WASHINGTON — The government yesterday recommended a speed limit for commercial ships along the Atlantic coast, where collisions with the endangered right whale threaten its existence.
About 300-400 of the whales are left in the wild, and they migrate annually between their southeastern Atlantic breeding grounds to feeding areas off the Massachusetts coast, intersecting busy shipping lanes.
The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday the new limit, the first to be instituted on the East Coast for a marine creature, was needed to assure its survival. The rule would set a speed limit of 11.5 miles per hour (10 knots) within 23 miles (20 nautical miles) of major mid-Atlantic ports and throughout the whale's breeding and feeding areas. The new regulation would cover ships 65 feet or longer and expire in five years if not renewed. Boats from federal agencies would be exempt.
"The bottom line is that this critically endangered species needs our help," said retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, the agency's administrator.
But the latest version of the so-called ship strike regulation differs from a draft released more than a year ago that was delayed in part because of objections from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and White House economists over the accuracy of the science linking ship speed to whale deaths.
The option selected yesterday and released with an 850-page analysis of its environmental and economic impacts is narrower than the 34-mile-wide coastal speed zone first proposed for the mid-Atlantic coast by marine scientists in June 2006.
The agency officials said the reduced area still covered 83 percent of all right whale sightings.
