Welcome to Quiet Sound

Dec 23, 2021 | All, Quiet Sound Updates

Welcome to Quiet Sound

Welcome to the Quiet Sound website! We are excited to be part of the Southern Resident Killer Whale protection community. In addition to our brand new website, the year to come will begin the process of complementing and strengthening ongoing work and early actions to address underwater noise. In January we will have our first Leadership Committee where we will solidify our work groups and also begin the scheduling of those work group meetings and action plans. To learn more about our upcoming projects click here. To stay informed and follow the work of Quiet Sound and our work groups please visit us often or sign up for our mailing list here.



Subscribe to stay connected

Washington launches program to cut underwater noise in Puget Sound

Dec 17, 2021 | All, In The Press

An orca surfaces as a Seattle ferry passes through Elliott Bay. Washington State’s new Quiet Sound program is working to cut noise pollution, including that of large ships, in orca habitats like the Salish Sea. (Courtesy of NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center)

Washington launches program to cut underwater noise in Puget SoundQuiet Sound plans to work with the Northwest shipping industry to make it easier for marine creatures to navigate, find food and communicate.

by Ashley Braun / December 17, 2021 / Updated at noon on Dec. 17

In many places around the world, the start of the coronavirus pandemic dampened the usual cacophony of human noise in marine waters. From cargo ships and ferries to cruise ships and recreational boats, vessel traffic dropped. The ocean became quieter, and marine life responded, their clicks, whistles, and calls suddenly traveling farther.

Rachel Aronson wants to keep up that slowdown in noise pollution from large commercial vessels in Washington waters, where the beloved, and endangered, southern resident orcas have long been struggling to hear and be heard.

“For whales, it was probably a nice sound vacation, and we can build on that into a system that is sustainable for both humans and for whales,” she said.

To protect endangered orcas in Washington state waters, a new collaborative program called Quiet Sound is preparing to launch several voluntary initiatives in the new year that are aimed at cutting underwater noise from large ships. Aronson directs Quiet Sound via the nonprofit Washington Maritime Blue, and she said the new measures range from piloting a potential seasonal slowdown zone for commercial vessels to using app-based technology to notify ship operators of nearby orca sightings in real time.

Rachel Aronson, program director of Quiet Sound, an initiative that aims to reduce the amount of ship noise pollution on local Southern Resident orcas, poses for a photograph at Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle, Washington, Monday, Dec. 13, 2021. The initiative is sponsored by Washington Maritime Blue. (Lindsey Wasson for Crosscut)

Today, Quiet Sound is just starting to come into focus. Its organizers thus far have concentrated on finding funding, hashing out the program’s direction and basic operations, and adding partners among government agencies, tribes, the maritime industry, and nonprofits. Now with more than $800,000 in funding for the next couple years, including from the state Legislature, the program hopes to turn down the volume on cargo ships, ferries, tugboats, fish processors and oil tankers in greater Puget Sound.

Quiet Sound’s origins can be traced to the Southern Resident Orca Task Force, formed in 2018 by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. The next year, the task force released final recommendations for reversing the decline of these struggling marine mammals, and included some recommendations focused on reducing vessel noise.

Vessels, both their presence and the underwater noise they generate, are among the top threats to the recovery of the southern resident orcas who frequent Puget Sound in the summer and fall each year. These echolocating marine mammals rely on sound to navigate, find food and communicate in a relatively dark seascape.

As more ships speed through the growing region’s waters, however, the added noise drowns out the orcas’ calls, increases their stress levels and limits their ability to seek out their preferred prey, endangered chinook salmon. Even the mere presence of vessels within 400 yards can disrupt the southern residents, especially females, as they hunt for scarce fish, research led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows.

Like an underwater sprinter, adult orcas burn a lot of energy chasing chinook salmon, one fish at a time, and with less food to go around, adults struggle to catch enough to feed themselves, much less find the energy to reproduce and feed their hungry calves. A noisier ocean makes all of this more challenging.

