by David Wojick at CFACT
New evidence says that offshore wind sonar surveys may have committed hundreds of thousands of violations of the MMPA, each potentially subject to tens of thousands of dollars in fines. The potential penalty total is in the billions. Moreover, these incredible violations appear to be deliberate.
These astonishingly bad findings flow from research by the Save the Right Whales Coalition (SRWC). It is a bit technical, but here is a simple summary.
First, some legal background. We are talking about the activity of sonar blasting doing something called “incidental harassment”. In the MMPA, harassment means doing bad things to a marine mammal. These can range from causing adverse behavioral changes to outright injury, such as, in this case, causing deafness. Incidental means the harassment is due to some activity that is not directed at the mammal, in this case, the many sonar surveys done in conjunction with offshore wind development.
One of the fundamental rules in the MMPA is that incidental harassment is illegal unless it has been specifically authorized by NOAA. The extreme noise from offshore wind sonar surveys does a lot of incidental harassment, so NOAA has issued an Incidental Harassment Authorization (IHA) for each one. Since sonar blasting geared up in 2016, NOAA has issued over 40 IHAs with more pending.
Each IHA lists the number of authorized harassments by species of affected mammal. How this is done is very important here. In simple terms, it is like this. NOAA has established noise level thresholds, above which there is harassment. Given the loudness of the sonar, the size of the ocean area where harassment will occur is then determined. Then, the number of critters of each affected species that will be in that area, hence harassed, is estimated. That number of harassments is then authorized so the survey can proceed.
These IHA numbers are big…
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