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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Navy agrees to limit use of sonar system

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer

The Navy has agreed under federal court oversight to limit its peacetime use of a loud, low-frequency sonar system that it had once planned to deploy in up to 75 percent of the world's oceans to detect at long range the new "quiet" submarines being deployed by many countries.

A necropsy is conducted on a porpoise that was among a pod that died near Washington state's San Juan Islands last summer, one of many tests in recent months to determine if Navy sonar was killing ocean animals.

Associated Press library photo

The agreement apparently will prevent its use in Hawai'i waters, where the Navy conducted early tests on the system in 1998.

The system, known as Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System-Low Frequency Active, has been accused of injuring whales and other marine animals that may have become disoriented by the noise. While the connections have not always been clear, multiple cases of dead marine mammals have been linked to the use of the powerful sonar.

There have been reports of brain and hearing damage to some animals, and just last week researchers announced they had found gas bubbles in the tissues of some beached whales in the Canary Islands, indicating they may have risen too quickly to escape the noise and developed decompression sickness, or "the bends."

Maui-based Pacific Whale Foundation President Greg Kaufmann said increasing reports of marine animal impacts in locations where the sonar system was used served as a warning.

"I think the Navy has realized that the animals that have been washing up are the canaries in the coal mine," he said.

Kaufmann said he was working on a foundation project in Ecuador when three dolphins, a Galapagos fur seal and three turtles washed up on shore right after the Navy had disclosed it was doing low-frequency active sonar testing. "These were species that had no history of stranding there," he said.

Earthjustice attorney Isaac Moriwake said the Navy has a responsibility to reduce the impact of its activities on the environment.

"It's incumbent on the military, if it's going to do these things, to determine what the effects are and minimize the impacts," Moriwake said.

The Navy reached its agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had sued in federal district court in California. Under the agreement, the Navy — except in wartime — will limit its use of the sonar to about 1 percent of the ocean area it once planned to use.

It would use the system only along the eastern seaboard of Asia, or about 1.5 million square miles. The agreement also will prohibit the peacetime use of the sonar in those waters during periods when marine mammals are known to be migrating through.

"This agreement safeguards both marine life and national security," Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement. "It will prevent the needless injury, harassment, and death of countless whales, porpoises and fish, and yet allow the Navy to do what is necessary to defend our country."

Although the general terms of the agreement appear to exclude Hawaiian waters, Navy spokes-man Lt. Cmdr. Cappy Surette said that the Navy has yet to receive final word of the agreement from the court in California, and he declined to comment on its applicability to Hawai'i.

Surette said the Navy does not see the agreement as a positive development and told The Washington Post that "it will limit the readiness of our sailors and Marines to meet the submarine threats of the new century." Military leaders are pushing for legislative changes that would allow the use of such sonar.

Surette said the Navy works conscientiously on its mission as "stewards of the sea."

"Preservation of the environment and national defense are not mutually exclusive," he said.

Advertiser reporter Robbie Dingeman contributed to this report.