Soldiers invade Indian Island for the week
Published 9:00 pm Friday, April 2, 2004
INDIAN ISLAND — About 500 U.S. Army active duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers are camping out on the beach as part of an exercise to deliver munitions to the Indian Island ordnance base.
Ammunition and bombs are usually delivered by commercial carriers, but the Department of Defense is doing the work itself through next week.
The work has turned normally tranquil Naval Magazine Indian Island, on the west side of Whidbey Island near Port Townsend, into an area teeming with military personnel. Men and women in full battle gear and M-16 rifles strapped to their backs walk through the mud.
A few of the troops are able to compare the scene with an Army bivouac in Iraq.
"This is exactly how you live over there," Maj. William Ritter said Wednesday. "Just substitute the trees with sand."
Peninusla Daily News
Port Orchard: Movie all over the landscape
You might say the new version of "Walking Tall" is all over the landscape. The setting was moved from Tennessee, where a real-life story inspired the original movie in 1973, to Kitsap County, which on the map is across Puget Sound from Seattle but in the remake is east of Seattle in the Cascade Range. Filming was done in the mountains of British Columbia rather than in the Cascades or the Olympic Mountains, which loom just west of the real Kitsap County. There was some attempt at realism, however, sheriff’s deputies said Thursday. Sheriff’s Sgt. John Gese gave pointers for avoiding regional bloopers such as a reference to Washington State Patrol "barracks" rather than "precinct."
Associated Press
Port Angeles: Full skeleton uncovered
A man who lived hundreds of years ago along the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca was found carefully wrapped in a hand-woven cedar mat at a grave site earlier this week. This is the first complete skeleton discovered at the waterfront site, the former home of a Klallam village called Tse-whit-zen. “We found an intact elderly male ancestor,” Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Secretary-Treasurer Frances Charles said Thursday. “We are overwhelmed by the fact that we have an individual who was not scattered like so many of the others.” Construction of the graving yard — a huge onshore dry dock for building components of the Hood Canal Bridge — was halted in August when the remains and artifacts were found at the site just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA Co. Ltd. mill.
Peninusla Daily News
Ellensburg: Student saves dorm from fire
Quick thinking by a Central Washington University student and a working smoke detector are credited with stopping a small fire from becoming larger inside a dormitory Thursday night. Around 10:30 p.m., Ellensburg firefighters responded to Alford Montgomery Hall in Student Village for reports of smoke in a hallway. Chief Rich Elliott said firefighters were told that the fire may have been trapped inside a wall of the brick, three-story structure. Elliott said a candle melted into a light in a room, causing the smoke. He credits the fast thinking of a dorm resident who doused it with a fire extinguisher.
