WWII bombing range has people up in arms
Since the US Army Corps of Engineers began sweeping the Orlando neighborhoods a year ago, they've found more than 200 munitions and other potentially volatile remnants. Some weighed up to 23 pounds. Most were recovered on the grounds of a middle school, including one lodged beneath the landing pit for the long jump.

There are hundreds of former bombing and artillery training ranges across the United States, but few have 2,000 homes sitting on top of them.

Since the US Army Corps of Engineers began sweeping the Orlando neighborhoods a year ago, they've found more than 200 munitions and other potentially volatile remnants. Some weighed up to 23 pounds. Most were recovered on the grounds of a middle school, including one lodged beneath the landing pit for the long jump.

The corps says it's extremely unlikely any of the buried munitions would detonate, but that's done little to calm nerves. The value of the homes - which originally cost $200,000 to $600,000 - has dropped by at least a third, residents say.

That's compared with a roughly 20-percent decline across Florida caused by the real estate slump.

That's if the homes can be sold at all. Some homeowners involved in class-action lawsuits over the site say banks have told them the properties aren't worth anything to lend against.

"This has been a failure of the government," said Ron Cumello, head of a local homeowners' association, during one of several meetings with the corps and local officials. "You guys have to win back our trust."

The developers, homebuilders, the Army Corps, and local government officials who zoned the land blame one another. Corps officials say they long ago told local governments about the bombs, but current officials say their records were stripped of the information. The homebuilders say no one told them.

Lori Hartigan, a 36-year-old nurse, says crews found one of the munitions near her driveway. Though many rounds dropped by pilots during training in 1944-45 were dummies, the rusty, five-inch cylinder in her yard was a live fuse packed with combustible powder.

She now feels stuck in a home she bought five years ago, and wants her money back from Lennar Corp. , which built many of the homes. "Just let me go on and buy something that's not in this area," Hartigan said.

At nearby Odyssey Middle School, a corps contractor was injured when he disturbed the old munition under the jumping pit at the school's track. The item started to burn, but did not explode.

The former Pinecastle Jeep Range is one of about 9,000 "Formerly Used Defense Sites" the Army Corps oversees. Though most haven't become residential, the site isn't the first of its kind.

A new subdivision in Arlington, Texas, was built on an old bombing range in the early 2000s, spurring several lawsuits and a years-long cleanup process that began in 2005 and continues today. The corps' top priority is Spring Valley in Washington, D.C., where residents live above ground polluted by World War I chemical weapons testing and unexploded munitions.

The corps has produced dozens of documents dating back to the 1940s that detail the Orlando site's history as a bombing range, and corps spokeswoman Amanda Ellison says they have always been public records.