Army's NORAD Blimp Breaks Loose Causing Havoc

Here's another fine example of your tax dollars at work! Remember last year we told you about the billion dollar surveillance blimps that our government was planning to launch over Maryland? These things were supposed to protect us from a potential barrage of enemy missiles that might somehow be launched by evil villains presumably lying in wait off the Atlantic coast aimed at Washington or wherever.

Well, they actually did put a couple of the things up in the air and they've been hovering over I-95 northeast of Washington until, yup you guessed it, one of them decided to come loose yesterday morning and meander northward from its mooring base. On the way, it dragged along its 6,700 foot tether line about 150 miles up into Pennsylvania until it unceremoniously came down about four hours later in a densely wooded forest near Moreland Township. 

As the tether line bounced to and fro creating a path of destruction, school teachers herded children into their schools as the line raked across roads, bridges, highways, fields, homes and quite a few power lines causing about 35,000 to lose power in the Bloomsburg, PA area. The military scrambled helicopters and a couple of F-16 fighter jets came for a looksee from the New Jersey National Guard.

The 243-foot-long, helium-filled blimp that weighs about 10,000 pounds came loose from its mooring at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland at 11:54 a.m. according to the Army. No one there has yet been able to explain why it broke free from its mooring. The tether line is supposed to keep these things safely secured to the ground in winds up to 100 mph. But this is our government at work, so you know that when a little rainstorm came through with winds around 45 mph, that was enough to break it loose. And off it went!

The blimp landed in a dense Pennsylvania forest at the top of some trees and the Army fired over 100 shotgun rounds to blow enough holes in the thing to let the last of the remaining helium escape and allow what was left of the $235 million blimp fall to the ground. An Army Chinook helicopter is planned to lift the blimp out of the forest. Local residents said they were thankful that the blimp missed a nearby nuclear power plant when it descended. (I guess so was the rest of the eastern seaboard!)

The $2.7 billion blimp program was recently profiled in a scathing report by the Los Angeles Times describing it as the "quintessential runaway Pentagon project."