Navy Is Sued Over Coastal Sonar Tests

Environmental groups on Monday sued the U.S. Navy, claiming it has failed to perform mandatory environmental reviews of its sonar tests in coastal waters, despite evidence that such intense noise can harm whales, dolphins and other protected sea creatures.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Humane Society and Defenders of Wildlife have grown increasingly alarmed since the Navy acknowledged that one type of sonar was “highly likely” to be connected to a mass stranding of beaked whales in the Bahamas last year.

These groups and the Santa Monica BayKeeper moved ahead with the legal action, even as Navy officials told The Times Monday that they have canceled the next planned test, scheduled for Oct. 30 off the Southern California coast. If they can confirm that the test was, indeed, scrapped, the environmental groups said they will not move ahead with a separate legal action to halt the local testing.

But the lawsuit will move forward, challenging the lack of environmental review for the entire program, which has tested sonar at a dozen locations in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since 1996, said Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The Navy operates in Southern California waters all of the time and can clearly choose to reschedule that test at any time,” Reynolds said. That could be potentially devastating, he said, if it were to coincide with the annual migration of gray whales that begins in mid-November, when the behemoths swim from their Arctic feeding grounds to the lagoons of Baja California.

In the suit filed Monday, environmentalists allege that the Navy has never done a required environmental impact statement on the sonar tests. Nor has the service obtained permits required by the Marine Mammal Protection Act for any harassment, injuries or fatalities of whales, dolphins or other protected sea mammals.

Scott Harris, a spokesman for the Office of Naval Research, declined to comment on the lawsuit until Navy lawyers could review it.

But he said the Navy has gone to great lengths to make sure that no marine mammals or other creatures are harmed during sonar tests conducted under the Littoral Warfare Advanced Development Program.

Spokesman Cites Mitigation Measures

Depending on the tests, he said, the Navy has observers keeping watch from ship decks, airplanes and sonar screens to make sure no whales come too close to the tests. If they spot a whale, the sonar can be shut down until it passes by.

“Most people are surprised at the mitigation measures that we go to,” Harris said. “The Navy is ultimately interested in continuing to operate without harming the environment.”

The Navy developed the sonar tests to help prepare for battle in shallower coastal waters, in contrast to the deep ocean encounters that were the concern of strategists during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

The tests vary widely, often using multiple systems, to figure out how the echo of shallower seabeds and coastal canyons affects sonar that was originally designed to detect enemy submarines, torpedoes, mines and other ships in deeper waters.

Since 1996, the Navy has conducted as many as four sonar tests every year, spread around in the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean and off the coast of the Carolinas, New York, Oregon, and, most recently, Japan.

In previous tests, the Navy has experimented with 20 or more sonar systems, including deploying the same mid-frequency radar that is suspected in the mass stranding of beaked whales in the Bahamas in March 2000.

Necropsies showed that five whales died from hemorrhaging around the brain and ear bones--presumably from intense internal vibrations caused by bursts of mid-frequency sound waves.

The Navy has yet to complete its final report on the incident, but preliminarily found that a mid-frequency sonar was “highly likely” to have been involved in the strandings.

Carroll Muffett, international counsel for the Defenders of Wildlife, wasn’t surprised that the Navy canceled its Southern California tests.

The Navy, he said, clearly understood the growing concern about testing in Southern California waters, home to many protected species of whales, dolphins, elephant seals and sea lions. Five Navy lawyers met with him and two environmental lawyers on Aug. 16, but neglected to mention any change in plans for the October test.