Residents of Tooele and beyond may encounter the new Tooele Army Depot commander riding his mountain bike through Settlement Canyon, or camping in the Oquirrhs.
“It’s beautiful, I’m super excited,” Col. Luke Clover said, sitting in a borrowed desk at one of the installation’s gatehouses. The harsh sunlight of late morning scattered off the straw grass and sand outside, giving the room a yellow tinge.
The depot, over 44,000 acres in the west desert, has come a long way since its inception, spurred by the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What started as “a dust bowl, thousands of acres of sagebrush” became a five-year temporary depot, at one point holding a thousand German prisoners of war during World War II, according to the U.S. Army.
After 80 years, and many shifts in technology and mission, the Tooele Army Depot has established itself as the Department of Defense’s western hub for “storage, shipping, receiving, demilitarization and maintenance of conventional ammunition.”
In a change of command that happens every two years, former Tooele Army Depot Commander Col. Eric Dennis has moved on to the likely greener pastures of Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs.
But Clover already feels the clock ticking. “Unfortunately, I only get to stay here two years,” he said. “There’s already a timeline for the planned changeover for commanders.”
‘Not like a regular installation’
The depot is special for a lot of reasons, Clover said. Geographically, the high Utah desert is the perfect place to work with munitions, the biggest mission of the installation. “We don’t get as much deterioration of munitions in this type of climate,” he said.
The base is far enough away from population centers to allow workers to “produce, receive, store and demilitarize munitions,” he said, while being connected to the nation’s rail and road transportation network.
But the depot has another special feature — the surrounding community. In the short three weeks Clover’s been working, he said, “I can’t even count the number of folks that I’ve met that are like, ‘My grandfather worked here, my father worked here, all my uncles and aunts worked here, I’m working here, my kids are working here.'”
He said the Tooele Army Depot is not like a regular installation. “We don’t have a lot of military members here,” he said. He is one of two uniformed service members who work at the almost 500 personnel-strong depot, primarily Department of the Army civilian employees.
Clover says the reason is they are “higher up in the organic industrial base of the Department of Defense.”
“We know that everything we do makes its way to America’s sons, daughters, mothers and fathers that are out there serving the county,” he said. “Everyone out here knows, ‘I need to do the best that I can in support of the brave men and women that volunteer to support and defend this country.'”
Potential for growth
“Right now the plan is not for any increase or decrease in the size of the workforce, or anything mission-wise as far as the installation goes,” Clover said. “But we know that there’s opportunity there.”
The depot was much larger in the 1990s, but then changed its mission. But Clover said, “We have tremendous opportunity to increase the amount of work with munitions … and we’re going to try to sell it to the rest of the Department of Defense.”
“You want to bring in additional work because you want to create more jobs and you want to create more benefit for the community,” he said, but the process requires a long-term vision.
He is tasked with working toward a strategic plan set by previous commanders, for the year 2042, a century from the founding of the base. It requires predicting the needs of the Department of Defense in terms of technical expertise, equipment, testing parameters, and overall conditions to safely and efficiently conduct their mission, according to Clover.
“How do you eat the elephant one bite at a time?” he said. “We look at taking our bites out of that elephant and setting up the plan on how we take the next bites to reach that vision for 2042.”
The new commander said he will work to address the always-present concerns of noise, safety and the base’s environmental impacts.
“I might not always be able to solve all the problems or concerns, but I plan on being transparent and clear in the communications with addressing those concerns,” Clover said.
The commander has already been observed picking up trash on the side of Commander Boulevard, which may bode well for the depot’s next two years.
EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel
