However, drop a hydrophone into those same waters to listen to the sounds in which those whales swim, socialize, and hunt, and the picture changes dramatically. There will be the whales, all talking in their distinct Southern Resident dialect to each other and echolocating for fish. There will be the whale-watching boats, whose engines are mostly short-lived whines and low-level thrums. And then there will be the large cargo ships. Because sound travels so well in water, even the quietest of these will throw up 100 decibels of noise across miles of seawater, and that noise dominates everything within the soundscape. The loudest of them, often older ships with rusty or warped screws, will make noise as loud as 130 decibels, worse than a chainsaw or a turbo-fan aircraft at takeoff.
Val Veirs, a retired physics professor, listens to all this racket, and monitors and records it, with an array of hydrophones he has set up off his waterfront home on the western side of San Juan Island. What he and his fellow scientists (including his son Scott) have found is that killer whales often respond to increased ship noise by vocalizing more loudly, depending on how loud the passing ships are. It is also not uncommon for whales to fall completely silent when passing ships throw up that overwhelming thrum in the water.
According to Veirs, it is inevitable that these noise levels are going to affect orcas, particularly their abilities to communicate and hunt, both of which are closely connected to sound. The noise is well known as an issue for orcas and has been studied many years by different scientists. Veirs, unlike Dave Bain, does not think the shipping noise is inconsequential simply because it is at a lower frequency than the orcas’ communications bandwidths. Rather the opposite: Veirs believes the big ships are a significantly greater problem for the whales, primarily because the noise is so loud, so pervasive, and so persistent.
“A whale that makes a 165-decibel call can probably be heard by another whale that’s up to a kilometer or so away, under some average conditions,” Veirs says. “Under quiet conditions, it could be much farther. And under noisy conditions, much less. So if we say that the average background is about 100 decibels, then around 1 or 2 kilometers is the kind of maximum range you could imagine orcas could communicate. They might do better by increasing their volume, saying, ‘Dammit, I’m talking to you over here!’ But that gives you a handle on what the range might be for orca vocalization.
“Echolocation is much, much less because there’s a huge loss in the echo. There’s a 20- or 30-dB loss in bouncing your sound off the fish. So the range at which you can detect your echo is also significantly affected by the amount of underwater noise. So if you go to 125 decibels, which is loud for a ship—but there are 5 percent that go by that are at least that loud—then the distance that this 165-decibel sound could be heard is brought down to about 100 meters. And of course if the whale swims closer to the ship, the sounds are louder, and the distance that they can communicate is presumably even less.”
Veirs says the ship noise potential for all this traffic worries him when it comes to the whales. “Right now, about 60 percent of the time, there’s no ship within hearing range,” he says. “But if you put a couple thousand more ships per year in there, it seems to me you’ll end up with about 30 percent of the time instead of 60 percent of the time that the whales are able to communicate without interference from vessel noise.”
And even more hair-raising is the knowledge that, if all goes according to the plan of the oil industry, increasingly among those ships will be large tankers bearing tar-sands oil.
• • •
Beginning in early 2014, energy companies started lobbying the Canadian government for the right to ship large quantities of tar-sands oil down the same path these whales take in the summertime. If they win approval, the oil will be carried in an endless parade of noisy oil tankers, negotiating the frequently treacherous currents and hard-right angles of the San Juan/Gulf Islands archipelago alongside threatened orca pods, and what the noise begins, a spill could finish, dooming these orcas to extinction in a few short years.
“Because the whales tend to group up, a catastrophic event such as a spill or a disease outbreak or something like that has the single largest potential to extirpate the population,” says Fred Felleman of Seattle, a marine traffic consultant and longtime whale researcher and activist. “We’re looking at putting at risk every primary resource that keeps resident whales resident. One significant spill in any one of those areas is more than enough to break the back on a very, very delicate camel.”
The placid Salish Sea waters in which the orcas’ battle for survival is being played out may seem a long way from Alberta where tar sands are mined, but they are inextricably linked by a pipeline carrying something called dilbit. It begins as a tarry, sludge-like form of petroleum known as bitumen that is extracted from sandstone ore in the Athabasca oil-sands region. Gasoline and other oil products are made from bitumen at refineries. However, there are no refineries in Canada capable of handling it. So the bitumen is diluted (hence “dilbit”) with a concoction of highly volatile chemicals into a more fluid form that can be transported by pipeline and then by ship to refineries elsewhere. At least, that’s the plan in Vancouver.
Unlike Keystone XL, the more notorious project to transport dilbit from Alberta by pipeline straight to refineries in Texas and the center of an ongoing environmental controversy in Washington, D.C., the Vancouver plan does not cross American soil at all. Rather, the owners of the already-existing Trans Mountain pipeline, that runs from Edmonton, Alberta, to Burnaby, just east of Vancouver, want to expand and upgrade it, increasing its capacity so that large quantities of dilbit can be transported from Alberta to Vancouver, then pumped into waiting ships and transported to various refineries in the United States and elsewhere.
It may surprise most people in the Northwest to learn that Vancouver has become an oil port, not to mention that Haro Strait has become the alternative route to the tar-sands pipeline so many are fighting in the Midwest. The change occurred in 2006 with very little fanfare, when Kinder Morgan, the Houston-based company that owns the Trans Mountain pipeline, began regularly loading dilbit into ships (about five per month) at Westridge Marine Terminal in Vancouver. Up until then, the pipeline had almost solely carried petroleum products headed for use in Vancouver.
Kinder Morgan’s long-term expansion plans include tripling the capacity of the pipeline, which would lead to a massive increase in both the amount of dilbit flowing out of the terminal at Westridge and the number of ships carrying it. If the company’s plans are approved by the Canadian Cabinet (and the likely legal challenges fail), Vancouver will see a leap from 60 crude-carrying ships a year to 420 of them. All of these ships can only pass one way en route to the open sea: through Haro Strait, along the American border, and right through the summer hunting grounds of the Southern Resident orcas. Nor is that the entire picture. Overall, the increase in oil-bearing ships represents only about 15 percent of the proposed overall increase in shipping, which includes more container and coal-bearing ships through Haro Strait.
Then there is the controversial proposal to turn Cherry Point, near Bellingham, into a major port for exporting coal brought there by train. The ships coming in and out of that port do not travel through Haro Strait, but rather through Rosario Strait, a narrower and even more convoluted path that also happens to be a regular part of the orcas’ circuit-like route.
All of which means, other risks aside, that the waters of the Salish Sea are going to be very, very noisy. However, while a massive increase in ship noise poses a kind of existential threat to the Southern Residents insofar as it may interfere with their ability to find and eat salmon, it pales in comparison to the lethal potential of a possible oil spill in Haro Strait while the whales are present. In Prince William Sound, for example, nearly a third of the resident orcas who were exposed to the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989 wound up dying within the year. One pod of transients was doomed to extinction by the event, but the Alaskan resident whales’ numbers
were strong enough to eventually rebound from the losses, as they appear to be doing now.
The Southern Residents, however, would not be so fortunate if they lost a third of their population. “The effects would be devastating,” says Ken Balcomb. “It would depend, of course, on whether the whales were in the vicinity when the spill occurred.”
While the fiercer weather that might precipitate a shipwreck and lead to a spill would likely hit in winter when the whales aren’t around as much, the impact would still linger. Balcomb observes: “Even then the toxins would be in the ecosystem for a long, long time, and that would be the coup de grace. And if they were present, it would pretty much doom whatever pods were in the vicinity.”
