Sitting on a bleacher on a weekday morning, Gary John, a 77-year-old hammer thrower, pulled on a pair of fluorescent yellow training shoes and strapped a glove onto his right hand. Then he dragged a heavy metal ball by a wire to a dusty concrete ring at Moffett Field.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s what keeps me going,\u201d John said, before spinning in a circle, bringing his arms above his head and releasing an 8-kilo hammer in the air. It flew across a dirt field, landing just shy of an orange cone that marked 40 meters from the ring.<\/p>\n
The hammer-throwing site<\/a> has drawn hundreds of athletes to Moffett Field<\/a> over the past three decades, according to Tore Gustafsson, a three-time Olympian and coach. Located on a barren strip of land adjacent to U.S. Highway 101 in Mountain View, the range is one of the few training areas accessible to the public, he said.<\/p>\n But it now looks like the range is headed for closure. Last month, a NASA official notified the hammer throwers that they would need to remove all their equipment from a storage shed and lock box by Aug. 14. Anything left behind would be confiscated, according to a July 14 email sent by Gerald DePerio, a NASA realty specialist.<\/p>\n A NASA spokesperson told the Mountain View Voice last week that the area \u201chas been identified for future development activities associated with the NASA Research Park\u201d and the structures on the site had to be removed.<\/p>\n \u201cIndividuals currently storing personal property are not tenants of the NASA Research Park and do not have an agreement with NASA to utilize the property,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n NASA did not respond to an inquiry about the planned use of the site, including whether it was slated for a future housing project<\/a>. It is also unclear when the site will be redeveloped.<\/p>\n The practice range sits within the Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman Superfund site<\/a>, an area that is known to have groundwater contamination from industrial pollutants left over from semiconductor facilities.<\/p>\n According to the spokesperson, NASA is performing the \u201crequired work\u201d to clean up the contaminants, which includes cancer-causing TCE<\/a> and is being overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n Threats of eviction<\/p>\n This is not the first time<\/a> the hammer throwers \u2014 a group that includes professional athletes, coaches and high school students \u2014 have received an eviction notice. About every 10 years, NASA says it is going to build on the site<\/a> and then the project falls by the wayside, according to Gustafsson.<\/p>\n In 2018, NASA planned to work with a private developer to build nearly 2,000 homes<\/a> along the southeastern side of Moffett Field, an area that included the hammer-throwing range. The status of the project is not publicly known.<\/p>\n