Navy to limit use of controversial sonar

SAN FRANCISCO — The Navy has agreed to limit its peacetime use of a new sonar system designed to detect enemy submarines but that may also harm marine mammals and fish, an environmentalist group said.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued the military on the issue, and the Navy reached a settlement last week in which the Navy agreed to use the new system only in specific areas along the eastern seaboard of Asia, according to documents provided by the environmental group.

The agreement must be approved by a federal magistrate to become permanent, but if implemented the deal would greatly restrict the Navy's original plan for the sonar system, which once was slated to be tested in most of the world's oceans.

Navy officials familiar with the case could not be reached for comment.

Environmentalists say sonar systems endanger marine mammals, especially whales, and fish. They point to a different system the Navy used in 2000, when at least 16 whales and two dolphins beached themselves on islands in the Bahamas. Eight whales died and scientists found hemorrhaging around their brains and ear bones, which could have been caused by exposure to loud noise.

"Oceans are an acoustic environment, and the species that live there have an acute acoustic sense," Frederick O'Regan, president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said in a conference call Monday. "If we interfere with these critical behaviors, we may be affecting not just individual animals, but entire populations."

Last year the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups sued the Navy over the new system, seeking to restrict its use.

U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte later issued a preliminary injunction restricting use of the system, and in a separate ruling ordered the environmentalists and the Navy to negotiate a final settlement.

The new deal, which is the result of those negotiations, largely mirrors the restrictions imposed by Laporte's earlier injunction.