In March 1999, the US Marine Corps staged a practice invasion of the San Francisco Bay Area with a fleet of five battleships, gigantic LCAC hovercraft, dozens of helicopters, hundreds of combat-equipped Marines and 6,000 sailors. For four days, the smoke and explosions of simulated combat rattled the tranquility of the "invasion" site - an abandoned naval hospital in the Oakland Hills. The exercise, complete with the firing of 32,000 rounds of blanks, took place within sight of a local high school and within earshot of the Oakland Zoo. It was estimated that the Corps' invading trucks, tanks, ships and landing craft turned 18,063.3 gallons of fuel into 1.21 tons of air pollution. (Pollution from aircraft was not included.) The nitrous oxides produced were estimated to be 3.4 times greater than the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's "significant threshold."
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