When?

That is strange, it came right up for me.  Starts out like this:
An Air National Guard fighter plane on a training mission to an Ocean County
target range last night accidentally fired a cannon, strafing a Little Egg
Harbor Township school, officials said today.

No one was injured.

Custodians at the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School reported a sound like
"someone running across the roof" around 9 p.m. Police officers who went to the
school to investigate did not find anything unusual.

But, school personnel who arrived at the school this morning discovered about 25
inch-and-a-half long training rounds in several classrooms. The rounds, fired
from a Vulcan cannon, punctured ceiling tiles and scuffed the floors, school
officials said.

The school was closed today...

WHOT?????

Posted on Thu, Nov. 04, 2004




National Guard jet strafes South Jersey school

By Jacqueline L. Urgo and Troy Graham

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

An Air National Guard fighter plane on a training mission to an Ocean
County target range last night accidentally fired a cannon, strafing a
Little Egg Harbor Township school, officials said today.

No one was injured.

Custodians at the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School reported a
sound like "someone running across the roof" around 9 p.m. Police
officers who went to the school to investigate did not find anything
unusual.

But, school personnel who arrived at the school this morning
discovered about 25 inch-and-a-half long training rounds in several
classrooms. The rounds, fired from a Vulcan cannon, punctured ceiling
tiles and scuffed the floors, school officials said.

The school was closed today because of the New Jersey Education
Association conference in Atlantic City and is not scheduled to reopen
until Monday. School officials said repairs would be made and the
school, which serves 970 students from third to sixth grade, should
reopen on time.

Two F-16 planes were flying last night at 7,000 feet on the training
mission from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland when one of the planes
accidentally strafed the school. The building is about three and a
half miles from the Warren Grove range, where the planes were supposed
to fire their weapons.

Military officials would not identify or give the rank of the pilot
whose plane fired on the school.

"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 National Guard. "We do not know
exactly why the gun fired."

This was not the first mishap involving the Warren Grove range. In
1999, a bomb that fell outside the range sparked a fire in the Pine
Barrens that burned more than 11,000 acres.

Two years later, another practice bomb started a 1,600-acre fire, and
in 2002, a jet returning from a practice run crashed near the Garden
State Parkway. The pilot ejected safely and on one on the ground was
injured in that incident.




     



Sorry!