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Ballast Water Check Ups

Ninety percent of vessels entering California ports complied with the state's new ballast water management laws, according to an annual review. The new state law, which went into effect January 2000, requires ships to conduct a mid-ocean exchange of ballast water before entering a California port, or else to keep their ballast on board, in order to prevent invasions of clams, worms and other aquatic troublemakers into California waters. Vessels must also fill out the right paperwork and pay a $400 per voyage fee to support the state's new 4-year, $6.7 million dollar compliance program.
"The shipping industry is really supportive and proactive now, a big change from the anger and frustration we were seeing back in 1999," says Maurya Falkner of the State Lands Commission, which is in charge of compliance. She says some shippers are even picking up ballast water after leaving, rather than while within, Asian ports, and cleaning tanks and chains more often.

According to the annual review, ships discharged a total of 7.8 million metric tons of ballast water in California ports in 2000 (3.7 million came from bulk ships, 2.4 from container ships, and 1.1 million from tankers).

Two field offices succeeded in inspecting 26% of all visiting vessels. North coast inspectors discovered a total of 83 violations out of 330 inspections, 71 of which were paperwork related and 12 of which were exchange violations. South coast inspectors tallied 200 violations out of 1,400 inspections, also almost all problems with paperwork. The Bay-Delta level of compliance ranged from highs of 90% in Stockton and 89% in Richmond to a low of 72% in Redwood City. One hole in the rosy picture is the cruise trade to Mexico, because most ships cruising the coast between Mexico and California don't travel far enough out to conduct what qualifies as a mid-ocean exchange (200 miles offshore). A group of affected cruise line companies has failed to meet California's deadline for researching an adequate alternative exchange site, possibly just 60 miles offshore near Baja, "It's ten months late, so we'll be moving forward with enforcement actions soon," says Falkner.

Hope may lie with an on-board water treatment system to be installed on Princess Cruise's Regal Sea Princess this June and sent out for test voyages, accompanied by state biologists, this fall. The treatment system improves on a previous test conducted on the Regal Sea Princess last year, and basically creates a cyclone in the ballast water so the heavier organisms separate out, and then uses ultra violet light to neutralize the remaining smaller particles. Princess Cruises hopes to retrofit all its vessels once these tests are complete. Matson Navigation Corporation, meanwhile, is conducting a similar retrofit and test on a container vessel.

Since the state is already monitoring discharges of foreign waters, the Port of Oakland has been looking into more local origins. According to the Port's Jody Zaitlin, monitoring indicates that 10-15% of ships calling at the port in 2000 discharged ballast water taken on in foreign ports, and 8% discharged water picked up on the West Coast - 95% of which came from Long Beach or Los Angeles. (There may be some overlap between foreign and coastal data sets).

In related news, insufficient attention to potential ballast water introductions of non-natives in two Port of Oakland improvement projects was the reason S.F. BayKeeper and the Center for Marine Conservation sued three federal agencies early this year. They brought the suit against the Army Corps, U.S. Fish & Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries Service more than a year after these agencies signed off on the two port projects. This spring, the Port of Oakland filed a motion to intervene in the suit, saying they wanted to be part of any discussions and dispute resolution, according to Zaitlin.

Ballast water management is now mandatory in Washington and California, with Oregon and Hawaii considering getting into the mix - uniform standards for the entire West Coast would make things easier for the shipping lines. On the federal level, meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard released public input requests this May on four approaches to setting ballast water treatment standards and ways to provide incentives for treatment.

Contact: Maurya Falkner (562)499- 6312 or for federal initiatives (202)366-9329 or http://dms.dot.gov. ARO

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