On 28 Jan 2006 15:23:34 -0800, miso@sushi.com wrote:

There is a Hawthorne Muni around 38.54461 -118.63182

I can't really understand why Hawthorne is on the BRAC hitlist. Seems
like a good spot to store bombs to me. The clean up cost to return the
land will be huge.

judging from the enormous amount of new construction going on there ,
I wouldn't  believe everything you read about  Hawthorne closing up !
it's been said  a number of times in the past and it's still going
strong.  

since they took down all the large signs around the place and removed
it from the web ....  possibly they want that activity to disappear
from public  attention .    also   , what  " exactly "  is the BRAC
list  saying  they want to close ?   and what exactly actually goes
around  there ?   

some people are saying that the presence of the  mountain sized 
pile of new dirt they took out of the ground there (  it's up  the
highway past the lake , on the right side of the road )  might be a
sign they  linked it to some other  facility with underground tunnels.
for sure it shows some kind of massive  underground excavation
activity  in the last several years .  there are plenty of other " new
" signs   ( don't want to mention them here )  that the place is very
busy  as well.  

I don't know what is actually going on there and I suspect what ever
BRAC is talking about , you won't see all the  activity there dry up
and disappear.  I'm sure you could move the Army  ammo storage and
distribution activities  ( probably the main employer of civilians
there  )    and the activities of the NUWTL  wouldn't be impacted at
all . it's hard to actually  say what  is really going on .  what ever
it is it's a LOT  more than the public knows about.  

remember that all those bunkers you see above the ground aren't
actually  the current facility. those are left over from when it first
moved there in the '60s.  starting in the '70s it went 40 stories 
( so they say ) underground  and  was reported to be a quite massive 
facility , many times larger than what you see , above ground .  in
recent times (  decade or so ago ) they enlarged and changed all the
above ground nuclear handling facilities as well , probably did the
same underground .   also,  the Army has even more  ( and probably 
larger ) facilities on the west side of the highway, up in mountains
also in tunnels .   I wouldn't be surprised at all if  it was directly
connected , these days ,  to the underground at  the NTS , since they
are obviously in such close proximity to each other .    

guess time will tell .  we'll have to wait and see what happens.  
in the meantime , it's a busy place and has a lot of interesting stuff
to go check out. 


k