US troop relocation out of Okinawa delayed after Japanese base project hits snag
- Construction of new facility at Oura Bay will take almost four years longer than anticipated, and cost estimate has ballooned to US$23.61 billion
- Engineers had warned the seabed was ‘as soft as mayonnaise’, but officials pressed ahead anyway, and the base has also become ensnared in political wrangling
Japan will revise the timetable and cost predictions for the construction of a new base for the US military in Okinawa, with some estimates suggesting the project will take nearly four years longer than anticipated and require 2.55 trillion yen (US$23.61 billion), up sharply from an earlier calculation of 350 billion.
The hold-up in work on the facility will further delay the long-planned relocation of thousands of American troops, their families and equipment to other locations in the Asia-Pacific region. Of the 20,600 US marines on Okinawa, 5,000 are scheduled to move to bases on Guam or rotate through US facilities in Hawaii, South Korea and Australia. The remaining personnel will leave the vast Futenma Air Station, in the centre of Okinawa, and relocate to the more remote Camp Schwab.
The Japanese government has been forced to reconsider its earlier projections for the base after work to reclaim part of Oura Bay near the United States Marine Corps’ existing Camp Schwab in the northeast of the island prefecture was halted when engineers confirmed the seabed was “as soft as mayonnaise”.
Officials were warned that the seabed beneath 65.4 hectares of the bay had been found to be too soft for construction in surveys conducted between 2014 and 2016, but they opted to push ahead with the work anyway.
Engineers now estimate the extra reinforcement required to make the base feasible will take an extra three years and eight months.