So, this is a little retarded, unfortunately.
The range they want to expand is some retard range at the extreme south of the impact area. The firing line of this range is ~400m from the nearest house, it appears to be the closes range to the installations border and also the closest range to a civilian home. So thats a real shit start.
There is a traditional 300 yard pop up range located at the north east (ish) end of the impact area facing south west (ish). There's plenty of f***ing woods and shit around that they could bulldoze, fill, cut, whatever. For reference, the closest civilian building from this current 300 popup firing line is ~2,000m. Which if my math is correct is more than 400m.
At this weird, apparently unknown range on this installation, it appears that there is zero shit worth hitting by accident for 2 miles south west of this range area. However, this is the military. Specifically the MA national garage and associates. If there's one thing these people are good at, it's making the worst f***ing choices possible. a long time ago we were at the cape shooting tungsten nylon 5.56x45mm M855LF I think. Talk about f***ing expensive holy shit. I got my 43 rounds of training that weekend, amazing!
They should know better. When Devens was mostly closed we lost more and more shit we could do in the impact area. Since MA has a combat engineer battalion, you'd hope that we'd have a place to use explosives in the state. Devens had (maybe still has?) a small demo range. Even nearly 20 years ago the new neighbors who built intentionally close to the impact area would bitch about a handful of days per year where demolitions was used. And as a result, we weren't able to use it anymore. These are the same people who say shit like "support the troops" and "thank you for your service."