Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
size of cruise ships, the noisy crowds filling their ports, the pollution, the dumping and
Alaska's ever-shrinking share of the proceeds.
After the Royal Caribbean convictions a group of Alaskans lobbied their state govern-
ment to hold cruise lines responsible for the damage they caused. Juneau, the state cap-
ital, imposed a $5-per-passenger head tax to cover costs of cleaning up after those cruise
tourists. Governor Tony Knowles convened a state panel in 2000 to monitor the waste
produced by cruise ships during that summer season. One of the members appointed
was Gershon Cohen, a scientist and environmentalist who lives in the small port town of
Haines, which limits the number of ships allowed to dock there.
As Cohen describes it, the panel tested cruise ship waste for evidence of hazardous ma-
terial. What they found, instead, was untreated human sewage. “That shocked the hell out
of us,” he said. “We found the cruise ships were floating poop producers.”
The raw sewage came from inadequate “marine sanitation devices” that were designed
to treat the refuse from a few dozen people but were installed on ships to treat the waste
from thousands. Cohen said the samples testing fecal coliform bacteria from the ships' hu-
man sewage were unbelievable: “One ship tested out at nine million fecal coliform bacter-
ia counts per sample. Another tested at fourteen million, another at twenty-four million.
These samples to be healthy are supposed to be at 200 or less.”
Those pollutants from human sewage were threatening Alaska's marine life, its fish,
coral reefs, oyster beds, and sea mammals. Since the Alaskan economy depends mightily
on fishing, recreation and other land-based tourism, those findings alarmed the state lead-
ers. The Alaskan legislature passed laws requiring that cruise ships routinely be tested to
meet the state's clean-air and -water standards and levying a $1 tax on each passenger to
pay for the program.
In Congress, Senator Frank Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, won passage of a law
to allow Alaska to set standards and regulate “black water” waste that contains human
sewage. No other state had these laws.
The cruise industry pushed back again, and convinced Senator Murkowski to win ap-
proval from the Secretary of Interior to nearly double the number of cruise ships allowed
in Glacier Bay National Park during the high summer season over the strong objections of
park officials.
Then Gershon Cohen and an Alaska attorney won a petition drive that placed an initi-
ative on the 2006 ballot requiring cruise ships to apply for official waste permits with strict
limits on sewage disposal. The initiative also created an ocean rangers program of marine
engineers who would ride cruise ships to monitor the discharge and that would be under-
written by a new $50 passenger head tax. Despite predictions to the contrary, the voter
initiative passed. Some of the requirements were later eased by Sean Parnell, the new gov-
ernor, including cutting in half the passenger head tax in order to head off a lawsuit filed
against the tax by Carnival and Royal Caribbean.
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