THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9507020081
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE, VA. LENGTH: Short : 41 lines
The Puerto Rican mayor looked at the hundreds of antennas sprouting from the fertile Virginia valley. He didn't like what he saw.
``They're not going to do that to our valley,'' Lajas Mayor Jose Rivera Nazario said later, away from U.S. Navy officials. ``The valley should be saved for farming, not antennas.''
That was not the reaction the Navy wanted when it invited the mayor and some Puerto Rican farmers to Virginia last week to court their acceptance of a $9 million radar station planned for the Caribbean island.
Privately, federal officials say opposition will have little effect on their proposal, backed by the Clinton administration as the newest weapon to fight drug trafficking.
The radar, identical to the unit in Virginia, would track low-flying aircraft and boats carrying drug shipments from Colombia, Peru and Brazil.
The planned radar unit would involve planting 744 19-foot-high antennae over 200 acres of sugar cane, alfalfa, rice and cattle fields.
A transmitter would be built on Vieques, a 33,000-acre island 50 miles off the east coast, where residents already are upset about a naval base that covers two-thirds of the island.
Residents say the transmitter, though it would be built on the base, would hurt a budding tourism industry being developed to offset a 50 percent jobless rate. Gov. Pedro Rossello says he supports the radar because it would help reduce the drug trade, blamed for 90 percent of Puerto Rico's crime.
Opponents, though, say the station would destroy prime agricultural land and pose a health threat.
``Unless there are valid factors regarding its environmental impact, the project will go on,'' Lt. Commander Mike McCloskey said during the visit to a radar system in Norfolk identical to the one planned for Puerto Rico.
The Virginia radar covers the area ranging from Florida to Venezuela. A separate system in Texas covers the route from the Caribbean into Mexico. by CNB