Talk:Amchitka

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Contents 1 WWII source 2 Japanese source in 1783 to 1787 3 ROTHR, 1988-1993 4 Other Aleutian islands were test sites?

[edit] WWII source

Here is an excellent source that would be useful for the article's WWII section. Pages 272-276 cover Amchitka's role well. Jakew 20:13, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Japanese source in 1783 to 1787

I know it does not sound traceable for English speakers, putting Japanese source. However I think, about Amchitka around 1783, they're mostly written in Japanese and very few in Deutch and Russian, both are about the castaways. The story is well known in Japan as you can see if you search the castaway's name on Amazon.co.jp, there are 18 books and 1 compact disk. Even Russian-Japanese movie was made about 15 years ago. As a clue, I would put this. Here's auto-translation of a site that describes Kodayu's life in summary.
Amchitka(アムチトカ) starts from chapter 3, which start at
3rd chapter fog and island [amuchitoka] of wind
I would say the translation is 70 to 80% right.(just like translating person's name "三五郎(Sagorou; meaning three-five-man) who is sick" to "35 of the sick people 郎" or "Half Japanese mile" to "Semi-village" because of the meaning of Kanji, Chinese charactors".) It actually mess whole sentence up, though....it translate Kodayu to "Light-thick-husband" and the software seems to be trying the senteces making sence, but....--Orcano 06:50, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ROTHR, 1988-1993

I was one of approx 300 (civilian) workers who spent time on Amchitka between 1988 and 1993. We were there in support of the US Navy's Relocatable Over The Horizon Radar project (mentioned in the Over-the-horizon_radar article). I worked for Piquniq Management Company (PMC) which had the maintenance and operations contract for the Navy. The ROTHR itself was only operational for the last year or two of this time period, as there was much construction and renovation necessary prior to bringing the system online.

During my time there, we maintained a 144-man base camp at the southeast end of the island - ROTHR's receiver array and our main runway was here as well. The receiver array was a 2-mile long line of poles. At the northwest end of the island, approximately 40 miles away via a difficult and little-used road was a smaller camp, normally manned by 12 people if I remember right. Here is where the transmitter antenna was located; it was much smaller, perhaps 300 meters long and 10-20 meters tall. It looked like a very tall mesh fence; a small picture of it is here. Things I remember from my time there:

• Lt. Commander D.J. Louk of the US Navy was in command of Fleet Surveillance Support Command Detachment 1 (FSSC Det 1), approx 15 petty officers who oversaw the project. They had one (!!) regular seaman to order around. I wish I could remember that kid's name. Everyone else on the island was a civilian.
• Fish and Wildlife Service had one person on the island (it is a national refuge); her name was Donna, and she lived outside the base camp in a small cabin.
• I recall seeing puffins, eagles, foxes, otters, killer whales, and seals. There are no trees on the island. Oh, and we had so many rats that one person had a fulltime job keeping them down.
• The typical contractor (like myself) spent 2 months on the island, then had a 1-month vacation.
• During my time there, the Navy burned down the North Hangar, a huge WWI-era building. They wanted to clear space for airplane parking during a military excercise. The resulting smoke cloud was visible from Adak, about 180 miles away.
• I visited all three of the atomic test sites. Very little remains to mark them and the sites look completely natural. For a short time I collected weekly water samples from them for the Department of Energy; these were mailed to DOE and (I was told) tested for tritium levels.
• The weather? Fog, and a lot of it, year round. And winds so strong that opening a door could be a hazardous experience. Rain often, and snow in winter (both fell nearly horizontally in the strong winds). A very raw place, but beautiful nonetheless.

I'm not sure how or even if the ROTHR period should be fit into the main Amchitka article. But I thought I would toss this in here for benefit of future editors.

[edit] Other Aleutian islands were test sites?

So an anonymous over on the Snow Crash article was asking about one of the main characters, whose motivation is revenge against America for using his people's lands for nuclear testing (he's an Aleut); he was asking on the topic of Nuclear testing on the Aleutians. I found this article, but I hesitate to just redirect it to Amchitka. Was Amchitka the only Aleutian nuclear test site? --Gwern (contribs) 16:59 18 September 2007 (GMT)