The following action alert was prepared by our intrepid researcher, editor and document hound, Carol Van Strum. It ran yesterday on Daily Kos as well.
By Carol Van Strum
The U.S. Navy two years ago persuaded legislators, the media, NOAA, and even environmental groups who should know better that Navy war games and testing of unidentified weapons, drone aircraft, sonar, and war ships over the entire Pacific Northwest coastline would have no significant effects on marine life or coastal residents.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the Navy now intends to increase all those activities, once again without identifying what they will be doing or where. Pacific coast residents this week received postcards from the U.S. Navy inviting the public to participate in the National Environmental Policy Act Process by attending “Open House Information Sessions” in remote, scarcely accessible towns in California, Oregon, Washington (State), and Alaska.
The Open House Information Sessions will be staffed by Navy representatives, a euphemism for private contractors who have no authority to answer questions presented by the public. As before, these “sessions” will be limited to a PR firm’s shiny posters and glossy brochures and a shiny, token staff who are instructed not to make any public presentation of the Navy’s proposed plans. The Navy will not allow formal oral comments or questions from the public at these sessions.
In other words, the Navy invites the public to a PR session about unidentified plans to expand its war games and weapons testing throughout coastal waters and northwest air space from 250 miles offshore inland to the Idaho border. The Navy will neither identify its plans nor answer any questions about them. We are then invited to submit written comments on all these unidentified plans by April 27.
I am not making this up. You can Here are links to the U.S. Navy website regarding this issue. There is very little information provided by the Navy website on this expansion and new EIS/OEIS.
U.S. Navy home page — website & information on filing public comments
U.S. Navy website for filing public comments by April 27, 2012
Comments in writing must be received by the U.S. Navy no later than April 27, 2012. Mail to:
Naval Facilities engineering Command Northwest
Attn: Mrs. Kimberly Kler, NWTT EIS/OEIS, Project Manager
1101 Tautog Circle, Suite 203
Silverdale, WA 98315-1101
Send copies of your comments to your legislators, local and national media, environmental groups and anyone else, including Occupy West Coast.
Its a convenient denial for the navy – sonar deeply affects marine life – disorientation of whales and dolphins – mammals like us – is a killer of the innocent.
Thank you for the thank yous, but I want to make some revisions and an addendum or two. Never get interrupted and then eat copious amounts of pizza when commenting… 😉
First para: not requiring your ships to go a thousand miles or more for their at-sea training is a huge money saver, on the order of millions of dollars per day for an entire battle group. That’s serious cash. The geography of the Northwest also comes into play: the many islands, bays, and harbors are close (in general terms) to the Korean peninsula and Chinese coasts. What they will practice in the new area will be new tactics and strategies to deal with the new quiet and small subs those folks have.
About the level of current Navy training: the sonar folks are given training in all aspects of their work, including different temperature levels of the seawater around them. What they lack is real world experience, the day-in, day-out life in cold water. The Navy has spent so much of the last few years in near-tropic and tropical waters most of the sonar operators don’t have a very great breadth of experience. I’m actually talking about the surface ships only here, the submarine force is well versed in all water temps, but they tend to use different methods and equipment.
The “foreign subs” paragraph. I actually meant to say that North Korea has small subs, not “little” subs. In light of how that could be misconstrued as “a few”, I should have said they have lots of small subs, which can go into very shallow water, and are very quiet and difficult to detect. Quite capable of delivering nuclear weapons into enemy harbors and blowing up. Short range however, but that includes northeast China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan.
Addendum A: the Northwest coast is much closer to the East Asian theater than SoCal, by as much as 3 days. Any available carrier battle group in Puget Sound can be off Japan and Korea within about 6 days, the aircraft within 5. Technically, the aircraft could be in Japan within 24 hours, but they would lack support personnel and supplies without the carrier.
Addendum B: a Carrier Battle Group is a small fleet of ships, centered on the aircraft carrier. As many as 6 surface warships will sail with the carrier, providing air and sub-surface protection. One to two submarines will also be there, but invisible to the surface fleet. A good number of supply ships will constantly keep the fleet stocked with fuel, food, weapons, and other supplies while at sea.
Addendum C: I would think that if this gets permitted (and it could happen with the words “national security” being thrown about), we would find that perhaps even foreign navies would come to practice as well. Canada, Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are good candidates to send ships and observers. Why send ships and people all the way across the Pacific? Because the Chinese and North Koreans do not have a lot of espionage possibilities that far from home. The area is also cloudy a lot of the time, decreasing the possibility of satellite snooping as well.
