6 US Marines are dead and 8 are injured after a Monday night live fire exercise at a US Army Depot in Hawthorne, Nevada.
Are live fire exercises common at this Depot? If not, my BS detector will be twitching on high.
There’s testing and disposal activities at Hawthorne, Honey Lake and a disposal area south of Hawthorne, as I recall.
There’s huge amounts of ammo stored at Hawthorne. If you fly over the area in a light plane, you’ll see the high desert studded with hundreds (or even thousands) of the ammo bunkers, with their doors facing each other across an access road east and south of the town of Hawthorne. They don’t fool around there - the trucks carrying the loads of ordnance have to detour around the town center of Hawthorne, and there are signs all over the streets to that effect, directing trucks carrying ordnance as to which way they have to navigate from the depot to north or south on US 95.
Nevada is filled with military activities which other states never see, know even less about and don’t care. There’s a reason why most Nevadans are opposed to nonsense like being used as a nuke waste dump - because Nevada is already used for these types of activities far in excess of what every other state is doing for national defense, and Hawthorne is one such example.
Can’t speak to the exact current operation but the place is a Naval Ammunition Depot. Some of Everything the Navy and Marine Corp uses is kept there. Last time I trained there, which was some decades ago, we shot everything we had. It’s a big place with room for armor maneuvering, air ops, and all the rest. A tube ignition for a 60 mm mortar is so freeking unlikely that I have to suspect either sabotage or extreme clusterflockability. Does any one else remember that web video from a few years ago that showed an Arab guy shooting a small mortar-—3-rounds no problem but the fourth went off in his tube? I always suspected we were salting the earth. Semper Fi.