordnance found on the grounds. The items are mortar shells that have lain unexploded since test-firing ceased at the depot six months after its opening in 1918.
But the UXO are just the first of the contaminants. Others are chemical toxins. For example, the buildings once used to recover TNT from obsolete and decaying munitions used to be washed down daily to reduce the risk of accidental explosion, and the resultant raw TNT worked its way into the shallow water table. The TNT “rides like a plume on the water table,” says John Rutherford.
Obsolete and decaying munitions of all types were safely detonated or otherwise destroyed in demolition circles. Again, the resultant ash has rendered the soil toxic. At the “old burning grounds,” munitions were incinerated and the ashes dumped on an island in the river backwaters. “You can dig there and find ashes ten feet down,” says Randy Nÿboer of the Illinois DNR. “Old photos show how the island grew in size due to the buried, toxic ash.” Debris at the site included 1,578 “live ordnance items,” including mortar rounds, grenades, rockets, land mines, projectiles, and fuses
Next there is the “hand grenade burial pit,” one of the more poetically named sites. Or the “Washout Facility” site, where over 67,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed and 10 million gallons of contaminated surface water were treated. At the Fire Training Area 26,000 tons of solvent- and petroleum-contaminated soil were incinerated.
But perhaps the most frustrating toxic site—now cleaned up—is one not in any way connected to the depot mission. In the early 1950s, says Clarke, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) obtained permission from the Army to bury 860 tons of a banned orchard pesticide (Dinitrolorthocresole, a larvacide) on the depot grounds. The Army dug a trench 250 feet long by 50 feet wide and 20 feet deep, and then hired three local high school students one summer to slit open the pesticide bags, one by one, and dump them into the trench from the back end of a truck. The three teenagers, covered in pesticide and sweat, ended up in the local hospital with respiratory problems.
This particular site was cleaned in the summer of 2002, the soil removed and taken to an incinerator in Texas. The groundwater, which showed traces of the pesticide, will be tested again every quarter for two years to determine whether the water has cleaned itself through filtration, or whether further cleanup will be required.
Over 100 contamination sites of soil and groundwater have been identified, and a large fan-shaped swath of the depot may potentially harbor UXO, having been within the firing range. $78 million has been spent on environmental cleanup between 1996 and 2008, says Clarke, and his best-guess estimate is that $150 million more will be required, although the USFWS has pegged the total cost closer to $350 million.
Clarke outlines the cleanup process as follows. First, due to a scarcity of records, the environmental team interviewed former depot employees to identify potential contamination sites. A site investigation follows, and a soil sample is lab-tested. Next, investigators determine the risks posed by a particular site’s toxin. If the risk exceeds acceptable parameters, Clarke will do a feasibility study to choose among a variety of alternative remedies for cleaning up a particular site, and finally, execute the cleanup, which may involve excavating the soil, shipping it to an incinerator, and sending it to an EPA-approved landfill. The area is then backfilled with clean topsoil, and prairie grasses planted.
The process for cleaning up UXOs includes doing a visual walk-over of the surface area, as well as using geophysical instruments (essentially metal detectors), radar, and sound instruments to detect anomalies underground or on the surface “that could be metallic, explosive, and worth the trouble to dig up.” The process, says Clarke, “is less of a science than is cleanup for other contaminants, so it is harder sometimes to get everyone’s agreement that a particular parcel is OK.”
Environmental cleanup is a slow process. Procedures must be agreed upon by the federal and Illinois EPA, and communication maintained with the Illinois DNR, the USFWS, and the LRA.
Economic and environmental interests both credit Illinois Congressman Don Manzullo, however, with having created a process that helps move the process forward. Frustrated by slow initial progress and the Army’s early reluctance to accept responsibility for cleanup of UXOs in particular (which are not considered a superfund waste), Manzullo formed a SMART (Strategic Management Analysis Requirements Technology) Team in August 2000 to help prioritize cleanup sites and to decide “how clean is clean,” according to Ed Britton. The SMART team includes members of the Department of Defense, the USFWS, the U.S. and Illinois EPA, as well as some local citizens. According to Britton, “With high ranking members [of each of these groups] on the team, decisions made by the team would stick and not be overturned by persons higher up on the chain of command.”
Even so, cleanup efforts are further complicated by the unpredictable availability of funds. “Funding depends on dollars appropriated by Congress and approved by the President,” says Clarke, who then points out that the Savanna Depot competes with hundreds of other closed installations, many of which face similar environmental cleanup issues. And, adds Britton, the Homeland Security and Defense Act has put cleanup at the bottom of the list of priorities for the Department of Defense.