That’s where Quiet Sound hopes to make a difference in the wake of the orca task force’s 2019 recommendations.

According to Jon Sloan, interim director of the Port of Seattle’s maritime environment and sustainability program, the port first had to take those recommendations and help rally a planning team that includes state, local and federal agencies, the Makah Tribe, the shipping industry and nonprofits like Maritime Blue. And then there was the fundraising. The ports of Seattle and Tacoma and their joint venture ponied up $100,000 of seed money in their 2021 budgets to get Quiet Sound started.

With those pieces finally coming together, Quiet Sound is eager to start having an impact on noise levels in Puget Sound. Aronson pointed out that slowing down large ships by just a moderate amount translates to even greater reductions in the underwater noise generated by ship propellers and engines, while having only a minimal impact on vessel travel times.

An orca surfaces near a sailboat and a larger ship in Haro Strait near the San Juans. The Quiet Sound program will help protect orca populations with measures such as voluntary ship slowdowns and having ships avoid key orca feeding areas when whales are present. (Courtesy of Fred Felleman)

Quiet Sound is modeled on the similarly coalition-focused Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation program, which Canada’s biggest port, the Port of Vancouver, started in 2014 to bring together diverse groups to cut noise pollution from large vessels coming into the bustling international port. While its early efforts concentrated on answering basic research questions about, for instance, vessel noise sources and levels, in recent years ECHO has been testing real-world measures to reduce noise impacts from large vessels traveling to and from the port, targeting times and places the southern residents are mostly likely to overlap with ship traffic, according to ECHO program manager Orla Robinson.

One measure suggests that ships slow down in specified zones in Haro Strait and Boundary Pass, which border the San Juan Islands, from June to roughly October, when the orcas tend to follow salmon into this region. Another ECHO initiative asks tugboats to shift their paths away from a critical orca feeding area along the southern coast of Vancouver Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a measure that led to a 60% to 80% drop in sound intensity in 2020.

Although ECHO is a voluntary program, participation from the shipping industry remains extremely high, around 80% to 90% for ships going into and out of the Port of Vancouver. And Robinson said the program also can point to measurable drops in vessel noise, thanks to a network of underwater microphones, or hydrophones. Independent research funded by the ECHO program suggests that such efforts to quiet the waters of places like Haro Strait could pay off, increasing the likelihood that the southern residents will return to hunt there.

ECHO’s results in British Columbia show promise that the Quiet Sound program could also help address existing vessel traffic noise in Washington waters, said Lovel Pratt, marine protection and policy director at nonprofit Friends of the San Juans.

“Hopefully, the Quiet Sound program will have similar success in terms of participation from the shippers and documented reductions in noise,” she said. Pratt added, however, that such programs aren’t perfect solutions, given the major projected increases in ship traffic in the Salish Sea, in part due to proposals to build or expand fossil fuel projects and shipping terminals.

Aronson, who has been in the job only a few months, is also encouraged by the early successes of ECHO, as well as the Canadian program’s support for Quiet Sound’s own burgeoning efforts.

While the new program is still trying to bring additional partners on board, Quiet Sound plans to make its public debut in January. That’s also when the organization’s leaders are set to begin convening working groups to pursue a pilot slowdown area in Washington waters, among other initiatives.

“The dream is: know where the whales are concentrating their activity and where that overlaps with high ship activity; [and then] put the slowdown recommendation into place [when] seasonally appropriate,” said Aronson.

Quiet Sound also plans to tap into ECHO’s WhaleReport Alert System, a two-way platform run by the Canadian conservation nonprofit Ocean Wise to flag real-time orca sightings for mariners and port personnel.

The idea is that ships can then curb their speeds, post an additional whale spotter or move away from marine mammals in the area if it’s safe to do so. On top of reducing noise pollution, such measures could also lead to fewer ships striking whales. Washington State Ferries, a major source of underwater noise, have already started using the WhaleReport Alert System after a ship collided with and killed an orca in 2016.

