Protect marine life from weapons tests

Right now, there’s no way to pinpoint the effects that U.S. Air Force weaponry testing — hundreds of bombs detonating in waters about 50 miles west of Kauai, in this case — will have on dolphins, whales and other marine mammals.

To compensate for such uncertainty, federal law compels the military and agencies tasked with marine resource management to do everything they reasonably can do to avoid harming marine life.

That’s why it’s puzzling that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is poised to sign off on a mitigation plan for Air Force training slated to start next month that falls short of expected environmental responsibility standards.

Through the “Long Range Strike Weapons System Evaluation Program,” pilots would drop into waters weapons such as joint air-to-surface standoff missiles with a 1,000-pound warhead, 250-pound bombs and high-speed anti-radiation missiles. Marine mammals potentially affected in the Barking Sands Underwater Range Extension of the Pacific Missile Range Facility include 16 species. Among them: endangered sei whales, humpback whales, dwarf sperm whales, pygmy sperm whales, bottlenose dolphins and striped dolphins.

Expected harm ranges from so-called “noninjurious temporary harassment” to hearing loss. The mitigation plan includes monitoring for marine mammals through pre-mission aerial visual surveys. Then, during bombing sessions, if any dead or injured animals are spotted, operations would stop.

The snag in this plan is that aerial surveys alone would fail to spot the vast majority of marine mammals in these waters, which plunge to depths approaching 3 miles below surface waters. The NMFS should also require supplemental mitigation in the form of real-time monitoring with acoustic hydrophones that can detect whales and dolphins hidden from view.

The Fisheries Service has pointed to U.S. Navy guidance that frowns on using a hydrophones network at the missile range facility for real-time monitoring due to “limitations of the current technology” in “ability to detect, classify and estimate locations of marine mammals.” Instead, the NMFS plans to require using hydrophones during bombing sessions to collect data that would be analyzed after the testing, if funding allows.

But that plan is too thin to meet the expectation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), which Congress enacted 45 years ago in the wake of concerns about the environmental threats tied to various human activities, such as weaponry testing. Its mandate for an ecosystem-based approach to marine resource management ushered in a national policy that aims to maintain health and stability in marine mammal species and population stocks.

Last year, that legislation was the foundation of a federal appeals court ruling that found the Fisheries Service had wrongly allowed the Navy to use low-frequency sonar for training, testing and routine operations because it could harm whales and other marine life. The court concluded that the agency “did not give adequate protection to areas of the world’s oceans flagged by its own experts as biologically important.” The result: “a meaningful proportion of the world’s marine mammal habitat is under-protected.”

In the Air Force case, too, NMFS is on a course that will likely result in under-protected marine life.

In written comments on the mitigation plan submitted to the Fisheries Service, the Marine Mammal Commission — an independent oversight agency that helps sort out consensus among competing interests on controversial issues involving marine mammal science and conservation — the agency disagrees with the hydrophone limitations rationale.

It counters that, actually, the Navy “is quite adept at detecting, classifying and localizing individual marine mammals” at the Pacific Missile Range Facility, and calls for the supplemental mitigation of hydrophones in real time.

Comments submitted by environmental law group Earthjustice also call for a more substantial plan. Its letter noted: “We readily admit the hydrophone array will miss some animals. But so will the flyovers. So you need to do both.” Agreed. Before the the Air Force training gets underway on Aug. 23, the Fisheries Service must alter its course to better protect the sensitive habitat in the range facility’s waters.