An average of $4 million dollars per year has been appropriated since 2004, up from a scant $1 million in 2004. Bit by bit, section by section, the cleanup crawls forward. Site use determines the level of cleanup. Sometimes the Army will issue a Land Use Control (LUC), stipulating that a site has been cleaned to industrial standards, and that if future owners want to convert the property to higher levels—a school or residential use, for example—the sellers would be responsible for more intensive cleanup.
The summer of 2008 was shaping up to be a critical year for environmental cleanup and public access, says Ed Britton, as the Army intended to investigate areas alongside the river road that runs almost the length of the property up to a Mississippi overlook. The road lies within the fan-shaped swath of artillery-shelling from the Depot’s early days. The overlook has been cleared for the public, but not the areas to the side of the road itself. You can drive to the overlook, but you can’t stop along the way. “We keep finding surprises. And they’re not good surprises,” says Britton, explaining for example that two 75 mm. mortar rounds were recently found two feet off the road. Investigation of the river road “will clear—or complicate—so many things,” he adds.
Still, Britton predicts the Depot “will never be 100 % clean. That’s the nature of unexploded ordnance.”
* *
About once every half hour, a Burlington Northern and Santa Fe train lumbers past the prairie where Dan Wenny and Josh are bird banding. In between, the only sounds are the twitters and trills of grasshopper sparrows, eastern and western meadowlarks—all of which Dan identifies with a keen ear—and the honking of some geese playing in a distant backwater.
There isn’t much talking. Dan and Josh are by nature quiet. Josh, the junior from the University of Illinois-Champaign who is majoring in Integrative Biology, came to his interest in birds when he nursed one back to health on his college campus. Wenny holds a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida, and is now the Avian Ecologist for the Illinois Natural History Survey and Director of the Lost Mound Field Station.
Birds are getting caught in the nets now as quickly as Dan and Josh can untangle, measure, and band them. Josh takes a turn untangling the second bird, a male grasshopper sparrow, making slow deliberate moves as if untangling a fishing line. The bird is un-banded, so Dan demonstrates how to slip the tiny white band over the bird’s leg and dissolve the slit in the plastic (“so the bird won’t snag the band and entangle its leg in something later on”) with a drop of acetone.
Dan explains that 75% of male grasshopper sparrows are mated and territorial, guarding about a half-acre site. Twenty-five percent are unmated, and wander from territory to territory. Birds are mostly monogamous, though unmated males may sneak in from time to time. It is not uncommon to find at least one egg in a nest fertilized by a different male. Male sparrows are territorial, and have a slight variation in their songs. A male will listen, then, to see whether its neighbors are in their correct spots or are encroaching. In the spring, young males will come in and sing in different locations to see whether they’ll get chased out.
The third bird entangled is a female, identified by the brood patch on the breast. The female is taken back near to the catch site for release after processing, so she is nearer to her nest.
The fourth is a savanna sparrow, rare here, as this is the southern extremity of its range. Dan invites me to release the bird from the bag when all the measurements are taken.
Fifth is an adolescent redwing blackbird, not yet possessing the rich, red wing markings. The bird is common and is released without banding.
Next, a chipping sparrow, a small bird with a red-brownish head. Dan and Josh search to find a small enough band.
Seventh and eighth, more chipping sparrows. “These will make good practice for Josh,” Dan says. One breaks loose from Dan’s grasp before he completes measurements.
Ninth, a grasshopper sparrow.
Tenth, a grasshopper sparrow, one already caught and banded earlier this day.
Nets, fishing tackle box, and catch-and-release. Sort of like sky-fishing.
* *
Lost Mound Refuge—i.e., the 9,715 acres designated for the USFWS subsequent to environmental cleanup—is supposedly named for a mound adjacent to the premises that appeared on early maps and then somehow disappeared from later renditions. Local residents, however, say the name derives from Native American burial mounds on the same hills.
With 370 additional acres set aside for or purchased by the Illinois DNR, almost 10,000 acres will be preserved in managed wildlife refuges. Much of the acreage includes Mississippi backwaters and islands, but 4,000 of the upland acres are home to Illinois’ largest sand prairie.
Ironies abound. The sand prairie made the land less attractive to early pioneers and farmers, which in turn made it more attractive for the Army in 1916 as it scouted land for a proving grounds. When the base closed in early 2000, clean-up costs reduced the pressure to develop larger tracts for economic purposes.
