Wildfire threatens Guantanamo base

MIAMI — A wildfire ignited mines laid by the Cuban military decades ago and jumped the fence line at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay on Thursday, threatening buildings and forcing evacuations of six neighborhoods.

“Right now everyone is safe,” base spokesman Julie Ann Ripley said Thursday afternoon. Base workers were “doing a full accountability report,” a military term for checking rosters and counting heads. Navy C-12 aircraft were flying overhead scouting the scene but did not have the capability of dumping water on the fires, Ripley said.

Base security officials shut down the road leading to the Detention Center Zone, cutting off the main part of the outpost from the base within the base where the Pentagon holds 41 war-on-terror detainees.

“You can’t see the fire, but you can see a lot of smoke,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denny LeBoeuf said by telephone soon after arriving on the base Thursday. She wondered whether the remote base, which plans extensively for Caribbean hurricanes, also had a way to evacuate war-on-terror detainees from their secret maximum-security prison.

In an afternoon broadcast on the base radio station, base commander Navy Capt. Dave Culpepper advised: “Folks probably heard in the middle of the night a bunch of ordnance going off. And of course that was the fire burning on the other side of the fence, over on the Cuban side, their mines cooking off from the heat.”

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