CRUISING: DESTINATION NOWHERE - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 113

Disasters continued. The Exxon Valdez spilled 32 million gallons of oil in Prince Wil-
liam Sound, Alaska, in 1989. The Prestige , a Greek ship registered in the Bahamas and
Liberia, spilled 77,000 tons of fuel off the Galician coast of northwestern Spain in 2002.
Despite the MARPOL convention, the owners of the Prestige escaped responsibility. Furi-
ous, the Europeans sharpened their own laws and stepped up surveillance of the coast.
Against this backdrop, cruise ships were largely ignored, considered harmless for carry-
ing tourists rather than oil. The awakening came in Alaska ten years after the Exxon Valdez
spill. The guilty party was Royal Caribbean. Their cruise ships, which sailed through some
of Alaska's most sensitive harbors and coastal waterways, including the Inside Passage, were
caught illegally dumping bilge water containing waste oil and hazardous chemicals. The
bilge water routinely dumped by the cruise ships was sufficiently toxic that the U.S. Clean
Water Act forbids its discharge within 200 miles of the coast because it endangers fish and
wildlife and the habitat they depend on.
Royal Caribbean was convicted in 1999 of a “fleet-wide conspiracy” to rig their ship's
piping system to avoid using pollution treatment equipment and then lying to the Coast
Guard about it. The cruise line pled guilty to twenty-one felony counts and paid $18 mil-
lion in criminal fines, entering plea agreements with the Justice Department in Miami,
Los Angeles, New York, Anchorage, St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and San Juan,
Puerto Rico.
The company was put under a five-year court-surveillance environmental compliance
program. Royal Caribbean denied that this was a company policy and instead blamed the
rogue employees who, the company said, “knowingly violated environmental laws and our
own company policy.” But in a statement following the 1999 ruling, then-Attorney Gen-
eral Janet Reno said that “Royal Caribbean used our nation's waters as its dumping ground
even as it promoted itself as an environmentally 'green' company.”
Sweeting, the Royal Caribbean environmental officer who once worked for Conserva-
tion International, said the cruise industry has poured millions of dollars into solving most
of these problems, something many activists fail to acknowledge. He said he is genuinely
convinced that the cruise line was unaware of the illegal dumping in Alaska and “were so
devastatingly shocked by what happened.”
The government made new efforts to police the industry. In 2003 the Carnival Corpor-
ation pled guilty to illegally discharging oily waste from its ships, paying a $9 million fine
and agreeing to pay another $9 million to environmental projects.
Environmentalists lobbied for new legislation in Congress and in state legislatures to
strictly regulate the discharge of ships refuse and regularly monitor that discharge. The
cruise line industry pushed back, saying they were making voluntary improvements in
their waste disposal systems.
The clash between these approaches played out in Alaska, one of the oldest and most
popular cruise destinations. Citizen activists there said they were tired of the ever-growing