Is Sound of Sonar Deadly in San Juans?

Tuesday, June 17, 2003
SMUGGLERS COVE, San Juan County — Ken Balcomb keeps a harbor porpoise tucked in a basement freezer under lamb steaks and microwave lasagna. Wrapped in black plastic and duct tape, it sits untouched and frozen solid, like evidence in a coroner's morgue.

Balcomb found the blunt-nosed porpoise drifting dead off False Bay late last month, two weeks after a U.S. Navy destroyer motored through Haro Strait. Even people on shore said they could hear the high-pitched whine of the ship's powerful sonar emanating from the lapping waves.

For more than three decades, Balcomb has watched over the orca and other marine mammals off San Juan Island like they were his own kin. And for the past several years, he has tried to convince the government and even skeptical colleagues that Navy sonar can drive whales and other marine mammals crazy — even kill them.

While he and others are convinced of sonar's debilitating effect on marine life, the theory is a long way from becoming accepted as fact within the scientific community.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, charged with protecting Puget Sound orca under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, says it's too early to say what killed the Haro Strait porpoises.

And Darlene Ketten, a senior marine scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Harvard University, warns against the rush to blame the Navy. Ketten, who is a national expert on the inner ears of whales, may be enlisted to examine the Haro Strait porpoises this summer.

But Balcomb, who has looked the world over for proof, says it may have washed up in his front yard, courtesy of the Everett-based USS Shoup.

Its routine sonar exercise May 5, he says, has once again stirred the debate — just as questions are being raised about the military's treatment of the environment as a whole.

As experts prepare to analyze Balcomb's porpoise and nine others found dead in Haro Strait, Congress is locked in debate over the Bush administration's quest to exempt the military from the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act.

"They can be exempt from the law, but they can't be exempt from public scrutiny and opinion," Balcomb said. "There's been a lot of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil out there. But now maybe the proof is in the freezer. And eventually it will see the light."

PENTAGON PUSHES FOR CHANGES

Whether the environmental exemptions come to pass is far from certain, but one possible outcome would allow the Defense Department to ignore the Marine Mammal Protection Act during training exercises.

The act has long hampered the military's ability to adequately train troops, according to the Defense Department, which has pushed for exemptions.

But to some researchers, the Defense Department claim is nonsense.

"We fought the Vietnam War under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and we won the Cold War under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Navy was able to play within the rules," says David Bain, a University of Washington professor who studies whales. "Exempting the Navy from environmental laws is not going to help us defeat North Korea or Iraq."

While the Navy is cautious about saying anything about the May 5 incident, it acknowledged its responsibilities in a statement: "We are looking at a combination of narrowly focused measures to enhance readiness, while maintaining our commitment to environmental stewardship."

'HIGH-PITCHED BIRD CALL'

That the events of May 5 happened outside the cliffside home of Balcomb, of all people, is so serendipitous that sometimes he has a hard time believing it. He was videotaping whales from his home above Smugglers Cove, where he runs the Center for Whale Research. J pod, a family of 22 orcas, was feeding in Haro Strait, the channel between San Juan and Vancouver islands.

Then came a shrill noise, loud enough to make people wince, witnesses said.

"It was like a high-pitched bird call," said Tom McMillan, who runs a whale-watching company, Salish Sea Charters of San Juan Island. "It got so loud and so annoying that I had to turn my hydrophone off."

According to McMillan and others, the orcas immediately huddled, as if under attack, then broke in apparent confusion, swimming north, then south, then north again.

Three miles off, looming "like a gray ghost," Balcomb said, was the 500-foot Shoup, heading to an exercise off Vancouver Island. The Navy requires the crew to practice using its sonar every three months. By casting sound waves and measuring how long it takes them to bounce back, sailors can chart the sea floor and, in wartime, detect enemy submarines.

"That exercise is best conducted in a narrow passage," said Cmdr. Karen Sellers, a Navy spokeswoman. "So Haro Strait was an opportunity to get that done."

For four hours, the ship cast its signals before Canadian officials advised the ship of noise complaints, prompting the crew to silence the sonar.

Over the next two weeks, biologists collected 10 dead porpoises in the area. Nine went to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in Seattle, where they were frozen. The 10th is in Balcomb's freezer. It's too early to say what killed them, and some may have died before May 5. NMFS plans to have them dissected.

"We just want to keep an open mind," said Brian Gorman, an NMFS spokesman. "There may be a relationship, and there may not be. But no matter what conclusions are drawn, there will be a large number of people who disagree."

Meanwhile, the Navy, also waiting for necropsy results, points out that lookouts were posted to watch for marine mammals. And it questions why the ship's sonar would have bothered animals so far away, estimated to be at least three miles from J pod.