Mind, this is all conjecture, merely based on my reading of the Navy’s documents. Let’s just say it’s an educated guess as to the actual intentions of the Navy. I spent a good deal of my two years of sea duty in these very waters on fisheries patrols with the Coast Guard. Our ‘wartime’ duty was to guard the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca (the entrance to Puget Sound and the Salish Sea) and defend it from all enemies. The 42 year old ship I was on would have taken exactly one small torpedo to sink, and we fully expected that to happen. We had no defenses against submarines or aircraft, and one 30 year old main gun for ships. We were not thrilled by the odds.
Fe and Brendan — thank you for the additional info and insights. this shit makes me so angry and discouraged…
Brendan: Thank you for the informed insight. It explains a lot.
Well, after reading all the navalese BS, this seems to be a big change. What they are talking about doing is actually several items. First, full-on wargames off WA/OR/CA, with the carrier battle groups from the WA Navy ports being the main benefactors: they no longer go south to San Diego or Hawaii for such training (save money). Second, what I noticed was that they seem to be saying that the proposed training can’t be done elsewhere. One admission was noticeable “cold water training” for Navy divers, and that led me to the realization that our Navy has not trained in cold water operations for more than a few years.
This is important, as all of the systems they’ve developed for all of the various warfare they’re talking about usually work differently in cold water versus warm. The data the sonar and other systems pulls in has to be read differently, because sound does not travel the same in all temperatures. It varies, quite a bit in fact.
They also reference new diesel-electric submarines (of potential adversaries) that are very quiet and how we have to keep ahead of them. China and North Korea have very quiet ones (NK has very little subs), and the Chinese ‘surprised’ a carrier group about a year ago by one of their subs popping up within visual distance of the carrier – no one knew it was there. Big pie in face that.
Overall, this means more training to fight in cold water and enclosed areas (which are lot like the waters around Korea and northern China). That is why they are fast-tracking this, they need the training now, ASAP. The Navy hasn’t had a lot of anti-submarine warfare for years to worry about, and now they realize they are, once again, behind the 8 ball.
So, cetaceans be damned, the hominids are here to not give a rat’s ass about them. This will be a fight, that I am sure of.
Carol: Thank you for this valuable and informative piece. i’ve heard of floating crap games, but this takes the cake.
Fe: Thank you for posting the information supplement. The devil in the details indicates there is no intention to observe any restraint or boundary. This sort of reckless behavior, especially in the apparent absence of an emergency is unconscionable. Apparently they are doing what they are doing simply because they can. What next, testing drones by firing on seagulls?
Here’s one of the comments from Kos:
Thank you for posting this informative article.
I’ve been out on a boat all day recording Navy sonars that blasted for at least 3 hours, and probably continues as I write this, from a ship at the pier at Naval Station Everett, while at least two gray whales swam about a mile away. It was on KING5 news this evening, with the Navy quoted as saying they don’t believe it does any harm.
The training area is shown on this web page.
It’s strange that they are starting the process for the next 5-year permit already because they still have 3.5 years left on the permit they already have and there are other training ranges with permits that expire sooner than the NWTRC. It also appears to be a consolidation gambit, at least according to the website. The Navy appears to want bring the NWTRC (Northwest Training Range Complex), the Keyport Range, and some dockside testing and training all under one permit umbrella.
They have removed the gaps between WA and OR and between OR and CA, so now there is just one continuous range from Neah Bay to No. Calif., among other consolidations. The comment period (for a permit beginning in 2015) ends on April 27, 2012. This is on a fast track.
There are three recent news items that make this EIS process especially interesting.
1. On Feb. 11 a three year old L pod female was killed by massive trauma and washed up at Long Beach WA. From looking at the drift currents she was probably killed off northern Oregon. So far there are no signs of a ship strike, no surface wounds, no broken bones, etc. The head was CT scanned and will be examined this week. It’s not likely there will be any fractures in the skull, but we’re waiting for that final examination before concluding that she was killed by either an explosion or powerful sonars. To the best of our knowledge, only the Navy would do those things.
2. On Feb. 6 the Canadian ship Ottawa blasted sonars in Haro Strait for a half hour in the dark. Orcas were known to be around about 24 hours before, and 36 hours after the sonars 13 members of K and L pods were found deep inside Discovery Bay, where there is no record they’ve ever gone before. Hydrophones recorded apparent explosions in the Strait of Juan de Fuca but we don’t know what those were yet.
3. On Wednesday 2/29, and Friday 3/2, sonars were heard from Naval Station Everett. The Navy has confirmed they are testing sonars from pierside, and will continue to do so, as the 10-12 Saratoga gray whales return for their annual foraging a few miles off the Everett waterfront. This testing could drive the whales away from this spring foraging habitat.
Given the above developments, this permit process is likely to become very high profile, very soon.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. -Carl Sagan
by howardfromUSA on Wed Mar 07, 2012 at 08:06:09 PM PST