Still, Lost Mound hardly signifies land “lost,” forgotten, or abandoned. The land harbors 47 species of threatened or endangered animals and plants, and includes rare sand prairie, sand savanna, dunes, tallgrass prairie, swamp, marsh, sedge meadow, sand pond, and blowout communities. Most significantly, the refuge contains an unbroken ecological continuum from forested bluffs to prairie to river bottomlands.
The sand prairie itself is an unusual feature in the Midwest, an area more usually known for its dark, rich soil. The sand hills—up to 70 feet deep along the river banks and extending 7.5 miles—resulted from an ice dam located forty miles downstream on the Mississippi near the present day Quad Cities as the continental glaciers were melting 12,000 years ago. The ice dam re-routed the river’s flow through western Illinois and created a glacial river pool backed up all the way to Savanna. Meltwater entering the glacial pool dropped its sandy sediment, bits of rock ground up by the glaciers scouring across Wisconsin and Minnesota granite. When the ice dam finally broke, the river re-established its course, the pool drained, and great sandy bluffs and river plains were left exposed at Savanna.
Even before the military began its work at the Savanna Depot, early biologists were interested in the special features of the area. In 1908, Dr. Henry Allan Gleason of the Illinois Natural History Survey traveled to the sand prairie to photograph and catalog the landforms, plants, and animal species. His work provides contemporary biologists excellent comparative data. The sand prairie of Gleason’s day harbored far fewer trees than at present, says Wenny. The area has lost thirty plant species since the 1908 study. Grasses have declined, while forbs and shrubs, like aromatic sumac, have increased.
The changes are due to a number of factors. Fire, of course, is needed to maintain a prairie and keep the trees at bay. By 1908, and certainly thereafter, there was little contiguous prairie to sustain wildfires, and the Army, for understandable reasons, wanted to minimize the risk of fire in the ammunition storage areas. When cattle were brought in to graze the grasses, particularly around the igloos, one might have expected them to mimic the effects of buffalo, the other great maintainers of natural prairie. But, says Wenny, “cattle are wimpy compared to bison, and they seek shade,” and as a result they disperse tree seeds through their droppings, leading to more forest encroachment on the prairie.
Cattle produced another significant change on the prairie landscape. Despite the sandy soil, Illinois is a region of tall grass prairie, but the cattle grazing encouraged short grasses and kept the tall grass species trimmed. When cattle grazing ceased in 1999, tall grasses made a comeback, and bird species counts began to shift back to those Gleason would have observed in 1908. Birds preferring shorter vegetation, including the grasshopper sparrow, western meadowlark, killdeer, horned lark, and vesper sparrow, have declined in recent years. But birds preferring taller vegetation—the bobolink, henslow’s sparrow, dickcissel, northern harrier, and sedge wren—are on the increase.
Discontinuing cattle grazing was a first step in the prairie restoration. But is intervention intended to produce a more “natural” prairie itself unnatural? Wenny ponders the question, and notes that many prairie fires were actually set by Native Americans to run bison into a catch and entice others back again when the fresh and luscious grasses re-sprouted.
Even so, the goal of prairie restoration is to re-establish a prairie more like the one observed by Dr. Gleason in 1908. Forest encroachment, for example, has been battled a number of ways, including girdling the bark of trees by cutting a circular swath around the girth to cut off the flow of nutrients between the roots and leaves. Girdled trees were left standing, in the hope that dead trees would provide good roosting places for birds. However, that approach backfired, as the roosting birds actually spread new tree seedlings through their feces. Recent conversations have centered around having a commercial operator bring in a small number of bison to graze the prairie, although the discussions are currently on hold. Fencing for the bison would be a major expenditure for the operator, and with cleanup funding only known on a year-to-year basis, it would be hard to predict what lands will be available. Currently there are no such locations where the bison could be safely viewed by the public, either, another stumbling block.
Prescribed burns would provide the best prairie maintenance, but that is complicated, due to the UXOs. “Explosives and fire don’t get along too well,” says Randy Nÿboer. But by Spring 2008, the USFWS and Illinois DNR received clearance to burn 945 acreas. “We scorched a lot of cedars and locusts encroaching on the grasslands,” says Britton.
The prairie and surrounding forest provide excellent habitat for all sorts of species. Two hundred thirty-five bird species have been recorded at Lost Mound, including 118 breeding species, 107 species seen only during spring or fall migration, and 10 species present only in winter.
