NEW JERSEY Misfire at school prompts probe

There's no indication the action was deliberate, officials said.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. -- The custodians at Little Egg Harbor Township Intermediate School heard a strange noise Wednesday night -- as if someone were running across the roof -- that could not be explained even when police officers investigated.
In the morning, the mystery grew when school staff found hunks of metal that had punctured ceiling tiles in several classrooms and scuffed the floors.
The metal, it turned out, had come from an altitude of 7,000 feet. An Air National Guard fighter plane had strafed the school on a training mission. By Thursday morning, police had roped off the school, the military had begun an investigation and the township rumor mill had spun a story that the school had been bombed.
Military officials called the firing an accident and said they had no idea why the plane's Vulcan cannon blasted 1.5-inch-long 20 mm training rounds at the school. No one was injured.
They would not give the pilot's name or rank, saying that was the policy during an investigation. They also would not say what discipline the pilot could face.
The pilot was flying one of two F-16s from the 113th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard that took off Wednesday night from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. They were headed for Warren Grove, a bombing range in Ocean County, N.J., where they were supposed to fire their nonexplosive rounds. The range is about 31/2 miles from the school.
What happened
"He inadvertently discharged the weapon. He was not in the act of aiming the gun at anything," said Col. Brian Webster, commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard, of the incident. "We do not know exactly why the gun fired."
The New Jersey Air National Guard operates the range.
The warplanes returned to Andrews Air Force Base as scheduled.
The plane will be examined for possible mechanical problems, said Army Maj. Sheldon Smith, spokesman for the D.C. National Guard.
He called the firing an anomaly and said the unit would conduct a thorough investigation to determine whether human error or mechanical failure was involved.
"This unit has a very distinguished flying record," Smith said. "We are eager to find out what happened so it won't happen again."
"No one was injured, but we are taking this investigation very seriously, as if someone was," he said.
The 113th Wing operates around the clock to protect airspace over the nation's capital. It scrambled its jets after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Residents' reactions
Little Egg Harbor residents seemed untroubled by the news. The Warren Grove Gunnery Range has been in use since World War II. Residents say they can hear the bombing on a quiet night, and they joke about how they can gauge when military action is imminent based on activity at the range.
Jane Randolph, who lives near the school, said she would not advocate moving the range.
"After all, they were here first," she said. "These are all fairly new houses around here, and everyone's aware that Warren Grove is there. I think this is just an isolated incident."
This was not the first accident involving the Warren Grove range that was felt outside its borders. In 1999, a practice bomb that fell outside the range sparked a fire that burned more than 11,000 acres in the Pine Barrens, N.J. In 2001, an errant practice bomb caused a fire that scorched 1,600 acres.
And in 2002, a fighter jet from the 177th Fighter Wing crashed in woods off New Jersey's Garden State Parkway after a bombing run to Warren Grove.
The school hit by the rounds serves 970 third through sixth-graders. Mike Dupuis, president of the township school district, said children probably would have been injured had the school not been closed because teachers were attending the New Jersey Education Association conference in Atlantic City.