A spill from a tanker carrying tar-sands oil would be especially lethal. Dilbit does not behave like ordinary crude oil. The dilutants, which are highly toxic and extremely explosive, tend to separate very quickly from the bitumen, which means that the air surrounding the spill will be filled with a cloud of highly toxic and flammable gases. Any air-breathing mammals in the vicinity, including oil-response personnel, nearby residents, and of course killer whales, who are exposed to those gases will almost certainly incur serious lung damage if not an agonizing death.
Compounding the fears of a spill is the reality that government officials in the Northwest on both sides of the border are ill prepared for an oil spill if one were to occur, particularly one involving dilbit, to which the current oil-response units simply don’t have the equipment to properly respond. (Among its many dangerous characteristics, dilbit is likely to sink to the bottom of the sea immediately, while most oil-boom and response equipment is geared toward floating crude petroleum.)
“It’s always been a question, if there were a really serious spill out here, would the federal government be in any sense equipped to deal with the protection of critical resources,” says Karen Wristen, executive director of the Living Oceans Foundation in Vancouver, which is organizing to combat the oil-facility expansion. “And the answer to that is no, they never were.”
Making the picture especially gloomy is that the likelihood of a spill increases dramatically in the waters of the Salish Sea as the number of ships starts to climb. One study, by a George Washington University professor who specializes in shipping-traffic risk assessment, found that if all of the proposed projects for increasing ship traffic through Haro and Rosario straits come to pass, the likelihood of a collision by the year 2025 increases by 89 percent. The possibility of “oil flow” or a spill increases over 70 percent. In other words, if all these plans are put into action, it likely is a matter of when, not if, there will be an oil spill in these waters.
Wristen fears the broad impact on the planned stream of oil-laden ships, especially given the likelihood of a spill. “It hugely increases the risk to the whales, and we are so completely unprepared to deal with it,” she says. “It would devastate the whole ecosystem, and it would take a pretty hard toll on the people at the top of it, as well, the human beings and their economy. There’s so much to be lost in the Salish Sea.”
Washington State wildlife officials are aware of the possibility of an oil spill in the interim. Don Noviello of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife says state officials have prepared plans to deal with the whales in the event of a spill emergency. Those plans include using underwater bells to drive the whales away, as well as other measures such as seal bombs, although he acknowledges that, while they have run drills testing their equipment, none of these measures has been tested in the presence of whales.
Kinder Morgan and Trans Mountain officials submitted their final proposal for the expansion in December 2013, but the project has inspired large protests and remains in hot dispute, so the approval process by the Canadian Cabinet has been dragged down. The political pressure to approve the expansion will be intense, especially as the fight over the Keystone pipeline drags on and the pressure builds for a means to bring the tar-sands oil to market. While Canada’s federal government has been very vocal in support of pipeline development in the West, the opposition is also likely to be intense, especially in British Columbia, where First Nations communities and environmentalists are already up in arms, mostly about the risks posed by pipeline spills along the route to Vancouver.
For its part, the U.S. government in the form of the National Marine Fisheries Service, which listed the Southern Residents as endangered in 2005, noting at the time that a catastrophic oil spill could doom them, says it is prepared to respond to such an emergency, but it is remaining mum on the issue of increased vessel noise and higher spill risk from the new Canadian projects as well as the Bellingham coal port. Pipeline and port officials insist that improvements in navigation and spill response will keep wildlife in the shipping lanes safe. Environmentalists are deeply skeptical.
“We’ve already got a lot of environmental problems that are slowly driving these whales to extinction,” says Ken Balcomb. “I look at those 400 or so ships that they plan to run through here, and it’s just another 400 of the thousand cuts that the resident whales suffer. Eventually, they add up.”
Keiko at his new home at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in 1996.
CHAPTER Eight
Freeing Willies
THE SCENE COULD HAVE BEEN THE BIG CLIMAX IN A MOVIE ABOUT alien landings: a surreal setting in a high-tech facility, the black night split by spotlights, all shining on the big creature suspended in the air, a horde of humans watching with bated breath. This, however, was real life. The creature, Keiko, the movie-star killer whale, was arriving at his new $8 million home.
