When Pearl Harbor was selected as the USS Missouri’s home port in August 1996, the private Missouri Memorial Association began the final stages of its 14-year lobby to move the dreadnought from Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. The Hawai`i-based non-profit organization faced a lengthy legal and logistical journey far beyond the 2,300-miles the battleship would be towed across the pacific.
One side trip the association did not anticipate was a 12-mile, nine-day detour up the Columbia River to Astoria, Oregon. The freshwater port call was an effort to kill and flush off organisms attached to the ship’s hull.
The jog up the Columbia was instigated at the request of the short-lived Alien Aquatic Organism Task Force. The task force, convened by the Department of Land and Natural Resources, was created at the request of the 1997 Legislature. Members included representatives of state and federal agencies, private shipping and boating organizations, and the scientific community. Their charge was to develop a plan to prevent the propagation in Hawai`i of alien species brought here in ballast water and on the hulls of vessels.
The 20-member task force met on August 13 and October 22, 1997, to identify the Hawai`i ports at greatest risk and the type of vessels most likely to carry unwanted alien species. Container ships, tankers, and commissioned U.S. military ships are already regulated by ballast water guidelines developed by the International Maritime Organization. In addition, regular, voluntary hull maintenance and inspection is supposed to be performed on such vessels. Thus, these ships were eliminated from the matrix under consideration by the task force.
Also struck from the list were smaller recreational and fishing vessels, since enforcement would be all but impossible.
That left floating structures — barges, dry docks, drilling rigs, and cranes — that spend extended periods of time moored in warm-water ports. Although international rules have yet to be written for hull foulings, growths on the hulls of smaller vessels and towed structures have been implicated in several species introductions.
The U.S. Coast Guard, identified by the task force as the islands’ first line of defense against species introductions, agreed to the plan. Captain Frank Whipple, USCG Marine Safety commander for the Port of Honolulu, has set up an inspection-enforcement program based in part on the task force’s findings and concerns.
“I wanted to know what I should be looking for,” Whipple told Environment Hawai`i. “From that meeting, my office developed a list of four types of ships that came out of the high-risk scenarios.”
Red Flag
Whipple said the USS Missouri matched up nicely with the red-flag profile of a ship carrying trouble. “It had been laid up for a long period of time,” he noted, which meant that it fell into one of the groups of ships that could have much more growth on the bottom than other towed vessels.
Whipple called the Missouri Memorial Association to ask what they planned to do to assure that this hulk of floating metal would be bringing only human history to Hawai`i. “The task force provided an excellent medium for getting all the participants in the harbor together and talking,” Whipple said.
Because the ship had been mothballed and contained no ballast water which is the only medium of species introduction covered by international maritime law, the association officially did not have to do anything. However, says association vice president Don Hess, they “decided to be responsible.”
John Goody of Belt Collins Hawai`i, the principal environmental consultant working with MMA, said divers in Bremerton did not identify any species on the hull likely to be a problem. However, the species of some mollusks could not be identified.
Options for removing the organisms from the hull included mechanical removal while the vessel was in Puget Sound; having divers scrape the hull while the vessel was at sea; drydocking the ship; or mooring it in freshwater for a time.
“Environmentally, the removal of organisms while in Bremerton was not permissible,” Hess said. A drydock wasn’t available, he went on to say, and, given the Missouri’s size, even if one were, the cost would be prohibitive. Sea divers were feasible, he said, but such a mission was dangerous in the open ocean.
A good soak in freshwater seemed to be the best option, Hess said. And the Columbia River offered the best opportunity for this; it was not far off the route to Hawai`i, and had a large flow with a strong tidal current.
Whipple called the Alien Aquatic Organisms Task Force together on March 18, asking it to “give thumbs-up or -down to the consultant’s plan,” says John Schmerfeld, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The task force members generally agreed on the Columbia River option as effective and economical, he said.
Double Whammy
Schmerfeld said the academic experts on the task force thought the stowaways on the Missouri would undergo a double whammy in the process of being brought to Hawai`i: The hull would be in freshwater for more than a week, and would cross several temperature zones during the towing.
But to be sure, Hess of the MMA got in touch with Philip Barrett, associate director of the Center for Coastal and Land-Margin Research. CCALMR has a Navy-financed research project in the Columbia River whose object is to create a forecasting system for the estuary’s water dynamics. With many instruments already in the river and two years’ worth of data, Barrett’s group could provide a good deal of reliable information.
“We were perfectly happy to give them the data,” Barrett said of the request from the MMA. “But, ultimately, all the decisions were made by them.”
