Rounds from accidental burst of cannon fire sounded like
prowlers to custodians
At 2215 on Wednesday
evening, custodians were cleaning up the intermediate
school at Little Egg Harbor Township (NJ), like they do every
day. At about the same time, a New Jersey Air National Guard F-16
that had earlier departed from Andrews AFB in Washington (DC) was
turning towards the Warren Grove firing range in Ocean County (NJ)
as part of a night training exercise. The range has been in use
since the days of World War II for bombing and strafing
practice.
Suddenly, one of the custodians cleaning a third-grade classroom
heard what sounded like footsteps on the roof. Thinking that
prowlers were casing the facility, she called the police to have
them investigate. What she could not know is that seven thousand
feet above her, the pilot of the fighter jet had just accidentally
fired a half-second burst from the aircraft's 20mmm M61-A1 Vulcan
cannon, sending over two dozen two-inch lead slugs into the school
building, parking lot and adjacent land. Several rounds went
through classrooms, an office and a hallway. The exterior of the
building also showed evidence of the rounds impacting the brick
structure.
The aircraft belongs to the 177th Fighter Wing of the NJANG, and
its CO, Col. Brian Webster, told the New York Times that the
unidentified pilot fired his cannon by mistake as he turned into a
dive for a strafing run on the range. Rather than firing the cannon
at 7,000 feet in a 30-degree bank, he should have fired at 5,000
feet.
Eight of the slugs hit the school's roof, but luckily no one was
hurt. Not only did it happen at night, the students did not have
classes on Wednesday or Thursday because the teachers were
attending a conference in Atlantic City (NJ). Five more slugs were
found the next day in the school's parking lot, and more were found
in the adjacent land, where homes are spread apart amid woods.
"The National Guard takes this situation very seriously," Lt.
Col. Roberta Niedt, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of
Military and Veterans Affairs said to the Times. "The safety of our
people and the surrounding communities are our foremost
concern."
The president of the township's school board, Michael Dupuis, is
concerned about the incident, but is not worried about the location
of the range. "There will be concerns, but I feel confident that
the military has done and is doing everything it can to safeguard
against any occurrences of this nature," he said.
Colonel Webster added that this is the first time in forty years
that ammunition had impacted outside the range, and that the
incident is under investigation. "We have no idea why the gun went
off," he said. "This is a very unusual and unique thing."
However, there have been documented instances of incidents
related to the range. In 2002 an NJANG yet crashed near the Garden
State Parkway after the pilot parachuted to safety, and no one was
injured on the ground. A year before, another F-16 accidentally
dropped a 25 lb smoke bomb in a pine forest in Ocean County,
destroying 1,600 acres of woods. And three years prior, in 1999,
another accident during a bombing run took out 11,000 acres of
forest.
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