Navy and Environmentalists finally reach agreement

By Adam Keelan

The Navy and several environmental groups reached an agreement Friday allowing the service to use a powerful from 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 midfrequency 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 over servers who will look for whales or other animals that might be affected. It will also have to limit the sonar use to areas more than 25 nautical miles from the Northwestern Hawaii 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 Protecting Act.

But on Monday a federal district judge in Los Agelees, Florence-Mario, Florence-marie cooper, granted the environmental groups, a temporary restraining order, declaring that the Navy’s failure to look closely at the environmental effects of the sonar was an “arbitrary and capricious” violation of another feral statue, the National Environmental Police Act.

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

The Navy appealed judge coopers ruling to the federal appeals court in San Franciso, contending in 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 national security, foreign relations and the good of the public.

The exercises, in which the Navy had planned to begin using the soar this Thursday, are known as the Rim of the Pacific, or Rimpac, and involve military unites 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 the brief. “It is the only exercise scheduled in the next years which Pacific Rim forces can engage in the realistic anitsumbermarie, and warfar training.”

For More Information:
Joel Reynolds Bio
U.S. Navy Official Website