Lost Mound Refuge is a particularly important haven for the bald eagle, recently upgraded from endangered to threatened status due to a significant rebound in population in the past two decades since the pesticide DDT was banned. By the 1960s, the entire population in the lower 48 states was down to as few as 417 nesting pairs. In recent winters, nearly 600 bald eagles have been counted in the Lost Mound Refuge alone, and several year-round nesting sites have been discovered.
Plant species, including a wide range of wildflowers, include the hairy puccoon, Indian grass, June grass, porcupine grass, prairie dandelion, sour dock, little bluestem and big bluestem, prairie milkweed, mullein, aromatic sumac, prairie dropseed, James clammyweed and, as mentioned before, the most seemingly out-of-place plant in this temperate zone, common and fragile prickly-pear cactus. Indeed, the fragile prickly-pear is not found in any other location in Illinois.
Lost Mound Refuge is also a cross-roads of species boundaries. It is a southern boundary for northern plants and birds, and a northern boundary for southern species. It overlaps eastern and western species as well. The result is a particularly rich environment of intermingled species.
Illinois, like much of the Midwest, was largely a prairie in its natural state, with 22 million grassland acres. Today, only a fraction of a percent of pure prairie remains. Lost Mound Refuge will harbor 4,000 acres of prairie/savanna, though much of it is dotted with warehouses and igloo bunkers. And with The Prairie Enthusiasts also buying lands and conservation easements on uplands bordering Lost Mound—and restoring those lands to prairie and savanna—a continuous ecosystem from the forested bluffs to the prairie to the river bottomlands has been preserved. Jim Rachuy explains that the area is large enough that “it won’t ‘leak species.’ He explains, “Think of a small island that is a completely natural place, but which has been recently cut off from the mainland. If the island too small it will lose species even without human intervention simply because it is too small to maintain a large variety. This is called ‘leaking species.’ You need a certain size of place in order to maintain the variety of species, and too often a piecemeal approach to preservation doesn’t preserve large enough spaces. Lost Mound and its adjacent grounds will be of a large enough size, however, to maintain its rich variety.”
The interesting variety of plant and animal species along with the sand prairie terrain make the Lost Mound Refuge particularly rich for scientific study, often by university biologists or their students. One interesting and useful study looked at how prairie restoration techniques can themselves disturb the prairie. According to Ed Britton, there is a stand of red cedars on the Refuge that one might have “guessed” should be removed in the interest of sand prairie restoration, but an external wildlife study showed that the stand is an important roosting site for long-eared owls. “Without this study, we might possibly have taken some ‘restoration’ action counter-productive to the owls,” Britton says.
Environmentalists are excited about Lost Mound’s future. They hope to build a migratory bird education center on the grounds. Harry Drucker envisions eco-tourism. A bicycle path may wind through the grounds in the near future. The Prairie Enthusiasts of Northern Illinois in partnership with the Natural Area Guardians will soon manage a 200-acre prairie site on the DNR grounds.
According to Dan Wenny, “Lost Mound presents a unique opportunity to combine ecological restoration, biological research, and educational experiences in a way not currently available at any other site.” Randy Nÿboer thinks of it in narrative terms. “I want our children’s children to be able to see what the land was like when Abraham Lincoln lived in Illinois.”
And Nÿboer includes development in his vision for the ideal future. “We have an opportunity to make this a showcase. It takes a lot of effort and money, but I really think we can do it. It depends on people working together who want to preserve and develop the land. There is room for both.”
* *
Beth Baranksi, a Galena resident who became involved early on as a consultant for the town of Hanover as it tried to recover from the impact of the Depot’s closing, describes the Depot as a “Rubik’s cube, with lots of faces, and where each face is affected by decisions made by the other sides.” Persons involved with economic redevelopment, environmental cleanup, and conservation each have their own vision for the Depot, and sometimes their independent actions can collide with the others’, or their individual goals may not carry as much clout as they would in a concerted effort.
In November 2007, the individual sides of the Rubik’s cube came together to form the Lost Mound Action Team, with representatives from the LRA, USFWS, Army clean-up force, local conservationists and other committed individuals. The Action Team, says member Ed Britton, is “trying to tackle problems together rather than individually.” The Action Team’s current projects include pursuing the introduction of bison onto the prairie; bringing tour buses into specifically approved areas; creating a comprehensive map that will show ownership, UXO, endangered species, trails, etc., with overlays rather than having separate maps for separate purposes; garnering public and political support for the Depot plans and activities; gaining public access to as much of the Depot as possible; getting volunteer support for projects such as trail-building; establishing a bike trail and a migratory bird education center; and reviewing on a yearly basis the cleanup projects that should receive priority funding. Baranski, an Action Team member, is particularly interested in one of the Team’s side-projects to determine whether they can save the Beaty House, an 1840s-era ferry inn that sits in the flood plain and needs to be moved.
