HOOD CANAL – The Navy is eying Hood Canal, Puget Sound and the Washington coast for a significant expansion of testing and training exercises, including underwater weapons research and high-frequency sonar.
The Navy wants to increase the level of activity inside the Northwest Training Range Complex, a 126,000-square-mile test range stretching from Neah Bay to Northern California.
The range extends 288 miles out from the coast into the Pacific Ocean, and part of it includes the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
The Navy is preparing a federally required study and environmental impact statement to evaluate the potential effects associated with expanding activities within the range.
The range’s size wouldn’t change.
Navy officials conducted five public meetings earlier this month to get feedback in three Washington cities – Oak Harbor, Pacific Beach and Grays Harbor – and in Depoe Bay, Ore., and Eureka, Calif. The meetings were advertised in the Peninsula Daily News.
“The Navy does approximately 8,000 activities per year now, and they want to increase that to around 13,000,” Navy spokeswoman Sheila Murray said in an interview with The Daily World newspaper in Aberdeen.
In addition to the increased coastal operations, the Navy wants to lengthen its Hood Canal, Keyport and Quinault test ranges, Murray said.
Specifics about the increased activity have yet to be released to due security reasons, but Murray said it will bring more air, surface and underwater vessel traffic, as well as testing of under-water weapons, unmanned aerial and submersible vehicles and high-frequency sonar.
“But the majority of the activities will happen [off the coast with military aircraft] above 10,000 feet,” Murray said, “most of which are pretty transparent to the public.”
The environmental study process is lengthy and any changes implemented “could take another two years,” Murray said.
