Keith E. Forrester,

To the editor,

I am a professional environmental engineer with 30 years experience in industrial facility design and operations regulatory compliance, and hold 15 patents covering lead management and lead molecular stabilization. I support the proposed Belmont Firearms outdoor range.

With current "free-range" shooting currently practiced in Belmont, there exists an acute risk of projectile impact to human and fauna, as well as environmental impact. Since free-range lead projectiles will leach lead to both surface and groundwater, they expose surface unconfined and fractured confined aquifer drinking well water to soluble lead salts. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has recently reported that there is no safe level of lead exposure in children and wildlife, thus concluding that free-range shooting has negative environmental and health impact. Free-range noise, i.e., gun reports, can be heard from the wooded area adjacent to Belmont Firearms, throughout the day along with a steady baseline of automobile, motorcycle, machinery and air traffic noise.

The proposed Belmont Firearms outdoor range will provide a net reduction in projectile impact risk, projectile lead leaching, and noise transmission. Given that the proposed range will direct projectiles into material designed to capture projectiles, the potential for projectile acute toxicity by impact is eliminated. Lead leaching will also be eliminated by both capture and collection of projectiles and introduction of patented lead stabilizer in the range pathway and cell adjacent area. The lead stabilizer converts lead salts and oxides to insoluble mineral called chloropyromorphite, reported by the USEPA as the safest form of lead known to man. Furthermore, the proposed Belmont Firearms outdoor range will attract current "free-range" shooters away from unsafe and damaging shooting by providing an inexpensive, safe, hassle-free and permitted facility, with weather protection, restrooms, and ammunition supply not available in the random outdoors.

As with the current free-range, the proposed Belmont Firearms Outdoor Range will generate report noise from 22LR to 308 hunting rounds. However, far superior and at far less noise level than free-range use, the Belmont Firearms outdoor range will provide a noise adsorption and dampening "quiet range" system designed after the same method used in silencers. My company will also be assisting Belmont Firearms in conducting an event-generated decibel measure study, during which high-noise producing rounds will be used in the new quiet range and measured at various concentric distances there-from. We anticipate that existing background decibel-measured noise signals from automobiles, airplanes, landscaping, wood harvesting, and commercial and industrial facility operations, will exceed if not bury individual range report decibel levels, and that even the loudest 308 round report will peak well below current noise pollution NHDES and NHDOT established decibel limits for automobiles, motorcycles, and commercial-industrial facilities.

Keith E. Forrester,

Meredith