However, the alert system has several limitations, which Quiet Sound acknowledges. For example, it currently can receive whale sighting observations only through the Whale Report app and makes them available only to a private group of users. This setup leaves out an existing array of robust sources that report where orcas have been in Washington waters — data currently available to the public, who are often the ones generating it.

In addition, the alert system has relatively little data on whale sightings south of the Canadian border, something that Aronson and Quiet Sound hope to remedy in the days ahead.

“We’d like to work with some of our friends out there who have good whale data and help them connect their whale data to the WhaleReport Alert System,” said Aronson.

Two orcas are visible as the MV Wenatchee ferry crosses between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. (Courtesy of NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center)

Critics say Quiet Sound has plenty of potential allies in the Pacific Northwest’s long-established whale observation community, but maintains that the program’s early rollout has already managed to alienate some of them.

Quiet Sound will have to overcome certain tensions within the passionate community of people who have long been working on many of these issues in Washington, according to Fred Felleman, a whale biologist and environmental consultant with expertise in commercial shipping safety. Felleman also happens to be the Port of Seattle’s commission president and a board member of Maritime Blue, but is not speaking in either capacity here.

“While I’m very supportive of the program’s goals, I do have some serious concerns about its current implementation,” Felleman wrote via email.

As a close observer not permitted to participate directly in rolling out Quiet Sound, Felleman said his concerns began as the not-yet-formed organization was assembling its early partners and developing its direction.

In Felleman’s personal opinion, early planners have neglected the well-established orca-sighting and scientific communities — the type of people with “experience on the water with the whales.” That includes the whale-watching industry, which has its own industry-specific reporting app for sightings, and groups like the nonprofit Orca Network, which has been running a community science network of whale observers in Washington on a shoestring budget for 20 years.

“That’s the part I just think is an unforced error. And it creates alienation amongst the very folks that should be your closest friend,” said Felleman.

Susan Berta, co-founder and executive director of Orca Network, confirmed via email that her group feels left in the dark when it comes to Quiet Sound and its goals, though she saw promise for working together under the right conditions. Berta worries that the program’s focus on the WhaleReport Alert System and its own app in particular could potentially undermine the region’s existing whale reporting infrastructure, like that supported by her own scrappy nonprofit.

For years, Orca Network has been compiling the public’s whale sightings in Puget Sound via a hotline, email, and social media (and is supporting the imminent local expansion of a U.S.-based app). That data is, in turn, used by researchers and natural resource managers, said Berta, and the group does all of this with very little financial support. For instance, the nonprofit receives $15,000 a year from the federal government to turn its orca observations into an annual report.

If the public started funneling its local orca sightings instead to WhaleReport Alert System via the Whale Report app, Berta fears such competition might divert their members away from Orca Network and “result in loss of data for us, researchers and state and federal agencies who rely on it.”

“We have been asking and hoping for some support of the local [Washington]-based networks who have worked hard to build up our whale sightings and hydrophone networks over the last two decades,” she wrote of Quiet Sound, “but so far there are meetings and more meetings, then silence with no communication while they continue communicating with, working with, and funding Canadian efforts, which is disheartening for us.”

Aronson is aware of such concerns and hopes Quiet Sound can find an acceptable way to link other sources of data like Orca Network’s into the WhaleReport Alert System and connect real-time whale sightings directly to mariners, who right now don’t have easy access to them as they steer ships through Washington waters.

“One challenge is just finding the space that we can move things forward without re-creating the work that someone else has already done,” she said.

And while she acknowledges that Quiet Sound may have been a “black box” so far, Aronson is excited to open up the organization with many more opportunities for public engagement and outreach starting in January.

