The United States Navy is coming to town!

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- a newspaper that's about to fold , incidentally -- reports that the United States Department of the Navy will hold a public hearing in Eureka on Feb. 2 .

Concerning what, you ask? Concerning the proposed Northwest Training Range Complex , the department's plan to designate most of the Pacific Northwest coast as training grounds for naval operations. ( UPDATE: The NWTRC already exists -- news to me, anyway. The current proposal is to increase training operations in its bounds.)

What sorts of training? According to this brochure :

Training Activities

Training activities involve activities in the range complex where Navy personnel learn skills they need to operate machinery or weapons. These activities provide realistic experience and include:

Operating vehicles, aircraft, submarines, and surface ships;
Conducting live fire training against surface and air targets at sea;
Conducting airborne surveillance activities;
Detecting, locating, and countering threat electronic signals;
Finding and removing underwater mines;
Training Navy divers in a cold water environment;
There's a mass of material, including the full Enivronmental Impact Statement for the project, on the "documents" section of the project's site .

Map below. More to come, obviously.