Controversial Navy Sonar Cleared for Limited Testing

SAN FRANCISCO, California, November 18, 2002 (ENS) - A federal judge has lifted a worldwide ban on the U.S. Navy's experimental new sonar system, clearing the way for limited testing of the controversial system. The judge approved an agreement reached by the Navy and a coalition of environmental groups who seek to limit the sonar's potential impacts on marine mammals.

SURTASS LFA undergoing tests
(Photo courtesy U.S. Navy)

Late last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth LaPorte had issued a preliminary injunction stopping the deployment of the sonar system, which relies on very loud, low frequency sound to detect submarines at great distances. On Friday, she signed a temporary agreement between lawyers for the Navy and a coalition of conservation groups, allowing limited testing of the sonar system under strictly defined conditions.

The Navy originally had planned to deploy SURTASS LFA across about 14 million miles of the North Pacific by the end of last summer. The Navy developed the system to protect warships against super quiet diesel submarines, owned by Russia and other nations.

Under the agreement signed Friday, the Navy will launch the system in about one million square miles of ocean around the Mariana Islands, avoiding to coasts of the Philippines and Japan.

National Marine Fisheries officials respond to a pilot whale stranding. (Photo courtesy NMFS)

"What we ultimately agreed upon, after winning the preliminary injunction, was somewhere between 10 -15 percent of that - in an area of the Pacific Ocean that our experts unanimously told us was among the least productive sections of the much larger permitted area," Reynolds added.

The NRDC agreed to the limited deployment after concluding that Judge LaPorte was unlikely to authorize a complete ban on the sonar system while the court heard continuing arguments in the case. After issuing her temporary injunction, LaPorte had ordered the Navy and conservation groups to work out a compromise that would allow testing to begin.

"The very real risk of not reaching an agreement was that the court was not prepared to order anything close to the amount of geographic exclusion that the Navy finally accepted," Reynolds explained, adding that the NRDC and the other environmental plaintiffs will still seek to get the Navy's permit for SURTASS LFA "invalidated on a permanent basis as soon as possible."

On July 15, the Navy received a permit under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to "harass marine mammals" in the course of operating SURTASS LFA, and was approved to deploy two ships that use the new sonar system.

The Navy carefully monitors divers involved in SURTASS LFA testing due to concerns that the system may cause physiological harm similar to that seen in whales and other marine mammals.(Photo courtesy U.S. Navy)

But environmental groups argued that the survival of entire populations of whales and other marine mammals may be jeopardized by the deployment of this sonar, which has been measured at 140 decibels 300 miles away from the sound's source.

"From a scientific point of view, there is very little question that, given the right set of circumstances, active sonar can kill marine life," says Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist with the Humane Society of the United States, one of the coplaintiffs.

"The frightening thing about LFA is that we're flying blind, because the Navy has never seriously applied the lessons from previous strandings to its LFA system," said Rose.

The mass stranding of multiple whale species in the Bahamas in March 2000 and the simultaneous disappearance of the region's entire population of beaked whales has been linked to another type of Navy sonar. A federal investigation identified testing of a U.S. Navy mid-frequency active sonar system as the cause.

A beached goosebeak whale somewhere in the Caribbean. (Photo courtesy Laboratorio de Mamíferos Marinos del Caribe)

Under Friday's agreement, the Navy can immediately begin testing SURTASS LFA in the deep waters of the western Pacific, in a region that is believed to avoid major whale migration routes, feeding areas and breeding grounds. The testing area excludes a marine protected area around the Mariana Islands.

The compromise will "minimize the exposure to a long list of endangered and depleted species," said the NRDC's Reynolds.

The U.S. Navy's SURTASS LFA website is available at: http://www.surtass-lfa-eis.com