Vail Terrorists at it again
E-Mail says ELF Started Blaze
Timberscope
Timber Harvesting-October 2002
A radical environmental group has claimed responsibility for an August 11 fire that caused $700,000 damage to a U.S. Forest Service research office in Irvine, Warren County, Pa.
Earth Liberation Front has sent an e-mail to the Warren Times Observer saying it targeted the 40-year-old federal Forest Sciences Laboratory building in response to timber sales, oil drilling and "greed driven manipulation of nature" in the Allegheny National Forest.
Sent just two days after new roof trusses were raised on the damaged building, the e-mail says the group will destroy the facility if it is rebuilt, and that all other Forest Service buildings nationwide "should now be considered likely targets."
Susan Stout, project leader at the laboratory where some studies date to 1928, says she was shocked the lab was targeted. The lab employs 25. "We perceive ourselves as doing research to promote sustainable stewardship of hardwood forests in Pennsylvania and surrounding states," Stout says. "It seems like an agenda people should be in favor of. The fire has severely disrupted our work. We're back in business now in cramped, temporary quarters, but it will take a long time to really determine what was lost."
No one was injured in the five-alarm blaze, but the group's eight paragraph e-mail says that might not be the case in the future. "While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake," the e-mail states, "where it is necessary, we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice, and provide the needed protection for our planet that decades of legal battles, pleading, protest and economic sabotage have failed so drastically to achieve."
It is signed "Pacific E.L.F.," and is a new clue in the ongoing investigation of the fire by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI, the Pennsylvania State Police and the Forest Service.
The ATF office in Pittsburgh announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the those responsible. A hot line manned by agents 24 hours a day has been established at 1-888-283-3473.
ELF has taken credit for hundreds of acts of violence against property over the past six years, including fires that caused $12 million worth of damage to buildings at the Vail ski resort in Colorado in 1998.
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