The Manchester Fuel Department (MFD) is the Department of Defense’s largest single-site fuel terminal in the United States. The depot provides military-grade fuel, lubricants and additives to U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels, and to those from allied nations like Canada. Records available from 2017 show over 75 million gallons of fuel stored at MFD.
The facility sits on approximately two miles of Puget Sound shoreline, storing product in 44 bulk fuel tanks (33 Underground Storage Tanks and 11 Aboveground Storage Tanks) on 234 acres. Most of the tanks were built in the 1940s. The fuel depot (tank farm and loading pier) is less than six miles west of Alki Beach in Seattle.
Activists with Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, 350 West Sound Climate Action, and Earth Care Not Warfare demand that the U.S. military reduce its carbon footprint while reducing its global military footprint on the planet. The U.S. military has approximately 750 military bases around the world and emits more carbon into the atmosphere than 140 nations.
If the U.S. military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.
Our proximity to the largest number of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S. at Bangor, and to the “Pentagon’s largest gas station” at Manchester, demands a deeper reflection and response to the threats of nuclear war and climate change.
While climate change and the threat of nuclear war are the two major threats to the future of humankind and life on our planet, their solutions are similar. International cooperation to solve one of the problems—whether to abolish or tightly reduce nuclear weapons or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—would greatly help with the solution of the other.
The next Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action event is on May 7 at the Ground Zero Center in Poulsbo, and at the Bangor submarine base, in commemoration of Mother’s Day.
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