“We’ve been at this for thirteen years,” says Britton in regard to the various interests needing to work together. “I think we’re getting it down now.”
* *
By 10 a.m. the mist netting excursion is completed. Dan and Josh carefully slide the nets off the poles, fold them, and seal them into zip-lock bags, as a knotted or torn net may cost as much as $75 to replace. I help by pulling out the poles and depositing them in a single location on the prairie, since Dan and Josh will return in a few days for another count.
When we leave, I snap a few photos of the igloos, and imagine computers one day whirring away inside them while grasshopper sparrows go about their business outside on the prairie.
I take a few detours as I leave the depot. I drive slowly past Headquarters and the parade grounds, past the health clinic and the officers’ club, past the officers’ and the commander’s homes, past the machine shops, fire station, and security house, and exit past the squarish indentation in the pavement where the guardhouse once stood.
I never knew these grounds when 7,000 civilians and a thousand Army personnel swarmed about. I never knew the prairie in its natural state or sailed the icy waters of a glacial lake. I never saw artillery fly or trucks dumping toxic loads into gouged trenches, and never felt the sting of panic when the nearby communities realized the loss of jobs. I never saw the exodus of military wares and munitions.
But you can feel it all here, feel it all. It’s out there, buried, on the prairie. Some of it is toxic, I’ll grant you that. But much of it, very much, is pure treasure.
SOURCES CONSULTED
“Base Re-Alignment and Closure.” GlobalSecurity.Org. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/brac.htm. 27 September 2004.
Division of Conservation Planning. “Lost Mound Unit, Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge Environmental Assessment.” http://www.fws.gov/Midwest/planning/LostMound/index.html . 14 April 2008.
Erikson, Kurt. “Tiny Thomson Still Waiting for Prison to Pay Off.” http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2007/12/il_tiny_thomson.html.
15 December 2007.
Kunke, RuthAnne, Inga Olsen, and Ross E. Paulson. 80 Years of Service—Savanna Ordnance Depot: In the Defense of Our Nation. Augustana College, 1996.
“Lost Mound National Wildlife Refuge.” Illinois Department of Natural Resources & Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge publication.
“Lost Mound National Wildlife Refuge: Environmental Assessment.” United States Fish and Wildlife Service. http://midwest.fws.gov/planning/lostmoundtop.htm. 8 September 2003.
Reber, Craig. “Lost Mound Unit Makes Progress, Faces Challenges.” The Telegraph Herald. 27 August, 2003.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Region 5 Superfund—Savanna Army Depot Activity.” http://www.epa.gov/R5Super/npl/illinois/IL3210020803.htm. Accessed 4 April 2008.
I would like to thank the following persons for allowing me to interview them, tag along with them on their work, and return with follow-up questions:
- Marty Altensey: employee of Stickle Warehousing
- Beth Baranski: Baranski, Hammer, and Associates, and Lost Mound Action Team member
- Ed Britton: United States Fish & Wildlife Service
- John Clarke: BRAC Environmental Coordinator
- Harry Drucker: co-founder of Friends of the Depot
- Gary Frederick, President, Fluidic Micro-Controls and Vice President, N-Ovation.
- Warren Jackman: founder of Riverport Railroad
- Diane Komiske: Executive Director of Jo-Carroll LRA
- Randy Nÿboer: Illinois Department of Natural Resources
- Jim Rachuy: Founder of Illinois Chapter of Prairie Enthusiasts
- John Rutherford: former member of the Jo-Carroll LRA
- Marty Sheehy: employee of Stickle Warehousing
- Rick Stickle: founder of Stickle Warehousing
- Bob Wehrle: former member of the Jo-Carroll LRA
- Dan Wenny: Associate Research Scientist for the Illinois Natural History Survey, a division of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources
- Charles Wenstrom: member of JoDaviess County Natural Area Guardians
- David Ylinen: former Executive Director of Jo-Carroll LRA
[1] Dan Wenny was Associate Research Scientist for the Illinois Natural History Survey, a division of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources at the time of writing.