For decades, warships and planes hammered the Naval Training Range on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, with live rounds before it was closed in April 2003 after years of protests against the danger and the din.
Nevertheless thousands of unexploded bombs, rockets, cluster bombs and other munitions were left lurking under dense foliage.
About 110 contract workers are now cleaning up the site on Vieques, a speck of land with 9,000 residents 13km east of Puerto Rico's main island. It is dangerous work, requiring concentration, keen eyesight and nerves of steel.
The Navy began war maneuvers on Vieques in 1948, subjecting those who live on the rest of the island to thunderous, window-rattling blasts. Marines practiced amphibious landings, supported by warplanes and ships.
Now the eastern half of the island containing the former training site is as beautiful as it is deadly.
Ringed by beaches, tidal pools and crystalline waters, it is blanketed with munitions ranging from World War II leftovers to those still used today, including 600kg bombs.
Technicians have detonated more than 3,400 munitions-related items containing 10.6 tonnes of explosives on the site, according to the Navy. More than 175,000 items, including bomb fragments, have been carted away.
There have been no explosives-related injuries so far during the cleanup, said Kelley Stirling, a Navy public affairs officer.
"It really gets your attention when you walk out there," Carlton Finley, a Navy ordnance disposal expert, said as he drove onto the range in an SUV with contract worker Joe Riner. "You've got to keep your focus, watch where you're putting your foot, and step lightly."
The SUV rolled past a beach pocked with 6m-wide craters and littered with missile fins and bombs.
"We consider every item to be high-explosive until we can positively determine otherwise," Riner said.
The protest against the bombing range by islanders and some US celebrities began in 1999 when a Marine jet dropped two bombs off target and killed a Puerto Rican security guard.
Cleaning the area has proved more difficult than expected, with much of the 5,800 hectare site covered with tangled vegetation reaching 4.5m high.
Officials had expected to clear 160 hectares in seven months, but it has taken almost a year-and-a-half to finish just 95 hectares said Daniel Rodriguez of the US Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the cleanup.
The area is officially a Fish and Wildlife Service refuge, but only a sliver is open to the public. The US Interior Department is expected to issue a report soon outlining plans for the site.
Removing all the munitions could take as long as a decade, officials say. The current phase envisions clearing 440 hectares.
Working in 30m-by-30-m grids, the contractors first inspect to make sure there are no explosives that could be detonated by falling branches, then slice away smaller trees and vegetation with brush-cutting tools and chain saws.
If the brush clearers find a suspicious object, an ordnance technician blows it up since it's too dangerous to move live munitions. Once the brush is cleared, workers sweep the ground with metal detectors to find munitions or fragments.
Among the most hazardous munitions are BLU-97 cluster bombs, which eject from the rear of a canister in mid-flight and scatter over wide areas.
"This will ruin your whole day. It will reach out and touch you," Finley said of the soda-can sized bomblet, which US forces dropped in Afghanistan. "It will go off if you just look at it too hard."
To make the cleanup safer, the Navy wants Puerto Rico to suspend a law against open burning, so the vegetation can be set ablaze. The Navy says air-monitoring stations would be installed to ensure the fires don't release toxins into the air.
Yarissa Martinez, of Puerto Rico's Environmental Quality Board, said on Wednesday that her agency hadn't received the Navy's request and declined to speculate on whether it would be approved.
Some islanders want a moratorium on the detonations until health effects of possible emissions are analyzed.
Three monitoring boxes have been set up to gauge whether metals or other dangerous elements are being introduced into the atmosphere. None has been detected at unsafe levels. Rodriguez said more monitoring stations are needed to make sure islanders are safe.
The contract workers know all too well that removing the ammo is risky, too. Before they leave for work some crew members hold a prayer session in a parking lot.
"Before we get in the van, we do a `Hi Almighty, here we are ... please help us,"' said Edgar Colon, one of the brush clearers. "We put that out, you know, and after that we turn on the rock 'n' roll."
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