SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- A coalition of environmental groups is suing the U.S. Navy and the National Marine Fisheries Service in U.S. District Court, charging the Navy has no legal right to deploy a very noisy underwater sonar system that endangers marine mammals.
The system, called Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active sonar, or SURTASS LFA, is designed to detect submarines. It consists of 18 bathtub-sized underwater loudspeakers dragged behind a ship. The speakers emit very loud sounds, echoes of which can be used to detect the presence of submarines.
The system's loud sounds present a possible fatal danger to large numbers of whales and dolphins, the suit charges, and the permit issued by National Marine Fisheries Service is illegal. The suit was filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Humane Society of the United States and several other environmental groups.
Joel Reynolds, senior attorney and director of NRDC's Marine Mammals Protection Project, said in a statement, "One of the truly disturbing aspects of this system is its unprecedented power and geographic scope. If the Navy deploys LFA, tens of thousands of square miles of ocean habitat would be saturated with extremely loud and dangerous sound. The Navy has illegally been given a blank check to deploy LFA in 75 percent of the world's oceans."
The plaintiffs point to the deaths of whales in a number of incidents near naval operations. The most publicized of these was the beaching of four species of whales in the Bahamas in 2000. The Navy had been operating a sonar system in the area that generated higher frequencies than LFA. The Navy essentially accepted responsibility for those whale deaths but claims the new low frequency system will be operated away from shorelines and with other safeguards to prevent similar occurrences.
The environmental groups said they consider these measures totally inadequate and will not begin to prevent the type of damage that is inevitable if the high-powered sonar system is put into operation.
Gordon Helm, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service told United Press International the National Marine Fisheries Service had fully complied with the law authorizing the incidental harassment of marine mammals. "We've actually exceeded requirements under the Marine Mammal Protection Act in order to insure additional protections," Helm said.
"We have doubled the safety zone around the transmitter ray," he continued. "We've reduced the frequency of the transmitter source to reduce the possibility of resonance. We have a 12 nautical mile costal exclusion and also an exclusion around any biologically important area, which is an area where a lot of marine mammals may congregate. We have a monitoring program that provides almost 100 percent reliability within that safety zone."
Other representatives for the NMFS and the Navy said they are within their rights to use the sonar.
Lt. Cmdr. Pauline Storum, a Navy spokeswoman, told UPI in an e-mail, "The Navy has instituted a number of important measures to minimize any potential adverse impact this system will have on marine mammals, and we will continue to work with the appropriate regulatory agencies, as well as the scientific community, to ensure that SURTASS LFA sonar is utilized in a safe and effective manner. The Navy remains committed to the environmentally responsible employment of SURTASS LFA ... the premiere system of the Navy to counter the real and increasing threat of quiet diesel submarines."
Kurt Fristrup, assistant director of the Cornell University bio-acoustic research program in Ithaca, N.Y., worked on the LFA Scientific Research Program in 1997, an extensive study commissioned by the Navy to measure whale response to SURTASS LFA. Fristrup told UPI, "We found that the animals do respond to LFA signals but the magnitude of the response was modest." None of the peer-reviewed articles published on the topic conclude there would be extensive damage to marine mammals from LFA, he added.
Darlene Ketten, an associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who specializes in marine mammal bio-acoustics, told UPI, "the available data do not suggest any physiological damage to the ears of marine mammals."
The lawsuit charges the NMFS violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act by accepting an application from the Navy that failed to specify the number of marine mammals affected by LFA, failed to ensure only a small number of marine mammals in a small geographic area would be affected and a species as a whole would not be affected, and permitted the Navy to submit inadequate monitoring plans.
The plaintiffs asked the federal court invalidate the NMFS permit issued last month to the Navy.
(Reported by Joe Grossman, UPI Science News, in Santa Cruz, Calif.)
