Paradise Lost : Air Force Route Shatters Quiet of Farm Area

DEKALB JUNCTION, N.Y. —  When Leonhard Wiegandt moved here nine years ago, he thought he had found paradise.

“I came up here and carefully picked this place because I wanted to be away from highways, any kind of noise,” said Wiegandt, 52, who grazes 80 head of cattle on a 440-acre spread in the peace and quiet of St. Lawrence County.

It is a paradise about to be lost.

Strategic Air Command bombers flying out of four Northeast bases will soon begin making 75 to 100 flights a week--never on weekends--as low as 500 feet along a training route that passes right over Wiegandt’s barn.

The West German native already knows what it will be like living under IR-806, as the Air Force calls the route. In May, the F-111A fighter-bombers and aging, eight-engine B-52s made demonstration flights for two days.

“Almost every one of the planes went right dead-center over my barn,” he said. “The cows got spooked, broke down the gate and ran into the barn because of the noise. I’d hate to be milking when they fly over; I’d probably get my head kicked off.”

440-Mile Route

The 440-mile route begins over Montpelier, Vt., with the planes cruising at 7,000 feet. They enter New York State at the northern tip of Lake George, begin to descend as they fly northwest past Lake Placid, then head southwest to Ft. Drum for bombing runs before heading out over Lake Ontario and home.

The planes are based at Griffiss and Plattsburgh air force bases in New York State, Pease in New Hampshire and Loring in Maine.

“It’s extremely loud when you are directly underneath the flight path. Incredibly loud. It’s painful,” said Kathleen Fitzgerald, who moved here 13 years ago from New Jersey to escape suburbia and big cities.

The northern fringe of the Adirondacks “is an area where I can confidently enjoy life. Where serious crime is not a substantial problem. Where the air is clean. Where the people care about the homey things in life,” said Dick Mooers, deputy director of the St. Lawrence County Planning Office.

St. Lawrence County is vast--its 2,840 square miles make it larger than Delaware. Farming is the main business--800 full-time dairy farms and another 800 part-time farms dot the gently rolling countryside.

More than 95% of those farms are privately owned, and farmers like Wiegandt are constantly under pressure to produce more. “I’m working 16 hours a day, every day,” he said. “Physically, I can’t give no more. The smallest thing that goes wrong on a farm is a hassle.”

Routes Modified

For many northern New Yorkers, low-flying planes are not new; Air Force jets have been training over the Adirondacks for 23 years. But in January the Air Force decided to modify a couple of the routes to allow flights as low as 400 feet. A required environmental assessment was drawn up; it concluded that no significant negative environmental impact would be felt.

However, the assessment was perceived as superficial, and the announcement brought a storm of protest from environmentalists concerned about maintaining the tranquility of the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park and the safety of such endangered species as peregrine falcons and bald eagles, which nest there.

The Air Force compiled a second, more detailed assessment and made changes that have relieved some of the apprehensions of park advocates. After a meeting in June with local officials, SAC decided to raise the altitude to 1,000 feet over parts of St. Lawrence County, but the noise won’t be appreciably cut.

The new proposal says planes will avoid the endangered species and other sensitive wilderness areas, and shifts more flights onto IR-806, which has an area the Air Force calls a “racetrack,” a rounded triangle 30 miles wide that allows each plane to make three passes per flight over Ft. Drum. In an era of budget restraint, that cuts costs and gives pilots more training per flight.

“We need to use that range,” said Sgt. Alan Dockery, a SAC spokesman. “Our bases in the Northeast have to go a long way to ranges out West. If they can have access to a range in the Northeast where they can drop their training devices, that will save us as much as $50,000 on a B-52 mission. Nowadays, we have to pinch every dollar. That gets expensive, even for the Air Force.”

But the proposal also means three passes over Wiegandt’s farm. “You’re talking an excess of 4,000 planes flying over my place in a year’s time. And if they don’t fly over my place, they fly over somebody else’s,” he said.

The perception persists here that the Air Force hasn’t done its homework.

School Not Mentioned

Hermon-DeKalb Central School “is not mentioned, they said they didn’t know we were there,” complained school board president Bob Josephson. “Well, we have 600 kids in the school every day who know where we are.”

“The racetrack is over farms and forest land,” Mooers said, though 12,500 people live directly under the flight path. “That even surprised us. And there are six colleges with over 8,000 students.”

There are also 76 Amish families in the county who rely on horses for both transportation and agriculture, he said. Horses frighten easily, so there is a concern that noise from a low-flying jet might cause an accident. People want to know who would end up paying if that happened.

Noise isn’t the only concern. A string of accidents during low-level NATO flights over West Germany last year killed more than 100 people.

“I keep thinking that if they veered it wouldn’t take much for them to land in my back yard,” Hodge said. “They’re not very far above the ground, it wouldn’t take much, just a little mistake, for one to crash. We know they hit the ground, that’s why they’re upset over in Germany.”

The Air Force plans to monitor the flights and assess their environmental impact for a year before SAC decides on a long-term commitment.