"... I really don't think the guys on the boat knew what they were doing to the marine mammals," said Rich Osborne, a longtime whale researcher and director of the Whale Museum on Friday Harbor. "But I'm pretty convinced we'll have some permanent, heavy damage."

Balcomb, as usual, won't give the Navy even that much credit. "It's absolutely ludicrous that the Navy would ... say it didn't know there were marine mammals in the area. These (orcas) are the icons of Puget Sound. Everyone knows that they live here."

NO ENEMY OF THE NAVY

Balcomb, 62, began cataloging orcas in the mid-1970s. He stresses that he is no enemy of the Navy. Actually, he's a veteran. He served two tours, from 1967 to 1975, as an officer and pilot in the Pacific and in submarine sonar stations tracking Soviet submarines.

Nowadays, he says, he and his group get by partnering with other environmental groups, by renting his house to study teams, even bumming money from his parents.

A year ago, a San Juan Island millionaire donated the Bellevue Star, a 72-foot yacht, to Balcomb's group. But the bushy-bearded Balcomb still drives to the marina at Roche Harbor in a beat up Ford Escort. He trundles down the dock in Birkenstocks and a fleece-lined Levi jacket.

It was a trip to the Bahamas three years ago that landed him in the national spotlight. In March 2000, Balcomb was studying whales there when a Navy fleet passed by, testing its sonar. Within 24 hours, 17 marine mammals had beached themselves and died, or washed ashore dead.

Balcomb and others rushed to the beach to find beaked whales, usually deep-water creatures, incoherently thrashing ashore. Necropsies showed their inner ears had hemorrhaged. To Balcomb, it was a smoking gun: The sonar had destroyed the whales' most important sensory organ they depend on for communicating, navigation and finding food.

It appears the same fate befell the mammals in Haro Strait, according to Balcomb. The animals likely were surrounded by an excruciating noise — "acoustic bullets."

"It's like having a nail driven into your head, and it stays there."

Despite the apparent connection in the Bahamas case, friends told him he was nuts if he thought the Navy would admit fault. But in December 2001, the Navy said its sonar did contribute to the beachings, and it agreed to look for ways to mitigate the effects of sonar on marine mammals.

But that didn't end debate. For one thing, researchers still don't agree with Balcomb's chief hypothesis, that sonar itself ruptures the inner ear and can kill.

Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that said that it couldn't say for sure what direct impact undersea noise has on marine mammals. The Navy, citing its own research, maintains that its sonar is only seriously damaging within a kilometer of a ship.

Balcomb's fellow scientists say there are too many variables to say with certainty that sonar is the chief culprit, even in cases when whales and porpoises turn up dead after a sonar event.

For one thing, six or seven Harbor porpoises usually wash up every spring in the San Juans. And other whales beach themselves for myriad reasons, including hunger and pollution.

Ketten, the senior scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Harvard University, has disagreed with Balcomb's conclusions about the Bahamas case, having performed the necropsies on the Bahamas whales.

"I understand the impatience of many people for an explanation," she said. "But we need to stay open-minded and careful about leaping to conclusions before we have some firm answers."

She doesn't dispute that sonar could be a factor in whale strandings, but science hasn't settled on a single cause of the animals' deaths, she said.

"The animals in the Bahamas didn't die from sonar, they died from the effects and trauma of being beached in the hot sun," she said. "We don't know that sonar is causing an auditory trauma; many people have been assuming that. In fact, some aspects of the traumas don't quite fit with being direct effects of sonar, and also a lot of other whale and dolphin species can hear the sonar but they didn't end up on the beach."

And one simple explanation could be that sonar scares the whales, some of which then run aground in their panic to flee. Or it's possible deep-water whales get scared and surface too quickly, and their ears bleed from sudden decompression.

Ketten also is researching the possibility that some specific whale species, such as the beaked whale, could have blood-clotting problems that would cause bleeding in their ears when they panic.

But Balcomb finds Ketten's hesitance irritating. "To me, that argument is the same as saying that the cavalry ran some buffalo off a cliff, but their deaths didn't occur until they hit the ground, so it's not the cavalry's fault, it's the impact."

One day last month, Balcomb drove across San Juan Island to the UW's laboratories at Friday Harbor to deliver a copy of his videotape of the May 5 sonar incident to a pair of NMFS agents.

As he left, Balcomb sighed, and wondered aloud whether his efforts, all his zeal to make people see it his way, would ever amount to anything. And his mind filtered back to the porpoise in his freezer.

"Maybe it won't even show any smoking-gun evidence," he conceded. "But I won't just walk away.

"It would be like witnessing a mass murder and not being willing to stand up in court and present the evidence because you're afraid. And that would be something I personally couldn't live with."