It is particularly telling that Indiana's newest Navy facility is located in the middle of nowhere.
To say the Glendora Lake Facility is in a rural area would almost be exaggerating. This $3.3 million project was far out in the boondocks, midway down a barely marked gravel road.But that's just fine with the Navy. The site, a former AMAX Coal Co. stripper pit, was selected in part because it was so remote. Most of the work here on the Navy's 364-acre lake, which opened officially in May, involves testing very sensitive sonar equipment for submarines and warplanes, and it's critical that the lake is absolutely silent.
"Even fish swimming by can cause problems with our testing," says Tom Laughlin, the facility manager.
Military installations around the world have to cope with high-security measures and threats of terrorist attack. Here the main secu-rity problems are unauthorized ducks landing on the lake during a test or a heavy truck rumbling down the dusty, gravel road.
Although it doesn't look like much, a cluster of gleaming buildings around a dull green lake, the Glendora facility is critical for the Navy because it's the only large lake owned and controlled by the military. The Navy's other half-dozen "test lakes" around the country are public facilities also used by boaters, fishermen and industry.
"By buying our own facility and controlling the access to it and controlling what's developed around it, we can control the ambient noise, and that's what's important in our work," Laughlin said.
Most of the projects at the lake involve testing "sonobuoys" that often are dropped into the ocean by aircraft and used to listen for the movement of enemy submarines.
Testing sonobuoys in the private lake instead of the ocean not only saves time but also about $9,000 a day.
"When you take a ship or an aircraft out with a full crew, it's very expensive," he says. "Here, in general, what we can do is simulate how the hardware will perform when it hits the ocean without having to haul it all out there."
Sonobuoys - basically a cluster of instrumentation tightly packed into a plastic case about the size of a man's leg - are generally tossed into the ocean by low-flying "submarine hunter" planes or thrown overboard by sailors on Navy warships.
Sonar operators can use the data returned by the buoys to track where a submarine might be moving.
The equipment at Glendora can simulate all of the conditions a sonobuoy could encounter, including weather. Large freezers and heaters can even test how they will perform in temperature extremes.
Waves are simulated by having the equipment towed along underwater cables while another machine bobs them up and down.
The only thing that can't be simulated is the actual air drop. That will change this fall when the Navy installs a large, unmanned hot-air balloon that can drop the devices from 700 feet into the lake.
Laughlin heads a crew of seven full-time engineers at the facility. None is in the Navy. He got his start with acoustic testing at Crane in the 1970s as a college intern when the Navy leased another nearby stripper pit from AMAX for its testing. After graduation from Florida Atlantic University, he joined the unit full time.
The leased lake facility was pretty grim, he said, just a few surplus trailers full of equipment."It used to snow in my office," he said.
But "things got good this year" with the ribbon-cutting on the new $3.3 million facility, complete with air-conditioning and state-of-the-art testing equipment, he said. It has a complete workshop area so engineers can assemble or work on equipment without leaving.
"Because we're so remote, we try to be self-sustaining as much as we can be," he said.
The unit is officially part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Crane, Ind., about 50 miles away.
The lake's mission is consistent with the high-tech testing at Crane, which is Indiana's largest technical employer with 3,800 people, mostly civilians.
Last week engineers at the lake were testing a ton of sonar equipment before it ends up in the nose of a submarine.
They also test electronic countermeasures that can trick enemy sonar and a variety of hand-held devices used by divers for night vision and to cut cables or complete construction tasks.
"Underwater, divers have trouble getting enough leverage, so they pack a small explosive charge into the device to give them a hand," he said.