The horde of media people who had descended on the little seaside tourist town of Newport, Oregon, on January 7, 1996, turned on their klieg lights as the darkness deepened, in order to better catch on video for a waiting worldwide audience the saga of the star of Free Willy.
The big six-ton orca, his famous dorsal fin flopped over the side of the white sling, glistened black and white as he dangled from a giant crane. The crowd of well-wishers gathered on the private property next to the aquarium chanted his name.
When the crane carried the whale across the edge of the new state-of-the-art pool, the water in his full view for the first time, he chuffed, sending a spout of fine steam into the air. Then he sounded, once, that trademark orca whistle: “Ooooeee!”
Behind the new pool, in the aquarium’s other marine mammal habitats, there arose a sudden din: seals, barking loudly, as if protesting their new neighbor’s arrival. Some orcas do, after all, eat seals in the wild.
Those were the only dissenting voices to be heard. Outside, the crowd kept chanting and applauding. Once Keiko was suspended a few feet above the pool, his trainers and veterinarians went to work, drawing final blood samples and checking the whale’s responses after more than 20 hours in the sling as he was flown by airplane from Mexico City.
The crowd grew restless, and so did the orca. He began flicking his flukes, knocking one trainer off his feet in the process. Finally they gave the signal and dropped him slowly, fully into the water. A trainer hopped on his back to help him move off the sling, and the orca tossed him off and dove into his deep new waters. It was his first step toward freedom, a return to the wild, truly a first for a captive whale.
The crowd cheered. Even the normally stoic media people applauded. Soon Keiko was responding to the trainer’s beckon—a hand splashed in the water, just as the boy in Free Willy did—and munching happily on the fish they tossed him. It was a scene right out of the movies. An anthemic soundtrack would have fit right in, which would be appropriate, considering that this was a scene born of the movies, created by and paid for by the movies.
The only thing it lacked was a happy ending.
• • •
Free Willy is slightly odd, as family movies go, in a lot of ways. The most obvious is that the child protagonist is not a typical moppet from the suburbs, which is generally the starting point of most Hollywood kids’ films. Jesse, played by Jason James Richter,
is a troubled street kid who was abandoned by his mother and is having trouble fitting with anyone, including his new foster family. He meets Willy, the titular orca played by Keiko, after vandalizing the whale’s tank.
It’s also not a very corporate-friendly movie. The villains of the movie are the aquarium’s owners, who can’t get the unhappy whale to perform and finally decide to let him die in an intentional “accident” so they can collect the insurance money. At this point, of course, Jesse and friends intervene, setting up the climactic and now-iconic scene in which Willy leaps over a seawall to freedom and a reunion with his family. The indelible message of the film is that captivity is bad for orcas and exists only to make money for aquarium owners.
No doubt this villainous portrayal of marine-park owners, as well as the storyline depicting the freeing of a captive orca, had a lot to do with why, when the film’s producers first approached officials at parks such as SeaWorld and the Miami Seaquarium, they were turned away. They finally succeeded with a park in Mexico City called Reino Aventura, which owned a 16-year-old orca taken from Icelandic waters in 1979 when he was three.
Originally dubbed “Sigi” at his first human home in a Reykjavik aquarium, he was renamed “Keiko,” a Japanese name meaning “lucky one,” when he was sold in 1982 to Marineland in Ontario. Three years later, having developed lesions and showing signs of poor health, he was shipped off to Mexico City. Reino Aventura was originally designed as a dolphin facility, and so the tank in which Keiko was kept was unnaturally small and shallow; when he floated at the surface, his flukes would brush the pool’s bottom. His only company was the dolphins owned by the park. He languished there, his lesions and his health worsening; his strength was so poor, he could only just half-breach out of the water. He chewed on the side of the tank and wore down his teeth. It seemed clear it would only be a matter of time for the whale.
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