That sentiment is shared by the Port of Seattle’s Sloan, who also points to January when Quiet Sound will start reaching out to organizations the group has “unofficially slated” to participate in working groups that would kick off the program’s various initiatives. He said, “I know there’s some anxiety out there. ‘Well, how come we haven’t been invited into Quiet Sound yet?’ Well, the working groups haven’t been formed yet. So that’s when that will happen.”

See the original post Here.

CORRECTION: This story has been corrected from an earlier version to show that an orca died after colliding with a ship not a ferry.



Subscribe to stay connected

Fresh Perspectives to Help Protect Orcas

Oct 18, 2021 | All, News from Partners

Fresh Perspectives to Help Protect Orcas

Drawhorn, Omie

October 18, 2021

The beloved Southern Resident Killer Whale is one of the most iconic species in the Pacific Northwest. Orcas are an important part of our culture, our ecosystem, and our economy. But with just over 70 orcas left, they need our help more than ever.

In response to the increasing need to help our orcas, Washington conservation districts created Orca Recovery Day on October 16, an intentional day of action to restore habitat, reduce storm water pollution, and educate the public about things they can do everyday to help orcas. In alignment with our orca recovery priorities, the Port of Seattle helped sponsor Orca Recovery Day.

Starting in 2020, a group of stakeholders with diverse backgrounds joined together to form the Quiet Sound Program and address underwater noise, a major threat to the Southern Resident orca’s survival.

Now Rachel Aronson will lead these efforts as the new Quiet Sound Program Director, bringing maritime voices together to form a shared vision and collective actions to save the Southern Resident Killer Whales. Her background in environmental conflict resolution and group facilitation is the perfect fit to guide the organization toward calm (and quiet) seas.

Quiet Sound is a collaborative initiative supported by Washington Maritime Blue with the mission of understanding and reducing the cumulative effects of acoustic and physical disturbance from large commercial vessels on Southern Resident Orcas throughout their range in Washington State. The idea was formed in 2019 in response to Governor Inslee’s Orca Task Force recommendations and the current Planning Team includes the Port of Seattle, the Port of Tacoma, the Northwest Seaport Alliance (NWSA), and other agencies, tribes, and organizations.

“I’m excited about Quiet Sound as a collaborative space where people with different experiences and expertise can come together and answer the question of how to support killer whales,” Aronson said.

One early goal has been the centralized reporting of whale sightings so pilots of large vessels can slow down or move away from orcas in their vicinity.

Learn more about the Quiet Sound Program

A fresh perspective

Aronson has the expertise and experience to quiet the Sound for orcas by bringing human stakeholders together for collective action.

“I have spent a lot of my career acting as a neutral party in an environmental decision-making space, and Quiet Sound is a neutral space,” Aronson said. “I want to help people to come together and make good decisions. When you put the work into building consensus, it pays off in the long run in terms of sustainable decisions.”

Her newcomer status in the maritime world allows her to come in without preconceived notions.

“Many folks in the space have been doing things a certain way for a long time,” she said. “Hopefully we can incorporate a lot of new information we haven’t tried before or new technology to locate whales and discover new ways to share information.”

Aronson currently works out of Maritime Blue’s hub at Fishermen’s Terminal, supported by a graduate fellow. An operations manager will join the crew later this fall.

The first orders of business for Aronson are writing Quiet Sound’s charter, confirming a leadership committee, and organizing working groups to start in January.

Collaborating for quiet

“Quiet Sound is exciting because everyone is already at the table,” said Aronson. “Industry representatives are already on board and committed to doing all we can to protect orcas. It’s a voluntary program folks on the water can learn from and support.”

