Editor”s note: This story was updated Saturday, Feb. 16, to include the correct meeting time of 5 to 8 p.m.
The U.S. Navy will be back in Fort Bragg to showcase its 2015-2020 plans for using offshore areas of California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska for continued military training and increased weapons testing.
The Northwest Training and Testing Area will extend from Alaska to the southern boundary of Humboldt County. Areas off Mendocino County are not included in the plan, but that was also the case four years ago when roughly the same area was being considered only for training not weapons testing.
Back then, Mendocino Coast residents led the opposition to the Northwest Range plan, creating several delays and extensions of the process. The Navy ultimately held several meetings in Fort Bragg and Ukiah in 2009 and 2010. Those were the best attended of any meetings about the plan.
Most of the testing and training will be focused in the Puget Sound area of Washington. Residents here were mostly upset about impacts on whales.
This time, Fort Bragg meetings are planned ahead of time.
The Navy will hold an open house in Fort Bragg on Friday, March 7, from 5 to 8 p.m. (corrected time), at the Redwood Coast Senior Center, 490 N. Harold St. At about 6:30 p.m., Navy project team members will give a presentation to attendees on the draft EIS.
“At this time [6:30 p.m.], and throughout the entire meeting, the public will be able to ask questions of the Navy project team and submit comments vocally and in writing,” said Liane Nakahara, public affairs specialist, Navy Region Northwest.” A court reporter will be there recording oral comments.
The whopping 1,828-page NWTT Draft Environmental Impact Statement is online at www.NWTTEIS.com. Public comment is due by Tuesday, March 25.
The Navy has been doing testing and training offshore since World War I. But it wasn”t until the year 2000 that the Navy decided to submit itself to a full environmental process for its testing and training activities. These plans are now done in all the nation”s oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.
“The purpose of the proposed action is to conduct training and testing activities to ensure that the Navy meets its mission, which is to maintain, train, and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression, and maintaining freedom of the seas,” the EIS says.
The Navy held scoping sessions in 2012 to find out what the public was worried about in regards to the military”s use of the ocean. Those public meetings (including one in Fort Bragg) showed marine mammals and the related issue of the use of Naval sonar were worries in the vast majority of comments.
The new EIS, which will last from 2015-2020, puts weapons testing back into the equation (few members of the public expressed worries about that). Weapons testing would increase from 621 to 2,511 under the new plan.
The new document also includes hundreds of pages of information on different species of marine mammals, different frequencies of sonar and the studies on the impacts of sonar on whales.
The voluminous document argues that impacts to marine mammals are minor when compared to the national defense need for ocean testing and training of sonar.
“Compared to the potential mortality, stranding, and injury resulting from commercial ship strikes and bycatch, entanglement, ocean pollution and other human causes, the potential for mortality, stranding, or injury (to marine mammals) resulting from Navy training and testing activities is estimated to be orders of magnitude lower (tens of animals versus hundreds of thousands of animals),” the EIS states.
Other upcoming meetings, from Alaska to Eureka, are detailed on the website.
The public input on this draft plan will be accumulated, then the Final EIS/OEIS (scheduled for completion in spring 2015) is designed to answer those questions. A final record of decision will be issued within 30 days of the release of the final environmental impact statement.
