War of the Whales (44 page)

Balcomb submitted one other piece of evidence: a document that contradicted the notion that the Navy had no prior knowledge of the presence of beaked whales in Providence Channel. Six months earlier, at the Maui marine mammal conference, Balcomb had befriended a biologist from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, the naval intelligence agency that administered the submarine test range at AUTEC. The biologist was in charge of the environmental planning and biological analysis division. As part of AUTEC’s internal environmental review in 1997, he conducted a comprehensive assessment of marine mammals in the Bahamas, including data from Balcomb and Claridge’s ongoing Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey. The assessment included protocols for avoiding harm to marine life during testing on the range, including specific allowable decibel thresholds by species, including beaked whales.

Balcomb pushed the report across the table to Janet Whaley. “If the Navy group at AUTEC knew all about the beaked whales in Providence Channel,” he wondered aloud, “why weren’t they mentioned in the Environmental Assessment the fleet conducted before the sonar exercises?”

The most compelling new evidence presented that morning came from the tapes at AUTEC that Balcomb had urged Gisiner to track down the first day of the stranding. Now, ten weeks later, he finally found out what they recorded. There were two hydrophone arrays recording in the vicinity of Abaco that day. One was
east
of the Bahamas: an old SOSUS array moored in the deep sound channel. Originally installed in the 1960s to track Soviet submarines as they transited the Atlantic, this array was currently being deployed by geological surveys to monitor underwater earthquakes and other seismic activity in the North Atlantic. Although numerous earthquakes had been detected from around the Atlantic the week of the stranding, there were no unusual sources of low-frequency acoustic energy emanating from the Bahamas region—meaning, the tissue damage observed in the beaked whales couldn’t have resulted from an explosion or geological event.

The other hydrophone array was located 100 miles
south
of the strandings, a mile deep on the floor of the AUTEC range. A storm tracker named John Proni from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration happened to be recording in the AUTEC range the morning of March 15. There were no submarine tests being conducted on the range from March 15 to March 18, which was why Proni had access to the arrays those days. On the morning of March 15, he recorded bursts of 135- to 150-decibel sound waves at between 3.5 and 6 kilohertz.

Using the basic algorithm he’ d learned in Fleet Sonar School, Balcomb quickly calculated that the sound level 100 miles to the north, where the whales stranded, would have been about 230 decibels! When he looked around the table, he saw Roger Gentry working his own equations on a pad.

After the meeting adjourned, Balcomb hurried to catch up with Gentry in the hallway. “Did you get the same sound source level as I did?” he asked. “Two hundred thirty decibels must mean 53-Charlie,” Balcomb said, referring to the nickname for the ANSQ-53c active sonar mounted on the hulls of most Navy destroyers.

Gentry looked around to see who might be watching him. He was unhappy to be having a conversation with Balcomb that might be construed as friendly. “I’m just a civilian, Ken. I know bioacoustics, not Navy hardware.”

Balcomb asked him what he knew about the meeting scheduled the next morning between Fisheries and the Navy. Gentry confirmed that, yes, the Navy was scheduled to brief Fisheries, and, yes, Gentry was attending. But even if he wanted to help Balcomb get inside the room—which he didn’t—there was no way the Navy would give him a seat at that meeting. Not after the press conference. Not after giving his videotape to
60 Minutes
.

•  •  •

The next morning, Balcomb was already boarding his flight back to Seattle by the time the large Navy team filed into the conference room at Fisheries headquarters. The whole crew showed up: the admirals from Atlantic Fleet Command, the scientists from ONR, the acousticians from the Naval Research Lab, and the leadership from the Office of Environmental Readiness and the Navy Secretary’s office. They all brought their lawyers.

