Editor,

It is now up to the Navy to decide if our homeless and at-risk youth on Whidbey Island will have a safe place for healing and growing.

Ryan’s House for Youth desperately needs a facility to offer a “safe, homelike environment” for a vulnerable and growing youth population. After months of searching, the organization has found what could be the perfect place. Ryan’s House is trying to purchase the Countryside Inn near Coupeville, claiming that it is the only facility to be found. Unfortunately, it sits at the end of Navy’s outlying field runway. It is adjacent to the dangerous takeoff area and inside the undeclared Accident Potential Zone (APZ-1).

The would-be site for Ryan’s House is also within the loudest portions of the airstrip’s flight path where F-18 Growler jet overflights inflict noise so detrimental to human health that one medical specialist termed the situation a “medical emergency.” The Navy knows there’s a noise problem, having paid $750,000 to owners of 28 other parcels in the same area who sued over jet noise. That was back in 2002 when older jets did not have noise-increasing afterburners like the Growlers now have.

Locating Ryan’s House at the airstrip may provide a “safer” place for some youths in need, but certainly not a safe one. The Navy can make it safe by ending the Growler overflights. Our elected officials, like Island County Commissioner Helen Price Johnson, should encourage them to do so. She and the Navy have been provided with numerous health and sound studies that document ongoing harms and risks. By closing the outlying field, the Navy would avoid more controversy and litigation, and it would be doing something immediate and concrete to meet a pressing need in our Island community.

RICK ABRAHAM

Greenbank