Keystone Beach photo by Mary Katherine Wainwright c December 2002
This turned out to be a fascinating day with a general theme of raising the question of corporate and government greed with decision making made for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The above photograph shows the Keystone Beach on Lake Geneva in Keystone Heights, Florida. Although the edge of the lake appears to be at the end of the pavilion, vast amounts of shore are exposed in the distance on the left due to the low lake level. This was generally the case throughout this area of many lakes at this time several years ago. The cause of this "drying up" of the lakes is worth a thorough investigation to determine if it is not man made as a result of corporate and government greed.
1. In my Internet browsing today I discovered Google's fabulous Maps which is marked "new." I don't know how long this has been available, but it is brand new to me today. I think it is great. I was exploring the Florida fires in news reports especially the one last week that threatened Keystone Heights where I used to live in the 1950s. This is where I stumbled onto Google Maps and got the aerial satellite view of the community, lakes and whole area to see where the fire threatened. Then I began searching other locations that I knew in the world and came up with some astonishing results, well, at least for me.
Last week there were reports on ABC News which is broadcast on BBC News24 about or after 1:00 am concerning Florida fires that included Bradford county where I used to attend high school in Starke for a couple years (1956-8.). I perked up and have been looking for reports ever since. Today I did some browsing in the Gainesville Sun and elsewhere which provided some fascinating information about a situation where a whole town was threatened but spared as it turned out by the efforts of all involved and a wee change in the weather. It's fascinating to be able to go back through some blogs, publicly contributed photos and the media reports on the Internet for this information which never existed in this way in the past.
Speaking last week as the fires apparently were under control Florida Division of Forestry's Annaleasa Winter said in a Tampa Bay Channel 10 WTSP TV report: “Not to say in the interior there's not [fires], but out near the perimeter of the fire it's very quiet, whereas two days ago we had forty foot walls of flame running at the highway and embers flying a quarter mile starting new fires, so it's a totally different story tonight." Here's a video report of her describing this incredible threat to WTSP.
Here's another story from last week on the Wednesday and Thursday, 9th and 10th May 2007, when the fires were at their worst from WTLV Channel 12 News who appears to be an NBC affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida. They have an excellent video clip from the broadcast at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, 9th May 2007. The Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, toured the area in Bradford County observing the fire from the air and talking with residents as the fire threatened Keystone Heights which is just east over the Bradford County line in Clay County. This fire had been in two counties actually, Alachua (Gainesville's its county seat) and Bradford before moving east threatening Keystone Heights and Clay County.
Judging from this WTLV video clip above of Governor Crist, I'd say the people of Florida are most lucky to have him rather than Jeb Bush as governor. I wonder what Jeb Bush would have done? It turns out that this area in Bradford County is also where the former Governor of Florida, Charlie Johns, lived on Silver Lake off highway 100 that had to be shutdown due to the dense smoke from the fire. Charlie Johns was governor of Florida at the time I was attending high school in Starke. His daughter was in my class. But, the story of Charlie Johns is another totally different one.
Here's a photo of highway 100 west of Keystone Heights on that Thursday, 10th May 2007, published in the Niagara Gazette in Niagara Falls, New York.
I picked up the above links and information from the Keystone Heights News which I also just discovered today in my browsing on the Internet where there are other links to more information. Also, there were photos sent into the Gainesville Sun by the public which pictured various aspects of the fire including helicopter water pickup from Santa Fe lake and another shot of the closed highway 100 with a state trooper standing guard. Please note the fact that the docks on Santa Fe lake are almost out of the water. This is most important as will be noted shortly.
I also went to Wikipedia to see what was disclosed about Keystone Heights. This is where I found the marvellous link to Google Maps for a satellite image map of Keystone Heights that made my day. I wanted an overview of the whole area to see what was where with respect to the fires and the town since I knew the area well. These Google satellite image maps combined with street maps (click on "hybrid") are fantastic. Everything fell into place, and I found far more than I had anticipated.
The lakes were drying up in a most incredible manner. The large lakes in the area were empty and split into several small lakes. The area was dry, dry, dry and getting drier. I believe that this has been the problem for many years now. Way back when there were cycles of a few years each between the highs and lows of the lakes with streams running between Lake Magnolia in Camp Blanding (US Army camp), Lake Brooklyn, Keystone Lake and Lake Geneva. Now Brooklyn lake and Lake Geneva are several smaller lakes. Brooklyn is disappearing, and there is a huge swath of land in the middle of what used to be the area between the main Lake Geneva and one of its coves. You can see where the shore line was which is far, far removed now from the actual edge of the water. The lakes are disappearing, and the area is drying out.
If you look above Santa Fe lake and to the north of Keystone Heights and the Lake Geneva area, you will see a vast track of green below Starke which is were I suspect a large part of the fire roared as it moved east toward highway 100 and south toward Keystone Heights. You'll have to scroll around with the satellite image, but that can be just pushed around with the cursor or click on the arrows while you zoom in or out to see detail or overview. I was gobsmacked with Google's Maps ability to do this and find everything. That's how I was able to roam around looking at all the old areas I once knew including where I lived, where we went camping and the place I mentioned a couple days ago where my friend and I got shot at by escaped convicts. Naturally, it has all changed, but the basic form is still there minus the full lakes.
