It’s Beluga Whales v. Mine in Cook Inlet Zone

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Category: State News

Created on Friday, 09 August 2024 15:19

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By YERETH ROSEN

Alaska Beacon

Two environmental groups are seeking new protections for endangered beluga whales in an area of southern Cook Inlet that could be converted into an industrial port for a proposed mine.

The petition from the Center of Biological Diversity and Cook Inletkeeper asks the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries service to establish a protective zone around Tuxedni Bay, on the west side of southern Cook Inlet.

The bay is a quiet refuge and winter feeding site for the rare belugas, which were listed as endangered in 2008.

But it could become the site of a port serving a mine producing gold and other metals that is proposed for a slice of Native-owned land within Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. Called the Johnson Tract project, it is located on land owned by Anchorage-based Cook Inlet Region Inc. that lies within the park’s boundaries.

That pending development prompted the petition, which was filed last month.

“The threat of development in this area is so profound we think this needs to be addressed immediately,” said Cooper Freeman, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Alaska director.

His organization followed up the petition to NOAA Fisheries two weeks later, on July 29, with a notice of intent to sue the National Park Service over its plans to allow an access road to the Johnson Tract mine site.

The Park Service is currently contemplating an easement that would be an early step in establishing a road and port. The easement under consideration would allow project design and engineering to start. A 14-day public comment period ended on June 24.

The Center for Biological Diversity argues that the Park Service would be violating the Endangered Species Act if it fails to adequately consider impacts to belugas, which already face a combination of threats that inhibit their recovery. Any such development threatens to be a major setback to the recovery plan required by law and adopted by NOAA Fisheries, the notice said.

“In short, if the easement is granted and the marine ore terminal built in Tuxedni Channel, it would threaten Cook Inlet belugas with nearly every threat detailed in the whale’s Recovery Plan: destruction and loss of habitat, pollution, catastrophic event, prey reduction, unauthorized take, and anthropogenic noise. It is hard to imagine how a major industrial port development in the beluga’s currently only known winter foraging area, where they are frequently present September 1-May 15 and likely occasionally during the summer, would not hinder their recovery and potentially their survival altogether,” it said.

A spokesperson for Department of the Interior declined to comment on the notice of intent to sue.

The petition and threat to sue come as new information is emerging about the importance of Tuxedni Bay to the endangered beluga population. The beluga number only about 330 now, down from a 1979 estimate of 1,300.

A recently published study by scientists from the NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, the University of Washington and other organizations identifies the site as a key place for the belugas to be in the winter.

Using acoustic monitoring – recordings captured by devices in fixed positions – the scientists tracked the movement of belugas and other marine mammals in winter. The result was that Tuxedni Bay was the first identified winter foraging site for the endangered belugas.

The site has multiple characteristics that draw belugas there in the winter.

The quiet is a key attraction for the belugas, which call to each other to navigate the inlet’s notoriously murky waters, said the study’s lead author, marine mammal specialist Manuel Castellote.

“They are acutely designed to be very sensitive to noise because they use sound for everything. It’s their main modality to connect with the environment. For us, it’s vision. For them, it’s sound,” said Castellote, a University of Washington scientist who also works at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s marine mammals laboratory.

Sound travels long distances underwater, added Castellote, who has spent years studying the effects of ship noise in the inlet. Beneath the water’s surface, noises made by a big container ship sailing in the inlet can be heard from several miles away, he said.

Another important attraction is the low number of mammal-hunting orcas, or killer whales, found there. In contrast, Chinitna Bay to the south – a site that is also largely free of manmade noise and that also might have a lot of winter food for belugas – is well-used by the orcas swimming in from the wider Gulf of Alaska, the scientists found through their acoustic monitoring. For the orcas, Chinitna Bay is easier to access, and its waters contain less of the glacial silt that makes Tuxedni so murky, said Castellote and coauthor Verena Gill, a NOAA fisheries senior scientist. Orcas tend to avoid murky waters, they noted.

Exactly what fish the belugas are eating in Tuxedni Bay remains undetermined, Castellote and Gill said. Cook Inlet belugas follow the herring and eulachon runs in the spring and the salmon runs through the summer, but there have not yet been studies to identify the winter food, they said. Smelt, flounder and halibut are possibilities, Gill said.

Their study recommends that regulators establish seasonal restrictions on human activities, like seismic surveys and pile driving, to keep Tuxedni Bay quiet in the fall and winter months when belugas are there. Such restrictions on noise-generating activities at certain times and in certain areas “offer one of the most effective means of protecting cetaceans and their habitats from the cumulative and synergistic effects of noise as well as from other anthropogenic stressors,” the study said.

Freeman said the environmental groups’ petition seeks more than mere seasonal restrictions,

Seasons will not matter much if the development goes through, he said. “When you build a marine terminal, it’s going to destroy the habitat,” he said. “We’re talking about turning Tuxedni Bay into an industrial port.”

A public information officer with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center declined to comment on the petition, citing its status as pending litigation.

Castellote and Gill also said they could not comment on the specifics about the environmentalists’ efforts to establish protections, partly because details about any proposed development are yet to emerge.

But in general, they said, they agree that industrial development of the bay would impact the belugas. “Obviously it will introduce noise and obviously that’s not going to be good for belugas, but we don’t know anything about the plans,” Gill said.

Development there would be different from anything that adds more noise to the area around the Port of Alaska in Anchorage or any other heavily developed Cook Inlet area where additional noise would not mean much change, Castellote said. “There is a very drastic difference between adding noise to a place that is already contaminated to a place that is not contaminated at all,” he said.

If development proceeds, it would have to go through what is called Endangered Species Act consultation, and that would be the point at which impacts and mitigation would be considered, Gill said.

The published study grew out of a research project funded by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency responsible for leasing offshore federal waters for oil and gas and renewable energy development. The report that Castellote, Gill and their research colleagues submitted to BOEM noted that Tuxedni Bay could be developed not only for the proposed Johnson Tract mine but also as a marine terminal for the controversial Pebble mine. The bay’s waters are also near an area offered in the past for oil and gas leasing, said the report, which was released in December.

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