Whale permit for Ketchikan bridge counts down to the single animal

Federal regulators have cleared the state transportation department to disturb humpback whales while replacing the Ward Creek Bridge in Ketchikan, under a permit that budgets the disturbance one whale at a time.

The National Marine Fisheries Service issued two authorizations covering in-water construction across two seasons, May 2028 through April 2030. They allow harassment only, meaning behavioral disruption, not killing or injury. After Endangered Species Act consultation, the agency raised the second year's limit for the Hawai'i humpback stock from 62 whales to 63, and cut the limit for the Mexico-North Pacific stock from 2 to 1. The Mexico population is listed as threatened.

NMFS found the work would have a negligible impact, the threshold the Marine Mammal Protection Act requires, and its biological opinion concluded the project is unlikely to jeopardize the threatened population or its critical habitat. The law separately bars permits that would meaningfully cut marine mammals off from subsistence users, which gives coastal and Alaska Native communities standing in decisions like this one.

Nobody commented. The proposal published May 11 and drew no substantive response.

It is the third such permit for an Alaska project in recent weeks. Alaska News covered authorizations for Juneau's Áak'w Landing cruise dock and Kodiak's St. Herman Harbor rebuild, neither of which drew comment either.

How to read that pattern is contested. Writing in the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Cody Carbaugh and Elizabeth Rutland argued that permits issued project by project, each found negligible on its own terms, can collectively undercut conservation goals. The competing reading is that the pattern shows the process working as designed: small public-works projects with genuinely minor effects, reviewed and cleared without incident.