Navy to proceed with undersea training range

The Navy announced Friday it would proceed with plans to construct an undersea water training range off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla.

The 625-square-mile training ground will be outfitted with equipment that will allow the Navy to record and analyze the exercises, which will commonly include a few ships searching for a submarine. Hundreds of miles of cable will connect the so-called "transducers," with a main cable running to shore.

The estimated $100 million project is necessary to train naval ships to better track a new generation of quieter diesel-powered submarines. The Navy has a deep-water training range in the Bahamas, but acoustic conditions are far different in shallow coastal waters where passing ship traffic and geographic contours complicate the search. The range would be about 57 miles off the coast of Jacksonville.

The Navy originally had hoped to build the facility off the coast of North Carolina, which concerned environmentalists and many in the fishing industry. They worried that frequent sonar use - up to 470 times a year, for one to six hours at a time - might harm fish that lure sport fisherman to coastal waters.

But the final choice comes with significant environmental concerns as well. The border of the training range would come within a few dozen miles of calving grounds of the endangered North Atlantic right whale. Experts think fewer than 400 right whales remain, with most of the mammals summering off the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia, and migrating to waters off Georgia and Florida in winter, when pregnant females give birth.

Sonar is controversial because at certain frequencies it is thought to cause harm to marine mammals, which use echolocation - a kind of biological sonar - to communicate and find food. Navy sonar use has been implicated in the stranding and even deaths of some dolphins and whales in conditions where mammals aren't able to escape the noise.

Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com