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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, June 3, 2001

Boom in cruising has some worried about environment

By Michele Kayal
Advertiser Staff Writer

The major cruise company whose newest luxury vessel is soon to call Hawai'i home has made national headlines in the past month. An environmental violation launched a federal inquiry, safety and mechanical problems interrupted cruises, and shoddy repairs led the Coast Guard to yank operating permits for one the company's ships.

Norwegian Cruise Line's new 2,200-passenger Star will be based here permanently in December. Some environmentalists are concerned about an increase in cruises and question whether monitoring systems are strong enough.

Norwegian Cruise Line

Norwegian Cruise Line's chief executive officer Colin Veitch says he does not expect the same problems to surface when the company permanently bases its brand-new, 2,200-passenger Star here in December, and Coast Guard inspectors say they see no alarming pattern to the incidents. But the coming boom in Hawai'i's cruise business has already raised concern among some enforcement officials and environmentalists, who question whether the monitoring systems in place are strong enough.

When the Star arrives, it will become the third ship calling every week at Island ports, increasing the Coast Guard's regular workload by a third. With the addition of the Star, the total number of port calls scheduled in Honolulu for 2002 will increase about 25 percent over this year, but the staff and budget of local authorities handling them will remain the same.

Norwegian has caught the attention of Coast Guard officials in three different ports in the past four weeks.

In Miami, inspectors last week took the extremely unusual step of pulling the safety certification on the company's Norway after they found more than 100 leaks in the ship's sprinkler system patched with rubber swatches and hose clamps. The Coast Guard restored the ship's safety clearance late Friday after inspecting the repairs, allowing the ship to set off on a cruise scheduled for today.

A week earlier, the company's Sky, which will visit Hawai'i six times this year, listed violently when its autopilot suddenly disengaged, throwing passengers to the floor. The same ship also became the first investigated under a new Alaska environmental law after it discharged inadequately treated sewage into waters there in early May.

Norwegian's Veitch says the string of bad luck is no more than that. The diverse problems do not indicate systemic failure at Norwegian, he says, and won't follow the company to Hawai'i.

"It's unfortunate that it happens all at one moment," he said. "We've had nothing of this sort for the past 18 months. And they are quite unrelated instances, so I would at the moment point to nothing more than coincidence."

Veitch said the Alaska situation was the result of a human error for which the chief engineer has since been fired. He would not comment on the Coast Guard proceedings in Miami, which were in progress last week as he spoke, but emphasized that Norwegian has extensive safety policies.

Star of the Norwegian Cruise Line
 •  The new $400 million, 91,000-ton Norwegian Star will be based in Honolulu starting in December.
 •  It's now under construction in Germany.
 •  It will be Norwegian Cruise Line's largest ship, accommodating 2,200 passengers and 1,100 crew members.
 •  It will be Norwegian Cruise Line's fastest ship, cruising at a maximum speed of 25 knots.
 •  The 15-deck ship is being built at the maximum size to fit through the Panama Canal.
 •  It will include 36 suites, 372 standard staterooms with balconies and an entire deck of 107 minisuites with balconies.
 •  The Norwegian Star's maiden voyage is Dec. 16.
 •  Before that voyage, Norwegian Cruise Line will bring the ship to Miami and Los Angeles for introductory festivities.

Source: Norwegian Cruise Line

Since new management took over about a year ago, he said, the company has spent "considerably more money" on maintenance, training and other issues.

"Any one of these incidents is of grave concern to us," he said. "Clearly, we want to look at our internal procedures to see if they're good enough, and then at the individuals involved. If there are lessons to learn, then we learn them. If there are individuals involved, as with the Alaska (sewage), then we approach that in the way you'd expect.

"I'm not happy with it. But I don't have any reason to believe that the systems that have served us well for a long time have suddenly failed."

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Ron LaBrec in Miami also said he did not see a pattern to the events and emphasized that they resulted from three different types of issues.

Coast Guard officials in Hawai'i are aware of the recent Norwegian incidents at other ports but are not tracking them closely, said Lt. Cmdr. Richard Hunt, chief of the inspection department at Honolulu's Marine Safety Office.

"Things get shared among all the Coast Guard pretty rapidly," he said. "We will kind of keep ourselves aware of (those other incidents), but it doesn't mean they're going to be subject to increased scrutiny."

But some officials and environmentalists have begun to question whether Hawai'i has an effective system for monitoring the cruise lines.

State and federal laws often overlap, and authority for enforcing the laws is split between at least three different state agencies, as well as the Coast Guard. In addition, none of the state laws applies to cruise ships specifically, and state officials say their authority also is not clearly defined when it comes to cruise ships.

"We have no involvement with cruise ships unless they spill something," said Gary Gill, Hawai'i's deputy director for environmental health, which oversees some clean water, waste management, and other environmental laws that could potentially apply to cruise ships. "That's the whole crux of the potential problem. You have a thousand cruise ships that land here tomorrow, and under the existing legal framework, there's no way the Department of Health can regulate or monitor that any differently than we do now. It's very minimal."

A meeting late last month between the Coast Guard and representatives of the state departments of Transportation, Health, and Land and Natural Resources produced no plan of action, but attendees said it helped clarify what each division does.

Despite the burgeoning number of port calls scheduled in the Islands — more than 200 in Honolulu alone for 2002, compared with 150 in 2001 — the Coast Guard's inspection staff and budget will remain the same.

"Throughout the whole Coast Guard our budgets were cut this year, and it just flows on downhill," Hunt said. "I don't expect to see any increase in our funding because of a few extra cruise ship arrivals, and I definitely won't be getting extra bodies."

Hunt's inspection department operates on a $57,000 annual budget that covers travel and supplies. His 22 staff members include five who are qualified to inspect cruise ships, but they are also responsible for looking at freighters, tankers and other U.S.- and foreign-flagged vessels that come in, Hunt said.

The inspectors' workload consists of spot checks to make sure ships' waste processors meet federal requirements, any special inspections required on ships that may be having problems, and mandatory quarterly reviews whenever a cruise ship pulls in that is due for one.

Some environmentalists say they are concerned generally with tourism growth in Hawai'i, especially its implications for stress on natural resources and the potential introduction of alien species. The cruise ships are another vehicle for these problems, they say, as well as a potential source of pollution.

"When it comes to immediate pollution issues, like with the Alaska case and other dumping, the problem is there are so many jurisdictional issues, the response has been, 'Let the cruise industry do voluntary compliance, and cross our fingers and hope for the best,' " said Jeff Mikulina, director of Sierra Club's Hawai'i Chapter.

"We hope (the authorities) would be looking at immediate impacts on Hawai'i and who's going to take control. And whether we're going to entrust the cruise industry to do its best."