Associated Press March 14, 2002
Local officials still in dark about mock military exercise
ROCK HILL (AP) - It's been six months since the night when mysterious helicopters swooped down near a nuclear plant near here, and still the details are as murky as when it happened. On Sept. 15, when nerves were frayed four days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, residents in a subdivision near the Catawba River heard the helicopters flying low along the river toward the plant.
Occasionally a helicopter from Duke Power Co.'s Catawba nuclear plant might check on power lines, but this was a Saturday night and it was dark.
"They were very low, and it made a lot of noise," said resident Sue Brown. "I was thinking they really want to keep a close eye on the nuclear plant up there. It really didn't worry me."
Law officers repeatedly tried, but failed, to contact the helicopter pilots. So F-16 fighters from Shaw Air Force base were scrambled although the helicopters were gone by the time the fighters arrived.
Local emergency officials say the helicopters were on a military training exercise, but the Pentagon denies involvement.
"We didn't have anything up there," said Maj. Mike Halbig, a Defense Department spokesman.
However, the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management concluded the exercise was conducted by special forces units.
"Apparently they decided to hold a mock attack ... DOD officials forgot to put this exercise on the 'hot sheet' for operations, therefore, no other agencies were notified prior to F-16s responding," the agency's report said.
Residents also saw soldiers rappelling from helicopters and heard gunfire, according to the report.
The FBI told the power company later that special forces units were involved, the report said. But FBI officials in Columbia refused to comment, and special operations units from the military branches say the helicopters were not theirs.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded the helicopters were conducting authorized activities and "there was no threat to the nuclear facility," said commission spokeswoman Beth Hagner. She said the commission submitted a report to the Emergency Operations Center on Sept. 16. However the report, which was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, does not say who was responsible for the exercise.
"No one still knows what exactly transpired," says York County Sheriff Bruce Bryant.
"I wish they would have told us in person what was going on," agrees Ralph Merchant, York County 911 director. "Somebody could have really gotten hurt." The helicopters were as alarming as the scrambled F-16s, Merchant said.
"We were scared that some of these good ol' boys were going to take pop shots at these people," he said. "They were calling and saying, 'If you don't get them out of here, we'll shoot them down."'
Steve Siegfried, South Carolina's homeland security director, said the state spoke with the U.S. Joint Forces Command, the Defense Department agency responsible for homeland security, to make sure local officials know about any upcoming drills.
"The only thing that was lacking was proper coordination. It was just that simple," Siegfried says, adding the state must approve when such exercises are held outside a military base.
Special Forces spokesman Maj. Michael Whetston says he doesn't know what conversations took place between the department and Siegfried.
It's not surprising local officials were left in the dark, said Tim Brown of GlobalSecurity.org, an online military watchdog group.
"Normally these things are so highly classified they don't tell anybody for fear someone will leak it," he said, adding it's hard to have a realistic mock attack on a nuclear plant. "They almost always know they are going to get tested. They need to do the test, and it's critical to do it realistically."
There have been other such incidents.
In October 1996, an Army Special Operations team conducted an urban training exercise in downtown Houston, but the first word came the day after one of the helicopters crashed, The Houston Chronicle reported.
A month earlier, nine Army helicopters swooped down and dropped 70 Green Berets in Pittsburgh, the Washington Times reported. A witness said he heard choppers firing at an empty warehouse.
Special Operations officials said they notified residents and police before the exercises but still more than 100 people called 911 to report explosions and gunfire, the Times reported.
Tom Shiel of Duke Power said September's incident happened several miles from the plant, which was already was on heightened alert after Sept. 11.
But the Defense Department says it doesn't know who would conduct such exercises. "We heard of this rumor, for a lack of a better term," Halbig said. "We checked it out with everybody in the Department of Defense that could have had an exercise and came back with the same answer: 'We still didn't have anything going on."'
Cotton Howell, York County's emergency management director who called for the F-16s, said if the same thing had happened before Sept. 11, he still would have called in the fighters. "It probably was better and err on the side of caution," he says.
Copyright 2002
