WASHINGTON – The Navy is moving ahead with plans to build a 500-square-mile sonar training range off the coast of North Carolina, officials said last week, a project that has sparked fierce opposition from environmentalists who say some of the world’s most endangered whales and sea turtles pass through the area.
Planning for the $99 million range has been under way for almost 10 years, but environmental challenges and concern that the sound waves from sonar may harm protected marine mammals have held up the process. The Navy published its draft environmental impact statement Friday and will begin a series of public hearings on the proposal next month.
The proposed site, about 50 miles off North Carolina, was selected to provide the Atlantic fleet with training in the use of sonar in coastal areas, where the Navy believes the greatest submarine threats now exist. The global spread of quiet and relatively low-cost diesel submarines has alarmed the Navy and convinced officials that its sailors need more training in detecting hostile subs in canyons and ocean beds closer to shore.
But marine mammal researchers and environmentalists have grown increasingly alarmed over the Navy’s plans and the potentially damaging effects of active sonar – which sends out very loud blasts of underwater sound.
Whales and other marine mammals have very sensitive hearing, and a growing body of research has shown that sonar can disorient and sometimes kill them. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentalist group, sued the Navy last week over its use of mid-frequency sonar, the type that would be deployed at the new sonar range.
Marine mammal advocates say they see the proposal for an East Coast sonar range as a long-feared “test case” of increased Navy assertiveness – especially since one of the most endangered and highly protected whales on Earth migrates through the region.
The world’s 300 to 350 remaining North Atlantic right whales, whose numbers were decimated in the 1800s by whalers who considered it the “right” one to harpoon, are known to travel from the Arctic to Florida along the East Coast. Their plight led this year to federal regulations requiring Navy and commercial vessels to take a variety of steps to avoid them.
“These animals are teetering on the brink of extinction,” said Sharon Young of the Humane Society of the United States, on Cape Cod. “Adding a sonar range in what may well be the middle of their migration route is just insane.”
The Navy has another training range off Hawaii, but officials said it is generally not available to ships in the Atlantic fleet and does not provide the kind of coastal, shallow-water sonar practice now considered necessary.
The North Carolina site, they said, is needed because of the “clear and present threat posed by quiet diesel electric submarines to our carrier strike groups, amphibious task forces, and to the sailors and Marines stationed aboard them.”
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