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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, February 28, 2005

Costs tallied amid coral reef devastation

 •  Damage to coastal areas costly

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer

Teams of divers will continue, for at least two more weeks, to haul buckets of cement to the ocean floor off Barbers Point, to try to stick living coral heads back to the bottom after they were ripped free when a 555-foot bulk carrier ran aground.

Divers use a bucket of cement to create a "bed" for a broken coral head. The coral will be tipped into place atop the cement and should recover from being broken loose in the Cape Flattery grounding.

Photo courtesy NOAA Fisheries, Pacific Islands Regional Office

Meanwhile, state and federal officials — as well as representatives of the ship's owners — are beginning the process of tallying up the costs and figuring out who will pay.

"Please don't let the taxpayers get bagged with this bill," said Roy Echiverri, a former 'Aiea resident who now lives in Idaho. He cited the amount of the damage, the cost of the coral head work and the years of scientific monitoring required.

"We need to ensure that the owners pick up every cent of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars that will be required both now and for years to come. There has to be a significant deterrent to minimize recurrence," said Echiverri, a citizen who expressed his opinion in an e-mail to The Advertiser.

While the numbers are unlikely to be settled for two or three years, the principle that shippers pay for damage to coastal areas is well established, and representatives for the Cape Flattery's owners say they'll do their part.

The Cape Flattery is managed by the Hong Kong firm Pacific Basin Shipping HK Ltd., and its representatives have been involved in the recovery from the beginning, participating in a federal-state-private "unified command" that oversaw the removal of the ship.

Company representative Jim Lawrence, who flew from his New York home to Hawai'i during the removal effort, said the firm intends to continue working with local and federal authorities to do what's right.

"I think the process is pretty well structured, pretty formal, and we'll work within that structure. Our goal is to come to a favorable conclusion. We're there to do exactly the right thing," he said.

The big ship went aground Feb. 2 on the reef east of the entrance to Kalaeloa Barbers Point Harbor. Its bow was on a section of hard reef in 20 to 30 feet of water, while the stern was hanging out over a rugged shelf favored by green sea turtles for resting.

When initial attempts to move the ship failed, the ship pumped on ballast water to increase its stability and tugboats held the bulk carrier firm — both to keep it from damaging the reef, and to keep the reef from ripping open the hull and possibly creating a worse problem with fuel or cargo spills.

The Hong Kong-flagged vessel carried a cargo of dry cement. Ultimately, most of the ship's 128,000 gallons of fuel and some of its 27,100 metric tons of powdered cement were offloaded to lighten the ship. Some of that cement, however, spilled to harden on top of sections of reef.

The Cape Flattery came free after eight days, and dive teams discovered that the area damaged by anchors and tugboat cables was far more extensive than the reef section actually crushed by the ship's hull.

State and federal divers, sometimes assisted by divers hired by the ship's owners, identified the extent of the impact to be as much 1,000 yards by about 300 yards, in water 20 to 70 feet deep. The reef was crushed under the ship's hull, suffering less damage at the distant ends of the identified impact region, but throughout the area, there were examples of coral communities torn up and big coral heads toppled, apparently from heavy tugboat cables sweeping across the bottom.

The state and federal governments regularly conduct investigations and collect settlements involving foreign-owned shipping.

The U.S. Coast Guard is conducting its own investigation into the grounding and has still not come to any conclusions about how or why it happened, said Chief Marshalena Delaney, of the 14th District public affairs office. The Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office was able to interview the Cape Flattery's crew before the ship left O'ahu, she said. She could not estimate how long the investigation would take.

One of the issues that has not been answered is whether the ship had a local pilot aboard, as most large vessels do when they come into or leave a Honolulu port. A pilot is a qualified captain with intimate knowledge of conditions in local waters.

The state of Hawai'i is also looking into the case, and could approach it from several angles. The state can bring a claim under state law for damage to submerged lands, and can also claim damages under the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990, even though there was no oil spill in the Cape Flattery case. The act can be put into effect for damages caused during the removal of a ship from a reef.

Deputy State Attorney General Kathleen Ho would say only that the state is "working with the other natural resource trustees" in the case. They include the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, state Department of Health, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service and others.

Most recent cases involving ship groundings or oil spills have not resulted in court trials, but rather negotiated agreements between government parties and the owners of the ships, which are overseen by the federal courts. These discussions result in formal "consent decrees."

While the investigation and negotiations proceed, dive teams have now cemented more than 100 live coral heads back to the sea floor, said Dave Gulko, coral reef specialist with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

One of the next questions is what to do with large chunks of dead coral. Leaving them in place is not an option, since they would roll around in the next big ocean swell from the west, and collide with and damage living corals. The options are to remove them from the water altogether, take them into deeper water where they won't endanger the reef, or cement them to the bottom.

"Even though they're dead, they create a lot of three-dimensional habitat for marine life," he said.

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.

• • •

DAMAGE TO COASTAL AREAS COSTLY

Government agencies have the legal muscle to require payment from firms responsible for damage to the near-shore marine environment, such as the reef damage from the Feb. 2 grounding of the ship Cape Flattery.

Here are some examples:

• The 443-foot freighter Elpis, operated by E.F.H.I. Compania Naviera and E.D.F. MAN (Shipping), ran aground near Key Largo in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary on Nov. 11, 1989, damaging or destroying three-quarters of an acre of coral reef. The ship's owners paid a settlement of $2.4 million. Reef restoration experts used suction pumps to remove debris, used giant limestone boulders from on and off the site to fill holes created by the grounding, and transplanted marine life "to enhance natural recovery rates."

• On May 15, 1996, a spill from a pipeline dumped oil into O'ahu's Waiau Stream and contaminated as much as 2,000 acres of Pearl Harbor. Chevron, now ChevronTexaco, in 1999 agreed to pay restoration costs and fines of $3.25 million to compensate for the environmental damage. Of the total, about half was used for restoration and half for renovation of the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

• The 325-foot container ship Fortuna Reefer, operated by the Thai firm Rama Shipping Co., ran up on the fringing reef of Isla Mora in Puerto Rico July 24, 1997. The owners settled for $1.25 million. An emergency restoration was undertaken to save a field of broken elkhorn corals, many of which were laying in the sand smothering. The damage area covered 6.8 acres. In this case, biologists used stainless-steel wire and nails to reattach broken corals.

• Tesoro Hawai'i on Aug. 24, 1998, spilled 4,900 gallons of oil from a Barbers Point mooring as the result of a hose failure between shore and the tanker Oversea New York. The thick oil drifted to beaches on O'ahu and Kaua'i and contaminated dozens of birds at sea, some of which died. Tesoro agreed to pay $700,000 in fines, compensation and habitat improvement costs, which included projects to protect seabirds and a massive cleanup of nets, ropes and other debris washed up on Kaua'i's shores. That's on top of the firm's estimate of more than $2 million in direct cleanup costs within the first month after the spill.

• On Sept. 26, 1998, the Liberian-flagged ship Command, operated by Pearl Shipping Corp. and Anax International Agencies, spilled 3,000 gallons of oil off San Francisco and San Mateo, Calif., oiling seabirds and 15 miles of beaches. Among the birds damaged were numerous California brown pelicans and marbled murrelets, both of which are endangered species. The firm agreed to pay civil damages of $5.5 million.

Sources: NOAA Damage Assessment and Restoration Program, Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuge, state of Hawai'i