Reid to seek investigation on use of military chaff

Saturday, Aug. 2, 1997 | 2:19 a.m.

Chaff is strands of aluminum-covered fiberglass used by military aircraft to evade radar.

It is scattered across rural Nevada on lands around Fallon Naval Air Station and Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas.

A national coalition of environmental cited public health concerns in asking Reid, D-Nev., for the investigation.

"Chaff is something we don't know a lot about," said Jenny Backus, Reid's spokeswoman in Washington, D.C. "They raised some good concerns. We want to look at it and get the facts out there."

Backus said Reid will ask the General Accounting Office or the National Institutes of Science to conduct the study to determine if the use of chaff poses a danger to the public.

"All a person needs to do is see and feel a clump of chaff to know that this is not something that a person or animal should inhale," Grace Bukowski, of the Rural Alliance for Military Accountability, told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

"The health risks and ecological damage associated with inhalation, ingestion and widespread dispersal of chaff has never been independently researched," she said.

The military has denied that chaff is a public hazard.

Chaff fibers are made of aluminum-covered fiberglass and are thinner than human hairs. Military aircraft release clouds of the stuff to confuse enemy radar and antiaircraft missiles.

The strands eventually break down into particles too small to see. But clumps of it have been reported along fence lines and clustered in tufts in remote, mostly rural regions.

"Chaff is clearly litter and littering public lands is illegal," said Lahsha Johnson, Nevada regional associate for the Wilderness Society. "The diversity of concerned citizens on this issue us unmatched by any other public land use issued I have witnessed to date."