Environmentalists debate harm of new Navy sonar

By Andrew Lucas

The Navy and several environmental groups reached an agreement Friday allowing the service to use a powerful form of sonar during military exercises under way near Hawaii. The accord ends a brief court battle that the Navy had said could threaten national security.

At issue was whether the so-called mid frequency sonar, which blasts strong sound waves under water in hopes of detecting foreign submarines, causes harm to whales and other marine mammals.

Under the agreement, the Navy will use that technology but will be required to post observers who will look for whales or other animals that might be affected. It will also have to limit the sonar’s use to areas more than 25 nautical miles from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument.

The legal skirmish was touched off a week ago when the Pentagon, in an effort to ensure the Navy’s ability to use the sonar during the war games, gave the service an interim national security exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

But on Monday a federal district judge in Los Angeles, Florence-Marie Cooper, granted the environmental groups a temporary restraining order, declaring the Navy’s failure to look closely at the environmental effects on sonar waves was an “arbitrary and capricious” violation of another federal statute, the National Environmental Protection Act.

Joel Reynolds, a senior lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, the Natural Resources Defense Council, said there was scientific consensus, including a study by the International Whaling Commission, that the sonar could cause “a wide spectrum of injury, from behavioral change to mass stranding and death.”

The Navy appealed Judge Cooper’s ruling to the federal appeals court in San Francisco, contending a brief filed Wednesday that suspending the sonar during the exercises, which began on June 26 and are to continue through July 28, could cause “definite and serious damage” to a national security, foreign relations and the good of the public.

The exercises, in which the Navy had planned to begin using the sonar this Thursday, are known as the Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, and involve military units from the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Chile and Peru.

“RIMPAC is the only opportunity for these participating nations to train together,” the Navy said in brief. “It is the only exercise scheduled in the next two years in which Pacific Rim forces can engage in realistic antisubmarine warfare training.”