Navy given choice: new safeguards or no sonar
A federal appeals court Tuesday restored a ban on the U.S. Navy's use of submarine-hunting sonar in upcoming training missions off Southern California until it adopts better safeguards for whales, dolphins and other marine mammals.
The order allows the Navy to continue its current exercises, but will force the Pentagon to devise ways to ensure that marine mammals are not harassed or injured by powerful sonic blasts during a series of training missions slated to begin in January.
Those precautions, such as reducing sonar power at night, when whales are not easily spotted, will have to be approved by the same federal court in Los Angeles that ordered the initial sonar ban in August.
Tuesday's decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came in a case that had pitted the interests of unencumbered military training against environmental protection.
At issue is mid-frequency, active sonar, a technology developed to hunt for Soviet submarines in the deep ocean. The Navy has adopted the technique in coastal waters to train sailors for a potential threat posed by quiet, diesel-electric submarines operated by North Korea, Iran or other nations.
U.S. and NATO warships using mid-frequency sonar near land have, at times, left behind clusters of panicked and sometimes fatally injured whales and dolphins in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and in the Mediterranean Sea.
U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper had issued a temporary injunction forbidding the Navy from training with sonar off Southern California until she could hear the merits of a case brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups.
The Navy appealed her decision and won a reprieve from the 9th Circuit Court. Tuesday's ruling restored the original court decision, essentially forcing the world's most powerful navy either to negotiate with environmental attorneys or unilaterally propose measures that will satisfy the district court.
In its five-page ruling, the three judges said that the environmental groups had shown a "strong likelihood" of winning their lawsuit and that the Navy had used many of the additional safeguards those groups have been pushing.
At the same time, the panel said Cooper did not explain why "a broad, absolute injunction . . . for two years was necessary to avoid irreparable harm to the environment."