For the first six weeks in her role, Aronson has focused on bringing together members of the planning team from these organizations:

the Port of Seattle
the Port of Tacoma
the Northwest Seaport Alliance
the Puget Sound Partnership
the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association
the Marine Exchange of Puget Sound
the Washington State Ferries
the United States Coast Guard
Maritime Blue
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and
the Makah Tribe

Noise reduction tactics

The program’s goal is to protect orcas and contribute to their recovery by reducing their exposure to vessels in Puget Sound. Less noise and fewer distractions could reduce their stress levels and help them find food. To accomplish this, the organization relies on these tactics:

An effective alert system that can locate orcas. Engaging non-profit organizations, professional mariners, and others to be the eyes (and ears) throughout the Salish Sea
A communication link between the spotters and the maritime industry
Engaged, committed, and voluntary participation from large commercial vessel operators
Tracking innovations that can be used to retrofit existing vessels and design new quieter vessels
Monitoring and reporting on outcomes to ensure the program is achieving its goals

Whale report network

Ocean Wise, a Canadian nonprofit, has already launched the Whale Report Alert System (WRAS), a cell phone-based application that informs commercial mariners when whales are nearby, with support from the Quiet Sound planning team..

Members of the public can log whale sighting reports in the WhaleReport app (Apple, Android). And these reports are quickly shared with Puget Sound Pilots, ferry, and tugboat captains so they can change their course or speed to protect orcas.

The success of the tool (WRAS) relies on input and sightings data from multiple sources, such as citizen sightings networks in Washington State, and the Quiet Sound team is working with these networks to determine the most effective way to translate the sightings data into alerts for mariners.

Next steps

Aronson has big plans for the future. Based upon the success of the ECHO program by the Port of Vancouver BC, Quiet Sound aims to designate a trial slowdown area in Puget Sound, where ships will lessen their speed during whale season.

Aronson’s goal is to secure more program funding, building on the $250,000 annual allocation from the Washington State Legislature, $100,000 from Ports, $100,000 from EPA, and $25,000 from NOAA. One innovative tactic is an upcoming partnership with the United States Navy Northwest Tech Bridge to develop technology solutions that allow manned and autonomous vehicles to sense whales in the vicinity.

With this challenge, the Navy is trying to unlock the potential of the startup private sector. Maritime Blue is a great bridge to those types of folks in marine space,” said Aronson.

Next year, depending on the COVID-19 recovery, Aronson hopes to host a Quiet Sound Summit, convening representatives from maritime research, industry groups, government organizations, and orca nonprofits to discuss how to protect whales in Washington from the threats of noise and ship strikes.

“That’s the dream,” she said. “We have great ideas for how to do this work; I’m excited to bring this under one umbrella.”

*Photo copyright: NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

See the original post Here.



Subscribe to stay connected

Quieting Puget Sound for Endangered Southern Resident Orcas

Apr 27, 2021 | All, News from Partners

NOAA Fisheries West Coast

Quieting Puget Sound for Endangered Southern Resident Orcas

April 27, 2021 Regan Nelson

The Washington State legislature this weekend approved a state budget that funds an innovative new program aimed at reducing ship noise and disturbance in the Salish Sea to benefit endangered Southern Resident orcas. The program, known as Quiet Sound, is the first of its kind in the United States. Underwater noise from ships is a global problem, but one that is particularly acute in Puget Sound, as the noisy waters make it hard for starving orcas to hunt and find food.

Quiet Sound will expand the system that alerts mariners to the presence of orcas so they can adjust their route or slow down, and it will examine options to adjust vessel operations in ways that reduce the underwater noise from large commercial vessels in Washington’s waters. Small changes in speed or direction by vessels could prevent a deadly collision with an orca and will reduce acoustic disturbance. Quiet Sound will also work to identify innovative technologies to lessen radiated noise from ships and employ underwater acoustic listening stations to track whales and to measure how underwater noise is changing.

As Nora Nickum, Ocean Policy Manager for the Seattle Aquarium, and I wrote in a recent Seattle Times op-ed, orcas use sound to hunt. Underwater noise from the myriad vessels traversing the Salish Sea disrupt orca’s ability to successfully find their preferred prey, Chinook salmon. At present, most stocks of Chinook in the region are low in number and in decline, meaning orcas already expend a lot of time and energy hunting for their scarce food source. A study commissioned by the Port of Vancouver noted that a Southern Resident orca potentially loses up to 5 ½ hours of foraging time per day from May through September due to vessel noise and disturbance from commercial vessels and whale-watch boats.