In addition to Gisiner from ONR, there were marine mammal specialists from Woods Hole, Florida, and California. The gray eminence among them was Sam Ridgway, who still directed the dolphin training center in Point Loma, San Diego. In the four decades since he was recruited to Point Mugu as the Navy’s first veterinarian and dolphin trainer, Ridgway had continued to plumb the mysteries of dolphin anatomy, echolocation, and hearing. By 2000, he was the Navy’s longest-serving cetologist, and virtually the last of the first generation of cetacean investigators that included John Lilly, Bill Schevill, Bill Watkins, and Ken Norris.

Ridgway’s research into the impact of noise, including sonar, on dolphins and other small whales had established a 180 decibel “safety” threshold for temporary hearing loss. The Navy and ONR had adopted this threshold for their Environmental Assessments, but many non-Navy scientists criticized 180 decibels as much too loud a threshold for safety, since hearing loss was the most extreme consequence of noise, and whales had been shown to change their migration paths and other important behaviors when subjected to just 120 decibels.

The Fisheries contingent was smaller than the Navy’s: the leadership from headquarters in Silver Spring and the Southeast Office in Florida, plus the few individuals from the Office of Protected Resources, including Gentry, whose security clearance allowed them to sit in on a classified briefing.

An admiral from the Atlantic Fleet led off by explaining how the political upheaval in Vieques, Puerto Rico, had forced the battle group to conduct its first-ever antisubmarine exercise in Providence Channel. Then Admiral Paul Gaffney, the head of ONR, introduced the acoustic modeling of the sonar exercises in the canyon that he’ d commissioned. Someone dimmed the lights and lowered a screen from the ceiling. An acoustician stepped forward to narrate a PowerPoint deck illustrating the progress of the battle group as it transited the 150-mile length of the canyon from midnight on March 15 until four o’clock that afternoon.

As the icons representing the ships moved through the canyon, bands of yellow, red, and green—symbolizing sound waves of varying decibels and frequencies—spread out in front of their bows. Two of the ships proceeded in a zigzagging pattern, while three others followed down the middle of the channel. By the 6:00 a.m. interval in the slide show, the cross-section view of the canyon was flooded with color. The peak-intensity sound, in red, was concentrated in a surface layer, with yellow-to-green-to-blue layers of decreasing sound spreading out at lower depths.

Shifting to an aerial view, the acoustician showed how the advance of the battleships through the canyon coincided with the presumed times and reported locations of the whale strandings, which were represented by white
X
marks along the shore of Abaco and nearby islands. The acoustician used his laser pointer to indicate how the surface layer of warm water had amplified the sound to levels in excess of 180 decibels within a radius of 30 miles of the ships. By the time he reached the 4:00 p.m. coordinates in the slide show, the sonar exercises were complete, and each of the stranded whale locations had been traversed.

“That’s all of them,” he said, pointing to whale number 17, which had stranded at Gold Rock Creek in Grand Bahama. He added, incidentally, that no whales or other marine mammals had been sighted by the battle group in the course of the exercise.

The simulation of the 16-hour war game and 17 whale strandings had taken less than ten minutes to reenact.

When the lights came up, there was much throat clearing and fiddling with paper and pencils.

Sam Ridgway pushed his chair away from the table and pulled himself slowly to his feet. “Well, gentlemen,” he said with what seemed like an exaggerated South Texas drawl, “that was a very
informative
presentation. I guess we can all go home now.” Nervous laughter rippled through the room. Ridgway looked around the conference table, feigning dismay that there might be anything further to discuss or conclude.

Nonetheless, scientific experts from the Navy and Fisheries presented acoustic and biological analysis throughout the morning. But the decision makers had seen what they needed to see, and soon they were slipping away from the table to conduct sidebar conversations in the hallways. During coffee breaks, the Fisheries leadership and its lawyers swirled around one another like a school of bait fish. Navy JAGs and general counsels spoke quietly into the ears of admirals. By late morning, the Navy lawyers were conferring with the Fisheries lawyers, and the Navy Secretary with the NOAA and Fisheries administrators.

When it was time to break for lunch, Gaffney thanked the scientists for their presentations. The Navy brass and their counterparts at Fisheries, along with their respective attorneys, convened to a smaller conference room with better chairs.

