Navy explores training impacts

Hearings will discuss how isle operations affect the environment

The Navy is seeking comment on an environmental impact statement that covers training areas and operations in Hawaii, from the use of active sonar during anti-submarine warfare training to anti-missile testing at Kauai's Barking Sands Beach.

"It's any and all Navy training in Hawaii," said Tom Clements, spokesman at Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai's Barking Sands.

This makes up the Hawaii Range Complex, 195,000 square miles of water surrounding the main Hawaiian islands.

However, Clements added that there is an additional 2.4 square miles to the north and west of Kauai when any type of anti-missile tests are conducted.

Seven successful intercepts of drone missiles fired from Kauai and knocked down by Pearl Harbor-based Aegis cruisers have been conducted in this area over the past several years.

The Navy said: "The proposal, which is necessary as global defense technology advances, includes an increased occurrence of fleet and large-scale training exercises, upgraded tracking ranges and test facilities, and enhanced capabilities to test and train with new, emerging technologies, vehicles and systems."

Part of the EIS process also is "to fulfill the DoN (Department of the Navy) commitment to update analyses on marine mammal exposures to noise in the water."

Meetings will be held throughout the state next month to take comments on the EIS. The Navy hopes to complete the EIS in 2006.

The Navy already has said that it does not want to agree to further restrictions on the use of mid-frequency active sonar being pushed by environmentalists.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Navy's use of mid-frequency active sonar.

The Navy was forced to get a permit to use active sonar from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which banned the use of active sonar in certain shallow waters during the operations of the Rim of the Pacific war games.

The deaths and stranding of marine mammals in the Bahamas in 2000 in part led to these concessions.

At the end of RIMPAC, Vice Adm. Barry Costello, commander of the Navy's 3rd Fleet, told the Star-Bulletin that sonar restrictions resulted in the loss of anti-submarine "training opportunities."

The issue over the use of active sonar should be based "on science and that we base it on what we can learn about the ocean and how sound travels; whatever measures we put into effect are based on some sound scientific evidence, as opposed to strongly held opinions," Costello said.

Rear Adm. James Symonds, Navy director of environmental readiness, told the Associated Press that some of the RIMPAC restrictions such as aerial and boat surveys of the training areas before and after the active sonar exercises were cumbersome and didn't do anything to protect the whales.

But he agreed that requirement that the warships turn down the power of the sonar when whales and other marine mammals when they were spotted or came within 450 yards were reasonable. Also, requiring lookouts to scan the ocean for whales, Symonds said, keeps them from being harmed.