Palmyra Atoll - Political Status

Political Status

Palmyra is an incorporated territory of the United States (the only such territory in existence since 1959), meaning that it is subject to all provisions of the U.S. Constitution and that is permanently under American sovereignty. However, since Palmyra is also an unorganized territory, there is no Act of Congress specifying how Palmyra should be governed. Palmyra is also uninhabited, as far as permanent residents are concerned.

The only relevant Federal law simply gives the President the authority to administer Palmyra as he best sees fit (see Section 48 of the Hawaii Omnibus Act, Pub. L. 86–624, July 12, 1960, 74 Stat. 411, attached as a note to former sections 491 to 636 of Title 48, United States Code).

The issue of the governing of Palmyra is generally a moot point, since there is no permanent population remaining there, nor any reason to think that there will be in the future. Palmyra is the only unorganized incorporated territory of the US. Cooper Island in this atoll is owned by The Nature Conservancy, and it is managed as a nature reserve. The rest of Palmyra is Federal land and waters under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since Palmyra has no local government at all, it is administered directly from Washington, D.C., by the Office of Insular Affairs, of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

For all other purposes, Palmyra is counted as one of the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands.

There is no current economic activity on Palmyra. Most of the roads and causeways there were built during WW II. All of these are now unserviceable and overgrown with bushes and grass. There is a 2,000-meter-long, unpaved, airstrip on Cooper Island (Palmyra (Cooper) Airport, ICAO code PLPA), that was built for the Navy during WW II.

A construction program in 2004 consisted of several two-person bungalows and showers for the temporary residents. Fresh water is collected from the roof of a concrete building in this area. The communal buildings of the area on the north side of Cooper Island (the only occupied area of the atoll) consist of a common cooking and dining building next to the only sea dock, and there is a kayak and scuba diving equipment storage building adjacent to this.

Palmyra Atoll's location in the Pacific Ocean, where the southern and northern currents meet, means that its beaches are littered with trash and debris. Plastic mooring buoys and plastic bottles are plentiful on the beaches of Palmyra.