Gentry hoped that Fisheries would hold the Navy’s feet to the fire. But once he saw the admirals filing into the closed-door conference—“Where the elephants go to play,” as Gisiner remarked to him with a smirk—he realized that the idea of Fisheries dictating terms to the Navy was laughable. The Navy had all the acousticians, most of the marine mammal experts, and all the other resources that counted, including money and computers. It also owned virtually all the acoustic and operational data related to the event, and Fisheries had neither the political clout nor the clear legal mandate to compel the US Navy to make it public.

The fleet commanders, for their part, opposed the notion of sharing their closely guarded trade secrets with Fisheries. The details of naval training exercises were classified, including the specific frequencies, source levels, and ranges of its sonar. Any evidence submitted to an investigation or published in a public report would have to be cleared in advance by the Navy. It defied the admirals’ comprehension that they had to kowtow to a roomful of lawyers and regulators. They had built and trained the most powerful Navy in the history of maritime warfare, had outlasted the fearsome Soviet armada during a four-decade Cold War, and now they were being called to account because a dozen whales had stranded during a training exercise?

But the civilians in the room—the Secretary of the Navy and the administrators of NOAA and Fisheries—understood the need for accommodation. An unfortunate sequence of events had forced the Bahamas incident into public view and was now forcing them into bed together. For a peacetime Navy intent on promoting itself as a good steward of the environment, pictures of dead whales on a beach with Navy warships offshore demanded a thorough and transparent investigation. So did a relentless environmental lawyer in Los Angeles—who was no doubt preparing at that very moment to sue both the Navy and Fisheries—and a former naval officer turned rogue whale researcher who wouldn’t stop talking to the press. By the end of a long afternoon of negotiation, the lawyers had agreed on the rules of engagement for the first-ever joint investigation conducted by the Navy and Fisheries.

When the Navy’s “letter of cooperation” with Fisheries was released to the press a week later, Gentry knew he was in for a long ordeal. The lawyers, predictably, had weasel-worded it so badly that you couldn’t tell who was admitting to what. The Navy acknowledged that the stranding was “an unusual and significant event,” and pledged that if the investigation ultimately determined that sonar could cause trauma to whales, “the Navy will reassess its use of sonars in the course of peacetime training and implement measures to ensure the least practicable adverse effect on beaked whales.”

What came through loud and clear to Gentry was that by announcing a joint investigation, the Navy had wrapped its arms around its supposed regulator, and it now had a stranglehold on him as well. Gentry had been named as Fisheries’ point person and as liaison with the Navy acousticians. Teri Rowles of Protected Resources was assigned to work with Darlene Ketten on the biological investigation.

The day they announced their partnership, Navy and Fisheries offered Ketten to the press to discuss her findings to date. She characterized the Bahamas strandings as “a red flag” and “a reason for concern,” then speculated that the animals that died would have experienced the equivalent of a “really bad headache.”
²
She cautioned, however, that there wasn’t enough evidence yet to link the strandings to Navy sonar, and the biological investigation would take months to complete.

The week after the joint investigation was announced, Admiral Gaffney left the Office of Naval Research to become president of the National Defense University. Before leaving, he authorized Gisiner to earmark $3 million for the purchase of a Siemens CT scanner for Ketten’s Woods Hole lab. Ketten heard the news in Adelaide, Australia, where she and Teri Rowles were briefing the International Whaling Commission on their investigation of the Bahamas stranding.

Balcomb, whose contributions to recovering and preserving the evidence trail of the stranding were relegated to a footnote in Ketten’s and Rowles’ presentation, was back on San Juan Island considering how he might keep the pressure on the Navy and Fisheries to make good on their promise of a thorough and transparent inquiry.

Reading the “letter of cooperation” in his Los Angeles office, Joel Reynolds was deeply skeptical about the outcome of this “cooperative” investigation, which he doubted would shed any light on the Navy’s midnight exercises in Providence Channel.