SHIPPING INTERESTS PREVAIL: BUSH ADMIN REDUCES WHALE PROTECTION ZONES

Whale-Protection Cuts Sought
NOAA Scales Back Proposed 30-Mile Speed Limit Zones



By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 26, 2008; Page A03

The Bush administration yesterday proposed scaling back protected zones for endangered whales in the Atlantic Ocean, yielding to cargo companies' concerns about new speed limits for ships in these areas.

The proposal, unveiled yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could end more than a year of wrangling between federal fisheries scientists and the White House over new measures to protect the North Atlantic right whale. About 300 of the whales remain, and researchers say their tiny population has been reduced further by fatal collisions with large ships.

In July 2006, NOAA announced plans to create 30-nautical-mile buffer zones off of several East Coast ports, in which ships would be required to slow to 10 nautical miles per hour during certain times of the year.

But cargo companies said that this would cause their ships to lose time and burn more fuel, and the proposal was held up for months by the administration.

Yesterday, in a document called an environmental impact statement, NOAA announced a change. Its new plan would reduce the buffer zone to 20 nautical miles, or about 23 standard miles.

Anson Franklin, a spokesman for the agency, said the reduction was motivated in part by shippers' concerns. "Time is money in shipping," Franklin said. "There was a concern about the increased cost to carriers . . . We accommodated that by reducing the speed zones."

The new plan would put in place the first speed zones off the U.S. coast aimed at helping right whales. But environmentalists and those who study the whales said they were unhappy with the changes. Any reduction in protection, they said, could be dangerous for a species so close to the brink.

"It's disappointing that it can't be all that it could be," said Amy Knowlton, a researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston. "If we didn't lose one or two females a year" because of the expanded speed zones, she said, "that could be the difference between letting this population recover, and letting this population continue into extinction."


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