There's a triangle of sorts in this area. Highway 100 runs north from Keystone Heights to Starke the county seat of Bradford County. Then highway 301 runs south but to the west side of the large green area through Waldo. It goes on to Gainesville the county seat of Alachua County. You can find all these things in this area by moving the satellite image around. As you zoom in, the names of the lakes appear along wit the roads and city streets when you get close enough to see the houses.
In the days gone by of the 1950s the game wardens used to fly around in sea planes checking on this wild country, its animals and those fishing and hunting. The game warden used to land on the lakes, taxi up to those fishing in boats and check their licence and catch to make certain everything was legal. This was an incredible area in those days. One of these game wardens met my father this way. One day when we were living at the Geneva Beach Apartments in the summer of 1953 when I was ten, the Game Warden landed on the lake in front and taxied up to the dock to say hello and chat. Now, sadly, it has all changed completely.
My question is how much of this water problem is the result of global warming, and how much is due to man's direct greed in this area? There isn't much that can be said for global warming since hard information is elusive, but I do know about a woman who campaigned vociferously against a water supply problem that was being created out in Camp Blanding by DuPont's mining of elminite from the sand there. She lost her valiant attempt for people to balance priorities in the face of possible water problems.
Her daughter, another magnificent lady of my age who went to high school at the same time, told me about her mother's struggle against corporate greed in the mining of the elminite and its impact on the water supply to the region not that many years ago and her failure. It looks like the water shortage that has developed is causing a knockon effect not just in the water table and lakes but also appears to be contributing to the overall dryness of the area. By the way the mineral elminite are those tiny black particles in the sand which make it possible to drive on the beach itself at Daytona because the sand can become packed hard.
In the video news report noted and linked above the governor pointed out how very dry the region was while wishing for Hurricane Andrea, a storm brewing before this official hurricane season gets underway, without lightning to drown the fires. There have been some hurricanes which have gone right through this area in recent years, and apparently that has had no effect on the water table level. Where is all the water going?
This magnificent lady and her brother used to live on Brooklyn Bay. They would often go water skiing in the morning before going off to school and were able to ski back and forth between Brooklyn Bay and Lake Brooklyn under the "Brooklyn" bridge for highway 21 that went overhead. No more. The two are completely separate bodies of shrivelled up water from what I see in the satellite image photo. There's not much water left now to do anything.
Florida has a serious fire problem now as described in the various articles above, and there is always a threat that these fires can start again at some point. Fifty years ago when I lived there for a few years (1953 to 1958.) before going off to school, we used to fight these kinds of fires ourselves. I do not remember anything like this. On occasion the fire siren went off for the volunteer fire department, and everyone went off to put out what fire was blazing. Usually, it was a woods fire.
It was always important to get these fires out. There was even a fire tower near the town staffed each day by a woman who would sit up 100 feet in the air looking at the entire country side for smoke to get these fires out as quickly as possible. She would often pick up the fires from moonshine stills too which were then raided. But, I do not ever remember anything with a fire wall that was 40 feet high and embers blowing a quarter of mile to set off new fires. It's difficult to see how such a thing could happen now unless everything was completely dry.
2. Having found the magnificent Google Maps, I kept exploring putting in addresses for places where I had lived and found them. I could see some still there recognising the buildings from the satellite image map and note the changes which had occurred in some of them. I went from London to Trabzon, Turkey, New York, San Antonio, Texas and Guam just for starters. I can see myself doing this for days, but I found one thing that was startling information for me.
I took a look at where I used to work in the USAF in San Antonio and where I had lived there too. By just putting in an address, I would get right on top of what I wanted to see. Or, perhaps a junction of streets if I could not remember a street number. However, I had to search a bit for the HQ of what used to be the USAF Security Service, but I found it and was amazed at what I found. They had named the streets after former USAFSS bases around the world: Kirknewton 
, Wakkanai 
, Peshawar 
and Trabzon 
.
There it was! A street named after Trabzon, Turkey, where I had spent 12 months after working 18 months at HQ USAFSS whose satellite image and map combined I was now examining. I could see how things had changed from those distant Cold War days of some 45 years ago. Can you imagine telling somebody to meet you at the corner of Trabzon and Kirknewton? Or, perhaps Wakkanai and Kirknewton? Put either of those in as a search item in Google Maps, and you will find the HQ of what used to be the USAF Security Service and is now the Air Intelligence Agency after passing through the Electronic Security Command phase. Don't forget to specify San Antonio, Texas.
And what a change too. It appears that they have their own Memorial Park like the one at NSA in Fort George Meade in Maryland. There is an aircraft on the very wide area [Here it is on the AIA home page with the side of the "H" building in the background.] where we used to walk to enter the building. From a satellite this looks like a small map denotation for an airport. The whole area has been rebuilt, but to the top is a large area of shrubs and whatever with a sandy large area further on.
