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.

FMI: www.state.nj.us/military/air/index.html, www.lehsd.k12.nj.us/inter/lehinthome.htm