Saturday, March 24, 2001

By Mark Oliva
Okinawa bureau

Mark Oliva / Stars and Stripes Seabees used forklifts to stack cars four and five high in a island cleanup project at Tsuken Island. The Seabees cleared 400 cars in four days, freeing up clogged roads and clearing lots and even cemeteries of abandoned cars.

TSUKEN ISLAND — Seabees on Okinawa might just claim the record for the most wrecked cars by one detachment.

Twelve sailors from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion FOUR and six Marines from 9th Engineer Support Battalion came to this island a short ferry ride away from White Beach Naval Facility for a ton of community cleanup projects — literally.

"We’ve crushed and stacked about 400 cars," said Navy Master Chief Petty Officer William McKenzie, company chief and senior Seabee on the job site. "It’s a pretty big project for us. Originally I didn’t know if we’d get Marine support, but they jumped all over it."

But just saying the construction and engineering crews were cracking and stacking beat-up junkers doesn’t paint the true picture. Four hundred cars littered this tiny island before the Seabees got to work.

McKenzie said the car removal project started two years ago when Tsuken officials requested bids to remove the abandoned cars cluttering the island’s narrow roads. The bids they got back, according to McKenzie, would have exceeded the budget for the project just to remove 80 cars. Since then, the problem mushroomed five times the original figure, and Tsuken officials sought Navy help.

Mark Oliva / Stars and Stripes An abandoned car is dealt with by the Seabees at Tsuken Island.

"Cars littered everywhere," Mckenzie said when he first surveyed the proposed project. "Some roads, I had to walk off the road to get around the cars. They were that thick. Some we had to dig out of the jungle in pieces."

Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kathryn Remm said if the problem weren’t so large, it would have been funny.

"We had one car with a tree growing out of the middle of it," the assistant crew leader said. "The cemetery road was overgrown with cars. We had a good 80 or 90 cars blocking the way. We drug about 50 out of the landfill."

The Seabees gathered every jalopy and beater they found and dragged, forklifted and crushed them into two collection sites. It was a feat they finished in less than half the time expected.

"We planned for a week or a week and half at the most." McKenzie said. "We did 400 cars in four days. We just got into a groove, and the equipment was good to us."

Seabees plan on turning over the haul-away portion of the project to the next Seabee battalion set to deploy to Okinawa.

"It was a pretty important project," McKenzie added. "The cars closed off some roads completely. It gives you a good feeling inside. You know the people on this island appreciate what [the sailors] did."

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