Posted on: Tuesday, May 29, 2001

Tourism Talk
There's a whirlpool of ignorance about ship waste

By Michele Kayal
Advertiser Staff Writer

It's a fact that what's legal is not always right.

It's legal to dump raw sewage — essentially the fetid mess that builds up in your toilet — into the fragile waters that separate Hawai'i's islands.

Can this be right?

It's also legal to ditch so-called "treated" waste out there. But recent tests by the state of Alaska show that "treated" sewage can be almost as filthy as the raw stuff.

The cruise lines say they're not emptying their showers and toilets into Hawai'i's whale sanctuary. And that even if they were, it wouldn't have any impact.

The currents, they say, would wash the sludge away, presumably to the oceans of some other destination.

But we don't know.

We don't know a lot of things:

• We don't know whether putrid effluent really is entering our waters. It's legal, so no one tracks it.

• We don't know what rules really apply to the cruise industry, and how they're supposed to be enforced.

• We don't know when the last incident of note took place.

• And, in many cases, we don't even know who's in charge of knowing.

At least one official responsible for enforcing clean-water issues didn't know that state law bans waste disposal within three miles of the coast. Apparently the state's lawmakers also don't know about the law, or at least don't understand it.

One state representative sponsored a bill this past session that would have laid down essentially the same ban, but singled out cruise ships. When queried, he could not explain the difference between his bill and existing law, because, he said, he wasn't clear on what the existing law does.

Cruise executives say they would happily oblige their host ports by submitting to the same tests performed in Alaska. They acknowledge that their on-board waste systems are not performing as should be expected, and say they are spending millions to replace the systems.

But until then, they say, testers should expect the same results — i.e., really, really, dirty stuff.

So why not do it? It would offer some hard, baseline information on the kind of sewage supposedly not being dumped in Hawaiian seas. And as the growing number of luxury vessels send the state's tourism industry into uncharted waters, information — any and all of it — might come in handy.

The state, to its credit, has begun trying to untangle the mess and whittle down the list of things we don't know. But time is running out.

By the end of the year, three ships will call Hawai'i home. By 2004, there will be five of them, unless American Classic Voyages takes the financially struggling Independence out of service.

Norwegian Cruise Line, which will base its 965-foot super-luxury Star here in December, has caught the attention of the federal prosecutor's office in Florida that has gone after other cruise lines. Its Norwegian Sky became the first ship investigated under new Alaska laws on wastewater disposal. That ship will visit Hawai'i six times this year.

But we don't know whether the same problems found in Alaska exist here.

Add that one to the list.

Michele Kayal is The Advertiser's tourism reporter. She can be reached by e-mail at mkayal@honoluluadvertiser.com