So, you may ask, why did I get an all-expense trip to San Juan? The short answer is that the Army wants to build a readiness center, and, to comply with federal law, has to do all of the environmental due diligence before they buy the property to build the readiness center.
The Preferred Site: So, we have to do environmental reports for two sites, the preferred site and the alternate site. In this case, at the end of the visits, we’re pretty sure that the real estate office gimmick’d the selection process because the alternate site was so bad there was no freakin’ way that it would/will ever get chosen.
Anyway, the preferred site is in the town of Las Piedras; it’s about a 25-acre site bordered by a freeway, a strip mall (what’s in a shopping mall in Las Piedras have? this one had a Burger King and a Church’s chicken out front….movie theatres were the big tenant along with a Subway and a Coldstone Creamery……the brutally poor parts of Puerto Rico aren’t around here…), and a gated condo community.
No lie, I’ve never been on a more heavily vegetated site in my life. Jungle Fever.
those weeds are at least waist high….
there’s a creek that borders the site
it’s the end of the rainy season; I’m not sure anything here ever turns brown, but, everything is completely green right now.
This site is the best of all worlds for me; my job down here is to look for environmental impacts from current and former use; if the site was never developed, and it’s so heavily vegetated that getting into the site (to dump stuff, for example) is an impossibility, my report gets very short and simple. I love this site.
The Alternate Site: This site is about 20 miles away. I am not at all sure how the Army ranked this site second and shudder to think about what caused sites 3 and 4 to be ranked lower. It’s about 15 acres, five of those acres have a variety of buildings on them. These buildings will doom this site to never never ever be considered by the Army for acquisition.
Ten of the acres are undeveloped farm land. The Army wants to buy only these ten acres but the land owner has said, if you want these 10, you must buy the other five. I can’t even begin to describe the other five; nothing I do below will do it justice.
it’s not a farm, but there are chickens, cats, and dogs, wandering everywhere. There is a part of the site that the property owner said that we couldn’t go up to that are without him because the dogs weren’t tied up and would bite us; they were mean because they were there to protect his cocks that he kept up there for cock fighting….
There are more vehicles parked on these five acres than at some supermarket parking lots. All in some sort of disrepair; they ranged from a 1950-era sedan to, well, this beauty.
part of the property was an engine repair shop. This is what I will refer to in the report as “recognized environmental concern (rec) #1”. The short version is that the Army can’t buy this property until there’s a soil/groundwater investigation to see if there are any impacts from the engine ship….
I got tired of taking pictures of rubbish (which was strewn everywhere) and this guy was colorful….
This is rec #2 and rec #3….the diesel engine for backup power and the tank of diesel fuel. The owner of the property was quite proud of this tank; it’s dual contained (leaks inside are contained inside) and then he has a concrete foundation around it for even more containment. These are all great things; he jut had it installed four or five years ago. The building has been there for 50 years….the unasked (and unanswered) question is “What happened to your old tank to make you decide that triple containment was necessary?”
Two different sets of horse stables on these five acres..this guy was tied up so that he could snack. The one stable was the best-kept area here; they raise these mini-horses that prance back and forth….
Rec #4 – all of this dirt was dumped here and graded into place…no idea where it came from and if it has impact or not…concrete chunks are not a good sign though.
The owner runs a print shop on the property; he very proudly points out they are chemical free now for 90% of the processes. Of course, that’s only for the last 4 or 5 years and I don’t even want to think about the chemicals that have been disposed of before then (to be fair, it seems they have records that they have done it correctly). But, these drums, located under the a/c unit, are fun, because.
they say this. This label is not the end of the world, but, it provides enough suspicion to create Rec #5. I haven’t even mentioned the five other rec’s that are out here.
So, I mentioned above there was that area we couldn’t go too….two other guys when they came out to do their part of the work (wetland and wildlife identification…the preferred site took them a lot longer!) made it out there later on Wednesday and got the two-cent tour of the cock-accommodations. They report there are at least 100 birds back there…there’s some pit bulls running loose back there as well AND a few families living back there in trailers/hovels! They live there because that is there job; if they weren’t there, someone would come and steal the chickens!
The Army, if they bought the property, would have to relocate these people to new housing. This, again, is another reason this site is only being carried along as an alternate for form’s sake…there is absolutely no chance they’ll be a readiness center here anytime soon.
