Special committee

Minister Leslie Miller's open door invitation to international environmentalists to join a committee, which will assess the testing being done by the United States Navy in the Tongue of The Ocean, is a good move forward in trying to understand what exactly is being done at the naval base in Central Andros.

Undoubtedly it is important to the Americans, as they have been at it now for 41 years. It is not their fault that The Bahamas has been short-changed and only collects $10.8 million a year, and it is certainly not the Americans' fault that it took 19 years before that amount was arrived at. In the first instance it was probably just poor negotiating skills by the administration which signed off on the deal in 1965, and which those who followed failed to improve upon until 1984.

So it may just be wishful thinking for some people to believe that all of a sudden these testing areas used by AUTEC will be declared a World Heritage site and that the U.S. Navy would close shop and move on.

That is highly unlikely as the Navy's website offers the following: "AUTEC's geography, low vessel traffic, protected environment, minimal shipping noise, slight currents, and absence of large ocean swells provide unsurpassed operational security and the required diversity necessary to support the Navy's 'from the sea' mission."

When looked at further the Navy says the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation mission is to support the full spectrum of undersea warfare by providing accurate three-dimensional tracking, performance measurement, and data collection resources to satisfy Research, Development, Test and Evaluation requirements, and for assessment of Fleet training, tactical and material readiness.

It says that The Bahamas' location, with its semi-tropical climate, quiet acoustic environment, lack of commercial encroachment, and extensive capabilities, is an ideal year-round test facility.

And, according to the website, it is no secret that AUTEC is located on Andros Island. It listed such attributes as its close proximity to the Tongue of the Ocean, a unique, deep-water basin, approximately 110 nautical miles long and 20 nautical miles wide, varying in depth from 4,500-6,000 feet.

The basin floor is relatively smooth and soft, with very gradual depth changes. The Tongue of the Ocean is bounded on the west by Andros Island, on the south and east by large areas of very shallow banks that are non-navigable, and on the north by the Berry Islands. The Navy says that this area of gradually varying depths is a prime location for littoral warfare training exercises.

These are some of the considerations that the environmentalists will have to weigh in on when determining whether the sonar testing in the Tongue of the Ocean has any bearing on marine mammals in the area and particularly on the several whales that have beached themselves in the past few years.

These are some of the reasons too why there must also be independent evaluations by impartial scientists with no axe to grind and who will see everything for what it is.

Perhaps this will happen with the committee that is being assembled by the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources and the Ministry of Energy and the Environment.

© 2006 The Freeport News