Court Opinion

ID: 9822411
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 09:03:10.236069+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:10:28.935965
License: Public Domain

CARR, Senior District Judge,
dissenting:
I agree that San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace v. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 449 F.3d 1016 (9th Cir.2006), required the Federal Defendants to address the environmental consequences of a possible terrorist attack on the San Diego Navy Broadway Complex. But I respectfully dissent from the majority’s determination that the Federal Defendants adequately addressed those consequences.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service determined there was “no known specific threat” of a terrorist attack at the Complex. For that reason, the Federal Defendants deemed the risk of such attacks “too speculative, remote and removed from the environmental effects of the proposed action to merit further analysis[.]” •
That reasoning is deeply flawed, as the majority rightly observes. Mothers for Peace makes clear that “[t]he numeric probability of a specific attack is not re-. quired in order to assess likely modes of attack, weapons, and vulnerabilities of a facility, and the possible impact of each of these on the physical environment[J” 449 F.3d at 1031.
What is more, the Federal Defendants have not ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack at the Complex. Cf Ground Zero Ctr. for Non-Violent Action v. U.S. Dep’t of the Navy, 383 F.3d 1082 (9th Cir.2004) (Navy not required to consider environmental impact of accidental missile explosion, where Navy determined risk of such explosion “is between one in 100 million and one in 100 trillion”). Rather, they have acknowledged the “significant” risk of terrorism in the continental United States and identified “a wide variety of attack methods” terrorists are likely to employ. Accordingly, the Federal Defendants could have, and should have, considered the environmental impact of at least a few attack scenarios at the Complex.
I am mindful that the Federal Defendants revised the Environmental Assessment after receiving public comments about- a potential terrorist attack at- the Complex. But those revisions only strengthened the Complex’s defenses against a potential terrorist attack; they did not assess” the ■ likely environmental impact of such an attack.
For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.