Ruling favors Navy range

Plans for submarine sonar training get a boost, despite risk for marine mammals

The Navy says it needs to sharpen its skills at detecting quiet enemy submarines lurking off the nation's coasts by building a sonar training range in the Atlantic Ocean.

In a case involving Navy sonar exercises in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week in a split decision that the court should give deference to military preparedness over harm to marine mammals. In doing so, it lifted a court injunction on Navy sonar training exercises off the California coast.

The high court's ruling poses a potential hurdle to environmental groups that might eventually challenge a proposal for a sonar training range off the East Coast, near the calving grounds of endangered North Atlantic right whales. It might raise the ante for proving environmental harm when seeking an injunction.

"If the court can't issue an injunction, then the Navy will be able to proceed despite inadequate environmental analysis," said Derb Carter, director of the Southern Environmental Law Center's Carolinas office in Chapel Hill, who was involved in litigation with the Navy over a proposed landing field near a wildlife refuge.

"It could have the effect of creating a view within the Navy that they can essentially disregard the environmental impacts of their proposed activities and not give due consideration of impacts this would have on marine mammals and other ocean resources," Carter said.

Several whale strandings have been associated circumstantially with Navy sonar exercises, including a fatal beaching on the Outer Banks in January 2005. In most cases, scientists haven't pinpointed a precise cause. The Navy has acknowledged that its midfrequency sonar caused a fatal whale stranding in the Bahamas.

The Navy is studying sites on the Atlantic Coast for an underwater sonar range to train sailors in anti-submarine warfare. The range would provide a grid of hundreds of underwater microphones anchored on the ocean floor that would record ship movements and allow training exercises at depths of 120 to 900 feet.

The proposed sites include waters off North Carolina near Camp Lejeune; off South Carolina; off northeastern Virginia; and off northeastern Florida near Jacksonville.

The Navy's preferred location for the range has shifted in recent months from North Carolina to Florida because, with base realignment, most of the sub hunting aircraft used in the exercises will be stationed in Jacksonville by 2010.

Navy leaders celebrated the legal decision as vital to allowing sailors to train realistically and to the Navy's ensuring it's ready for anti-submarine warfare. They said the ruling dealt specifically with the California training exercises.

At the same time, the Navy says it does take seriously its obligations to minimize effects on marine mammals in all waters. The Navy expects to spend $26 million a year over the next five years on marine mammal research and the effects of sonar, said Jene Nissen, Fleet Forces Command project manager for the underwater warfare sonar training range.

While the Supreme Court might have raised the bar for lawyers to prove environmental harm, finding that proof might be easier on the East than the West Coast, said Michelle Nowlin, supervising attorney with the Duke University Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. Waters off the East Coast are a biologically rich area with more imperiled species.

Atlantic's variety

"On the Atlantic Coast, you have more critically endangered species -- a greater variety of sea turtles, the North Atlantic right whale ... ," Nowlin said.

The right whale migrates along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Florida. Scientists say as few as 300 remain.

Scientists have linked several fatal whale beachings to the use of midfrequency sonar, though they don't understand exactly how the underwater pulses of sound harm the animals. The Navy has acknowledged that its midfrequency sonar caused a fatal stranding when 17 beaked whales beached in the Bahamas in 2000.

"We knew then that sonar had the potential to affect at least beaked whales," Nissen said. "The Navy embarked on an aggressive research endeavor trying to quantify or better understand what those effects are and how marine mammals may be affected by sonar."

The Navy also is doing a broader study of the environmental consequences of sonar and mine warfare training exercises in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. The study is to determine whether the Navy should continue doing large-scale exercises up and down the coast as it has for years, focus exercises in one area, or perhaps move them seasonally.

The Navy's preference is to continue doing them as it does now. It's expected to issue a final environmental study by mid-December.