By reducing underwater noise levels, Quiet Sound will play an important role in helping hungry orca whales find fish. A scientific analysis conducted in 2017 found that reducing acoustic disturbance by 50% combined with increasing Chinook salmon stocks by 15% would put the declining orca population on a growth trajectory. While more needs to be done to recover Chinook salmon throughout the orca’s range—including restoring key salmon habitat in the Columbia River Basin by breaching the four lower Snake River dams and replacing their energy with clean alternatives—Quiet Sound is an important step forward to lowering the volume in the orca’s primary summer feeding grounds.

Quiet Sound is inspired by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority-led ECHO program, a vessel quieting program established in 2014 on the Canadian side of the Salish Sea that is already showing impressive results. In 2019, 82% of large commercial ships participated in voluntary ship slowdowns, reducing their speeds to as slow as 11.5 knots. Scientists used underwater microphones (called hydrophones) to determine that these slowdowns reduced underwater noise by half. Captains also agreed to shift ship routes to avoid key orca foraging areas when the whales were present. Furthermore, the Port authority offers financial incentives to help shipowners retrofit noisy ships with technologies or quiet notations that reduce the vessel’s noise footprint.

Encouraged by the success of the ECHO program, and following on recommendations from the Orca Recovery Task Force, the Port of Seattle, led by Commissioner Fred Felleman, convened a workshop in 2019 bringing together state and federal agencies, tribes, industry, conservation groups and others to discuss if a similar approach could work for Washington, and it was from this convening that Quiet Sound was born. The Ports of Seattle, Tacoma and the Northwest Seaport Alliance committed initial start-up funds to the effort, which allowed for stakeholders to continue to work together to develop the program’s mission and architecture.

In testament to the broad support for Quiet Sound, in March, two dozen organizations, representing the shipping industry, conservation and community interests, and the ports of Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia, joined together in a letter to the Legislature urging support for Quiet Sound.

NRDC is grateful to Senator Liz Lovelett and Representative Debra Lekanoff, who led budget provisos to add funding for Quiet Sound to the state budget. Senator Christine Rolfes, Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, included the funding in the Senate budget, and led efforts to ensure it stayed in the final biennium budget. This leadership is critical in our collective effort to prevent the extinction of the Southern Resident orca population.

With state funding now secured, the Quiet Sound program partners should get to work without delay and operate in a manner that is transparent and inclusive of all interests.

Time is of the essence. While three new orca calves joined the population over the last year, their survival is predicated on the ability of their mothers to find food. And new research indicates that mother orcas are the most vulnerable to vessel disturbance. Quiet Sound must urgently act to reduce vessel noise and disturbance. We should all credit the Washington State legislators for making sure they have the means to do so.

See the original post Here.



Subscribe to stay connected

Collaboration Will Quiet the Sound

Jan 6, 2021 | All, News from Partners

Collaboration Will Quiet the Sound

Felleman, Fred

Jan 06, 2021

It’s no secret but the study of the southern resident orca community is why I first came to the Pacific Northwest in 1980 and continues to serve as a motivation for my public service. The fact that there are only 74 whales left in this population serves to sustain my efforts.

This is why I’m very proud of the Port having just received the Washington Public Ports Association Environmental Stewardship Award for a new initiative to reduce shipping noise, called Quiet Sound. This project, involving a broad range of stakeholders, was inspired by the Final Recommendations of Governor Inslee’s Southern Resident Orca Task Force that were published in November 2019.

I enjoyed working on the development of the recommendations with Port of Anacortes Commissioner, Kathy Pittis who represented the Washington Public Ports Association on the Task Force. In particular, Recommendation 22 calls for the identification of ways to reduce underwater noise from ferries and commercial vessels calling on Puget Sound Ports.

