Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (19 page)

The second effect was that the publicity around cruise ship pollution tipped the balance in favor of new taxes on cruise ship passengers. In 1999 voters in Juneau approved, with a 70-percent majority, a $5 head tax for each cruise passenger landing in the city.
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A similar tax had been defeated just three years earlier. The $5 head tax was the first time any port of call in an American state had imposed such a fee.
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The town of Haines followed suit with a 4-percent sales tax on shore excursions and onshore purchases. Many journalists suggested that the effort backfired when Royal Caribbean canceled future stops at the port. However, the reason for the cancellations was purely economic: its plea agreement with the uS government had disbarred Royal Caribbean, meaning that it could not enter into contracts with the federal government for five years. As such, it is effectively banned from Glacier Bay National Park. It goes to Hubbard Bay instead, which requires traveling farther. To visit Skagway (a financially lucrative stop), Hubbard Bay, and Haines, ships have to travel at higher speeds, which results in higher fuel costs. The income generated by stopping at Haines would not offset this additional expense.

In 2001 the town of Skagway considered imposing a higher sales tax during the summer months, but the initiative was defeated in city council. A citizen group called Responsible Cruising in Alaska tried to have an initiative placed on the 2002 statewide ballot to charge a head tax of $50 to $75 on cruise ship passengers, along with a corporate income tax and a 3 3-percent tax on onboard gambling. The initiative was put on hold in late 2001.

Shortly after, Alaska senator Rick Halford and Governor Tony Knowles individually proposed schemes for a head tax on all cruise passengers entering the state.
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In February 2002 the governor formally proposed to the state legislature a cruise passenger tax of $30 per head. A related story in a cruise industry trade publication indicated that there were “some assertions that the head tax is unconstitutional. In the event the head tax is struck down, his [Knowles’s] bill includes a provision that would instead levy a corporate income tax on the cruise industry.”
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The governor’s bill was sent to the Senate Transportation Committee but went no further during the 2002 legislative season.

Public Support for Monitoring and Enforcement

The third major effect of the Holland America and Royal Caribbean cases was an increased interest in monitoring cruise

ships, not just for oil pollution but also for sewage disposal and air pollution. The state Department of Environmental Conservation and the US Coast Guard launched a joint cruise ship initiative in December 1999.

The initiative began with meetings between the state, the Coast Guard, the EPA, members of the cruise industry, and representatives from environmental groups. The goal was to discuss the activities and operations of cruise ships and assess possible environmental issues. When the work groups realized there was little technical data to support cruise industry claims, they developed a scheme for sampling wastewater from the ships and for monitoring air emissions. The cruise lines’ participation in the scheme was voluntary. Thirteen of 24 ships refused to participate, choosing to go beyond the 12-mile legal boundary to dump raw sewage without monitoring and without limitations.

The results of monitoring during the summer of 2000 were, in the words of Alaska’s governor, “disgusting and disgraceful.” Seventy-nine of 80 ships’ effluent had levels of fecal coliform or total suspended solids that would be illegal on land — up to

100,000 times the federal standard. This was true of both black-water (waste from toilets) and graywater.
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As well, all samples indicated that “conventional pollutants” were part of the wastewater. According to the Juneau port commander for the Coast Guard, the results were so extreme that it might be necessary to consider possible design flaws and capacity issues with the Coast Guard-approved sewage treatment systems.
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The results of air-emission monitoring of air emissions were not impressive. The EPA had cited six cruise ship companies (involving 13 ships) for air pollution violations during the 1999 season, and in 2000 the situation had not improved. In August

2000 state investigators charged seven companies — Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Celebrity Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line, Carnival Cruise Line, World Explorer Cruise Line, and Crystal Cruises — for 11 violations of state smoke-opacity standards while their ships were docked at Juneau between mid-July and mid-August.

In a bid to repair its image, Princess Cruises announced in September 2000 that its ships would plug into Juneau’s power supply while in port instead of running their smoke-belching engines to generate electricity. The initiative, which required an investment of $4.5 million by the cruise line and $300,000 by the city, began in July 2001.

The Federal Government Responds

The initiative’s monitoring results led to Alaska’s Senator Frank Murkowski introducing federal legislation that regulated the dumping of raw sewage in a specific area of the Inside Passage: the Alexander Archipelago, including within the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. Passed in December 2000, the cruise ship operations bill extends protection to “doughnut holes” (defined by the state Department of Environmental Conservation as “small areas of the ocean within the Inside Passage that are more than three miles from the Alaska mainland and any islands”) where such disposal was common; these areas had previously been treated as being outside federal waters.
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The legislation also set standards for treated sewage and banned all discharges while ships were within one mile of shore.
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The Alaska Cruise Ship Initiative

Based on the results of the summer 2000 monitoring, in March 2001 Governor Knowles introduced legislation designed to strengthen state monitoring of the cruise industry’s waste disposal practices. Passed two months later, the legislation enforces state clean air and water standards for cruise ships, and also sets forth a fee of $1 per passenger to pay for pollution monitoring programs, inspections, and enforcement by state officials.