This I took to be, or once was and still looks like it, the Lackland AFB firing range where I qualified with a .30 caliber carbine in the summer of 1961. The street running next to it is called Range Road. Must be the firing range. Then, when I came back to work at USAF HQ in March 1962 after six months of technical training at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas, I could see the firing range outside my office window which was in the back of the huge "H" shaped building. At that time they were using the new AR15 which was the Air Force's assault rifle. The sound was loud and distinct in rapid fire with sand thrown up all over at 100 yards which we could see.
At that time this was what was called East Kelly as part of Kelly AFB which had the huge B52 maintenance facility and supposedly the largest hangar in the world. I believe that now it is part of Lackland AFB with name changes over the years from USAF Security Service to the Electronic Security Command and now the Air Intelligence Agency. Who knows?
Whatever the situation, there it is though: the streets named after USAFSS bases from the Cold War days. These were some of the very remote sites around the world where the tour of duty was minimal since they were considered hardship tours. There wasn't anything to do but work and sleep. I now feel rather honoured to know that there is a street there named Trabzon which is still remembered when no one really knew it existed at all. I hope the Turks appreciate the fact that they are so honoured for having participated in a very significant way in the Cold War.
3. Today's annoucement made and published on the AIA's web site makes it known that AIA is to be radically transformed into a worldwide Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconaissance agency effective on 8th June 2007. This is actually quite stunning news when you consider my experience of the past eight and three quarter years with which I've been dealing here. Read the following public news item very carefully.
Air Intelligence Agency HQ Lackland AFB San Antonio, Texas soon to be called the Air Force ISR Agency. What does ISR mean? The following announcement was made today:
AIA reported to Air Combat Command. The new agency is aligned under the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (A2) as a Field Operating Agency. [It's coming under Pentagon direct control.]
. . .
"Because ISR capabilities are at the core of determining these desired [warfighting] effects, ISR has never been more important during our 60 years as an independent service. ISR has become the foundation of Global Vigilance, Reach, and Power. The ISR transformation initiatives we are beginning will further enhance our ability to fly and fight as America's Air Force," [General T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff.]
. . .
"The Air Force ISR Agency will now be responsible for broadening their scope beyond the signal intelligence arena to include all elements of ISR," General Deptula said. "The intent is to provide unmatched ISR capability to our Nation's decision makers and combatant commanders." [Lt. Gen. David A Deptula, Air Force deputy chief of staff for A2.]
. . .
"(L)ast August Lt. Gen. Deptula defined the vision of AF/A2 to transform Air Force intelligence into a preeminent intelligence organization; with the most respected intelligence personnel; and the most valued ISR capability. This realignment is the result of nine months of hard work by ISR professionals in the Air Force and civilian sector. AF ISR transformation will allow us to treat intelligence as an AF-wide enterprise, coordinate and integrate ISR capabilities, and present those capabilities to joint warfighters and national users." [Maj. Gen. Craig Koziol, Air Force ISR Agency commander.]
The new agency force structure includes the 70th Intelligence Wing and the Air Force Cryptologic Office at Fort George G. Meade, Md.; the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio; and the Air Force Technical Applications Center at Patrick AFB, Fla.
The Air Force Information Operations Center, Lackland AFB, Texas was reassigned to 8th Air Force on 1 May in a parallel transformation to emphasize cyberspace as an AF operating domain.
. . .
General Koziol is eager to have his new organization step up to the plate.
"My intention is to have this new agency become the focal point for Air Force ISR development and modernization. Our team must keep one thing in mind though; this is about delivering the best trained forces and most effective capabilities and how we can conduct integrated ISR operations, with precision at all levels, for air, space and cyberspace missions."
He went on to say, "It's also about organizing, training, equipping, presenting and integrating multi-intelligence all-source ISR capabilities for Joint Forces Commanders through the Coalition/Joint Force Air Component Commander. I am also looking forward to developing even stronger relationships with the Combat Support Agencies within the national intelligence community--these organizations continue to play a vital role across the entire warfighting spectrum."
. . .
The change will become effective Jun 8, 2007.
4. Never a day goes by when this web journal does not come full circle to relate its subject matter to the items being discussed. Here is where that circle comes back to surveillance even if that was not far from anyone's consciousness when viewing the satellite images and maps above. Through a progression of names the former USAF Security Service is to become the Air Force ISR Agency: Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconaissance throughout the world directed from the Pentagon, going beyond signals intelligence and covering air, space and cyperspace. It will be covering everything: read that to mean satellite espionage on a worldwide basis.
Here also is TEMPEST resurrected once again. TEMPEST is the interception of those tiny electromagnetic radiations that are called emissions from anything that has an electrical capacity.
While exploring the Air Intelligence Agency (AIA) web site noted above, I found the "Memory Hole" for deleted documents which have been found and once again posted. Here is the document which pertains to TEMPEST security, i.e., making certain that all electronic equipment and its wiring are suitably secure and free from interception. I now wonder what they are doing with respect to security for brain wave monitoring and feedback which I believe is a TEMPEST derivative?