This undertaking draws heavily from the successful experience of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation (ECHO) Program. The success of ECHO is reflected by the high degree of voluntary compliance among mariners to reduce speed of their vessels and other measures over the past several years to reduce ship-generated noise and whale strikes.

The Port of Seattle and the Northwest Seaport Alliance (the Alliance) wrote comment letters supporting the initiative and the Commissioners from Seattle, Tacoma, and the Alliance supported the inclusion of seed money to jumpstart the formation of the Program in their 2021 budgets.

To date, the Port of Seattle and the Northwest Seaport Alliance have been the primary coordinators of the many organizations behind this effort including the U.S. Coast Guard, Maritime Blue, Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, Marine Exchange of Puget Sound, Washington State Ferries, Puget Sound Partnership, NOAA, and the Makah Tribe. As a tribal liaison for the Port, I’m keenly aware of the need to engage many other tribal governments as this effort moves forward.

The public contributed insights to shape the program’s formation at an October 2019 Orca Workshop the Port and Alliance hosted. We reconvened the group this November to unveil the organizational structure for the Quiet Sound program that the planning team developed over the last two years. The initiative will be managed by Maritime Blue, a nonprofit organization initiated by Governor Inslee to advance maritime innovation, on whose board I serve.

I’ve been delighted by the level of collaboration between agencies and industry on this new initiative. My deep appreciation also goes to the many people and organizations (colleagues of mine) who have been tracking and studying the movements of our endangered orcas for decades. Identifying protocols and ways to provide credit for these contributions is not only appropriate but essential to helping assure these data, fundamental to the program’s success, are able to be shared.

These efforts began this Fall as the whales continue their annual passes through Puget Sound. It couldn’t be more-timely with the arrival of two new male calves J-57 and J-58 as well as our cautious optimism around J-46’s impending birth.

Ultimately the success of the Quiet Sound Program requires getting timely and reliable sighting information to the Puget Sound Pilots, ferry and tugboat captains, the Coast Guard and Marine Exchange if we are to broadly operationalize the recommendations of the program. I’m also committed to helping integrate a Quiet Sound-like program into the Coast Guard’s robust vessel traffic system (VTS). We are fortunate to have the only international VTS in the country and the Canadian Coast Guard has just established a “whale desk” in its operations center.

This ongoing collaboration and outreach to other partners will be essential and is supported by the entire Seattle Port Commission and the Alliance. Fostering collaboration between these efforts is the top priority for our work moving forward.

The Port of Seattle, Port of Tacoma, and Alliance seed money is also intended to be used to seek matching support from grants, state and federal governments, businesses as well as in-kind contributions. I’m particularly appreciative by provisions for funding such programs Senator Cantwell has included in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which the Congress just overrode a presidential veto to pass. I’m also encouraged by the enthusiasm expressed to me about this effort by State legislators to date. The State ferry system is the largest contributor of underwater ship noise, making it essential the State contribute to the program’s success.

In order for our region to remain economically and ecologically vibrant with healthy communities, economic diversity, and a high quality of life, requires us to nurture the balance between urban life and the abundant, but fragile environment that surrounds us.

This is something we can’t take for granted and requires sustained and innovative efforts.

Through the Quiet Sound Program, we are making progress toward protecting our iconic orca and other whale species while fostering sustainable jobs of the future. I look forward to the next phase of our work with Maritime Blue and all our partners that make this possible.

We’ve come a long way in two years, and I feel very optimistic about our future, but we can’t lose this momentum.

We need to keep our hands on the tiller as well as your continued engagement and support on behalf of Puget Sound and all those dependent on it.

Fred Felleman, Vice President, Port of Seattle Commission

Photo credit: Copyright Fred Felleman

See the original post Here.



Subscribe to stay connected

« Older Entries

Next Entries »