House Bill 260 (Commercial Passenger Vessel Regulation and Fees) passed Alaska’s House of Representatives on May 3, 2001, with a vote of 35 to three. However, it got held up by the senate’s transportation committee, where the chairperson not only warned that the act would not pass his committee before the session was adjourned, but also claimed that the measure was unfair because it would require smaller vessels to meet the same environmental standards as large cruise ships.

Five days later, after the legislature had adjourned for the summer, the governor called a special session for the bill to be properly considered. The special session began one month later and the bill was passed on June 20. It was signed by the governor on June 29 and took effect July 1, 2001.

Although the state law was not more stringent than existing federal law regarding the disposal of sewage or pollution from smokestack emissions, it provided three things:

1.    a verified program of sampling, testing, and reporting of wastewater and air discharges

2.    enforceable standards for what cruise ships may discharge in Alaska waters

3.    a requirement that the cruise ship industry pay the costs of the program.

ALASKA CRUISE SHIP INITIATIVE COMMERCIAL PASSENGER VESSEL ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLIANCE PROGRAM

Wastewater Discharge Standards

•
   Untreated Sewage:
Passenger vessels are prohibited from discharging untreated sewage, i.e. sewage that has not met all applicable federal processing standards and effluent limitation standards. This means that sewage must be processed through a properly operated and maintained marine sanitation device and meet the applicable effluent standards.

•
   Treated Sewage:
Sewage cannot be discharged if it has suspended solids greater than 150 milligrams per liter or a fecal coliform count greater than 200 colonies per 100 milliliters. Small vessels can delay compliance upon submission of a plan that provides interim protective measures.

•
   Graywater:
Graywater cannot be discharged if it has suspended solids greater than 150 milligrams per liter or a fecal coliform count greater than 200 colonies per 100 milliliters. Vessels can delay compliance upon submission of an interim plan.

•    DEC [Department of Environmental Conservation] can establish numeric and narrative standards by regulation for any other parameters for treated sewage and graywater, including chlorine, chemical oxygen demand, and biological oxygen demand.

Restrictions on Discharges

Large vessels may not discharge treated sewage or graywater unless the vessel is proceeding at a speed of not less than six knots and more than one nautical mile from shore, complies with effluent standards, and is not in a no-discharge zone. Small vessels are not subject to this provision. Large passenger vessels are excused from compliance if the discharges are proven to meet strict secondary treatment standards.
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Alaska became the first state with the authority to inspect ships and prosecute violators, and to regulate air pollution, trash disposal, and handling of hazardous waste and sewage. As such, Alaska’s Environmental Compliance Program reflects a basic lack of trust in the cruise industry’s respect for environmental regulations.

This lack of trust was reinforced even while the bill was still under consideration. In the first five weeks of the 2001 Alaska cruise season, four cruise ships were cited for violations of the US Clean Water Act.

•    On May 5, 2001, the
Norwegian Sky
discharged treated sewage in the Alexander Archipelago. Tests of the effluent showed a fecal coliform count 3,500 times the allowable federal standard and suspended solids 180 times the standard.
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•    A week later, on May 12, 2001, Holland America Line’s
Westerdam
accidentally discharged graywater while docked at Juneau. A valve that failed to close completely allowed about 100 gallons to flow into the harbor. A passerby who noticed an odd color and odor in the water reported the incident to the Coast Guard.

•    On June 6, 2001, Celebrity Cruises’
Mercury
was charged with discharging treated wastewater at Juneau. Although the ship had cutting-edge technology for treatment of wastewater, it hadn’t yet received approval to discharge in protected areas. Tests of the wastewater indicated that it was more acidic than permitted for discharging within a mile from shore.
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•    On June 18, 2001, Royal Caribbean’s
Rhapsody of the Seas
illegally discharged 200 gallons of graywater into Juneau’s harbor while wastewater was being transferred to a holding tank. But the holding tank was full, so wastewater was released through an overboard discharge valve. The
Juneau Empire.,
in its report of the incident, quotes Nancy Wheatley, a senior vice-president for Royal Caribbean, as stating: “they were using too many pumps, pumping it too fast, and they didn’t shut the pumps off quite fast enough. They got essentially a splash of gray water out the air vent.... It should not have happened and we’re sorry it did.”
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Monitoring had been ongoing on a voluntary basis before the

legislation passed into law; it increased after July 1. For an indication of the results reported by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation at the end of the summer 2001, see the textbox entitled “Interim Cruise Ship Sampling Data Summary” (page 110).

Glacier Bay

A second issue of interest to Alaskans, and to others living outside the state, is the preservation of Glacier Bay National Park. Although the park is under federal jurisdiction, it is within Alaska’s boundaries and reflects the state’s environmental politics. The main issue relates to the number of cruise ships permitted to enter Glacier Bay.