As reported by national news in the US on September 16, 2022, 50 illegal immigrants from Venezuela were flown from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Officials on the island said they did not have the resources to take care of the immigrants, so they were transported by the Massachusetts National Guard to a military base on Cape Cod. The immigrants were tolerated on Martha’s Vineyard for exactly two days.
The military base they were taken to, with the purposely non-descriptive name, “Joint Base Cape Cod,” is about 30 miles north of the church in Edgartown where the immigrants stayed. The base was formerly known as the Massachusetts Military Reservation, or Otis/Camp Edwards. The base is notorious for being a dump site for the federal government, so it probably seemed to the authorities a logical place to get rid of the immigrants. The 22,000 acre base was designated a Superfund site in 1989 due to massive amounts of fuels and solvents dumped at Otis Air Base into the sandy soil above Upper Cape Cod’s sole-source aquifer. As more and more contaminated groundwater was being discovered on the Air Force side, yet more was discovered from the past dumping of propellants and explosives by the Army at Camp Edwards. At one site on the base in the 1960s, the Air Force dumped up to 6 million gallons of aviation fuel on the ground just to test aircraft emergency release valves. Enough fuel from here and elsewhere got into water supplies in nearby Forestdale that tap water at a kitchen sink could be lit on fire. Meanwhile, the Army was accustomed for years to firing Howitzer and mortar rounds into the base “impact area” whose explosions would shake windows in residential areas all over the Upper Cape. Nearby residents also lived with the frequent sound of machine gun fire from one of many gun ranges. Indeed, the Army National Guard has lately insisted it needs 200 acres of forest clearcut for a new machine gun range, with 5,000 acres reserved for strays and overshoots. For those feigning such concern, this was some place to send a group of helpless refugees. The public has no access to and very little knowledge of this huge area of sunny Cape Cod.
https://earthnewspaper.com/in-this-house-by-richard-hugus
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