Homework: Your Gift To Whales

By William Rossiter

Three Draft Environmental Impact Statements (DEIS) have public comment periods closing within a few days of each other, perhaps as you read this. Consider any time you can spend on them as a gift for cetaceans and all marine life. That's why CSI will comment.

1 - The US Navy Undersea Warfare Training Range DEIS will close for public comments 30 January 2006, an extension from the initial deadline a few days after Christmas. The DEIS proposes alternative sites for a vast, heavily instrumented area where active mid-frequency sonars would be used in combat scenarios. While communities and stakeholders in each area have legitimate concerns against one site or another, CSI and other NGOs long involved in anthropogenic noise issues see major flaws at the core of the DEIS. If unchallenged these are being pushed to become default standards for many other noisemakers in the ocean. Once again we are dealing with the premise that illogical, unsubstantiated premises can become "standard", even law, if it is asserted strongly enough.

The DEIS asserts that no cetaceans will be significantly harassed by receiving 190 dB of mid-frequency sonar sounds, many times as loud as the 180 dB level you may recall from the past decade of LFA and other sonar issues, although the LFA is a very different sound. This is a behavioral threshold, below which the DEIS assumes all animals will ignore the sonar sounds of a destroyer searching for a submarine. It ignores the reaction, witnessed by experts, of orcas, harbor porpoises and a minke whale to Washington State's Haro Strait passage of the sonar-transmitting USS Shoup, and later to a Canadian destroyer using similar equipment. The DEIS assumes that the East coast shelf environment makes the difference, but no one knows.

Everything in the DEIS hinges on one number applying to all cetaceans, asserting that 195 dB of received sound has the same effect on blue whales, harbor porpoises, and all the others in between. The illogical, unsubstantiated premise is based on a default: it asserts that all cetaceans are the same because no one has a clue about what noise levels will initiate temporary deafness in all but a handful of highly conditioned captive bottlenose dolphins and belugas, primarily from one Navy-sponsored experiment. That is OK as an initial theory, but not as a fundamental threshold upon which many regulations and laws will be based. Based on this the DEIS even asserts that bow-riding dolphins face more threat from being run over than sonar transmissions a few feet away.

By starting at 195 dB the impact distances from transmitting sonars can be made to seem very short, a few meters. If the number were 180 dB the impact range would be hundreds of meters. At distances where the effects of these sonars have caused whales to die the range would be many miles. The Navy must get away with insisting that 195 dB is valid or the whole DEIS falls apart.

With apologies for the technical terms, the DEIS defines MMPA Level B physiological harassment as 195 dB re 1 µPa²-s, assumed as the onset of temporary deafness for all cetaceans, or onset-Temporary Threshold Shift (TTS). This ignores the expert opinions that beaked whales in the Bahamas and Canary Islands exposed to sonar noises, at levels well below 160 dB of the same sonars in this DEIS, suffered tissue damage or responded so radically that debilitating and fatal injuries resulted. This evidence must be ignored, or the range of sonar effects would have to be miles instead of meters, and the whole premise would fail.

Level A Harassment is assumed to be permanent injury, Permanent Threshold Shift (PTS), from deafness at certain frequency ranges, for all cetaceans at 215 dB re 1 µPa²-s or above. PTS was extrapolated from the onset-TTS assumptions and research on terrestrial mammals including humans, although elsewhere the DEIS (and LFA DEIS) argues against using human values. Subjective observations of "altered behavior" during some experiments with captive dolphins and belugas are used to define MMPA Level B behavioral disturbance as 190 dB re 1 µPa²-s for all cetaceans. In the words of one participant, "altered behavior" meant some dolphins seemed to be trying to climb out of the pens where they were being blasted with the sounds, but being Navy they were expected to put up with it.

A troubling question oozes from this critical part of the DEIS: Do the very few scientists whose research on bottlenose dolphins and belugas is used to assert that all cetaceans are the same agree with this overreaching, self-serving declaration? How is it possible that they could? Why don't they speak up, at least to pull back from having their work misused? It's too easy, and insulting, to assume that they don't dare bite the hand that feeds them, but their reputations will be insulted by their inaction.

Although it is planned near the right whale migration route, the USWTR ("sweater", in Navy lingo) DEIS concludes, from acoustic modeling only, that right whales will not be affected by the activities at the Preferred Alternative, Site A, in the Cherry Point OPAREA (operating area) between Cape Fear and Cape Lookout. One of serious ramifications is that ESA Section 7 consultation with NMFS will not include right whales unless another alternative is selected.

The DEIS redefines many parameters without references or substantiation, often expressed in fragmented discussions spread between hundreds of pages. For example: "The definition of physiological effect and behavioral effect used here are specific to this OEIS/EIS and should not be confused with more global definitions applied to the field of biology." Some biological and ecological information on other species may be dated and presented in ways to minimize impact potentials. It is not an easy read, but it will establish several precedents if unchallenged.

The USWTR DEIS may be downloaded from http://projects.earthtech.com/USWTR/. Comments must be postmarked by 30 January 2006 and sent to: Naval Facilities Engineering Command Atlantic, Attn: Mr. Keith Jenkins (Code EV21KJ), 6506 Hampton Boulevard, Norfolk, VA 23508, Fax: 757-322-4894.

2 - Low Frequency Active Sonar is baaaaack. The public comment deadline is 10 February 2006 for the latest attempt to make almost all oceans open to the LFA, the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the SURTASS LFA Sonar. This deadline also was extended from a few days after Christmas. "Supplemental" is the key; its purpose is to address the deficiencies identified in the original LFA EIS, which an August 2003 district court opinion and order found, relating to compliance with the ESA, MMPA and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Essentially it modifies some parts of the original EIS, simply asserts that other parts remain valid, and requires readers to plow through both documents. MMPA compliance was accomplished by leading the Department of Defense in a major assault on the MMPA and other fundamental laws, gutting the need for the military to comply with just about anything.

Many Whales Alive! readers commented on the original LFA DEIS. You may recall how your careful arguments were arbitrarily simplified and categorized, then dismissed. Reread your comments and judge for yourself how the SDEIS handles them? Comments postmarked by 10 February must be sent to: SURTASS LFA Sonar EIS Program Manager, 4100 Fairfax Drive, Ste 730, Arlington, VA 22203, or email: eisteam@mindspring.com. The SDEIS may be found at http://www.surtass-lfa-eis.com/.

3 - NMFS will accept public comments through 31 January 2006 on the scope of the Right Whale Research DEIS planned for 2006. This DEIS will explore ramifications of issuing permits for research on northern right whales in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. One purpose is to define "appropriate mitigation measures and potential cumulative impacts of research activities on right whales and the environment," which is a polite way to say that some people and projects get in each other's way, and the competition for funding can be bloody. The DEIS will seek to define what information is needed on the whales, and the "appropriate levels of research intensity." Researchers will no doubt comment that NMFS's infamous delays with permits cause a serious impact on the species, and the last thing they want is to have to share a permit with the competition. NMFS will spend a lot on this DEIS, in part because they believe that it will reduce their vulnerability to lawsuits. CSI and many others don't agree. For details on the DEIS scoping process see: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/permits/eis/rightwhale.htm.