According to data provided to Environment Hawai`i by CCALMR, it is probable that while the USS Missouri was resting in the Columbia River, all but the very bottom of the keel was exposed to salt water when high tides would push a wedge of ocean water up the river channel. With every high tide, this wedge of high-density sea water extends under the river’s freshwater current some 17 miles up the channel at a thickness of 8 to 9 meters. At ebb tide, the entire estuary is scoured clean by the fresh river water.
Ports along the river included Astoria and Longview. Astoria was chosen, Hess said, because it was the closest and had mooring available for the large, deep-draft Missouri (887 feet long, 108 feet wide, and 34 feet, 9 1/4 inches deep).
On May 26, the battleship was towed inland, up the mouth of the Columbia. This in itself was a formidable task, as the steel vessel, weighing 45,000 tons empty, had to be tugged over the estuary’s main sandbar, a notorious ship’s graveyard. Twenty-foot waves regularly break along the barrier as tides clash with the river’s current. During ebb tides, the river discharge is concentrated and running strong, between 5 and 8 knots. Timing was paramount and maneuvering the unpowered battleship to a fixed pier was a challenge, Hess said.
After four days in Astoria, divers who were neither marine biologists nor photographers checked out part of the hull and found it already cleaner than before. Goody said the divers were members of the local fire department who took an “unauthorized look in scuba gear,” but could not get a full picture because of the strong river current.
Hess and Goody said the hiring of tug boats and the diversion up the Columbia cost the association about a couple of hundred thousand dollars. “We never expected it would be 100 percent effective,” Hess said, “but we thought it was the most responsible thing we could do under the circumstances.”
Submarine Invasion
On June 22, barely two hours after the USS Missouri had been moored in Pearl Harbor, the ship’s hull was examined by a team of three divers, led by Dr. Lucius Eldredge, an invertebrate zoologist with Bishop Museum. Eldredge found organisms still living on the steel hull.
Their finding was confirmed by a diving team from Belt Collins. Goody said his group found that when the Missouri arrived, “it went from having a very dense growth to a very sparse few hangers-on.”
The initial report from Eldredge was not as positive as Goody’s. The report was delivered June 25 to Mike Yamamoto of the DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources, who forwarded it to other task force members with the simple cover message: “The freshwater docking in Astoria, Oregon, did not kill everything.”
Eldredge said that his team had found two types of bivalves (a large Puget Sound mussel and a type of oyster), two kinds of barnacles, and two species of amphipod crustaceans. “All six are new to the Hawaiian Islands and known from the Pacific Northwest coast,” the report said.
The mussel was “fairly abundant on the hull, especially 5 meters below the water line,” but there were fewer oysters. The divers found a lot of empty barnacle shells, and a few with live occupants. “The two amphipods found to be abundant among the samples taken from the hull … inhabit the fresh and brackish waters of Northwestern Pacific Coast estuaries and embayments,” the report said. In other words, it is entirely possible that the Missouri picked up these hitchhikers while undergoing the freshwater bath in Astoria.
A disclaimer attached to the end of the report reminds readers that “the survey conducted on 22 June was by no means comprehensive or quantitative, and it is likely that additional species, living and dead, occur on the ship’s hull.”
Watching, Waiting
“We were a little bit concerned,” said Schmerfeld of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Once they’re here, there’s not much to do but monitor their mortality and spread.”
Schmerfeld said that he felt the stopover in Astoria was probably the most cost-effective means of trying to clean the ship’s hull, but that it might not have been long enough. “Most bivalves can close up and be fairly watertight” for short periods of time, he said, so they are immune to the effects of fresh water.
Schmerfeld said Eldredge’s team has received a grant to continue to monitor the organisms for about a year, with inspection dives scheduled every couple of months. Some funds for this come from the DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources, some from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and some from the national Aquatic Nuisance Species Fund.
One of the members of the Bishop Museum dive team, Dr. Steve Coles, said the team could not check the entire hull, but had chosen instead to focus on the trailing areas, toward the stern, and on the rudder, which would not have been scoured by much water current either in the ocean or in the Columbia River.
Coles said he and his group have been running studies of Pearl Harbor and other Hawaiian waters, surveying existing living organisms. This large study was completed a couple of years ago, “so we have a pretty good idea what’s here already,” he said, and whether it is native or not.
The goal in future dives is to see whether anything that did manage to make it to Hawai`i on the Missouri has survived the major temperature difference. He wants also to know if living organisms are remaining confined to the hull or are reproducing elsewhere, and, if so, whether they are competing with or otherwise having an impact on resident species.
A Clean Bill of Health
On October 15, Coles and another diver checked the Missouri’s hull once more. He had assumed he would find a few remaining mussels since they were so numerous on the first dive. To his astonishment, they found none. All the oysters were gone and the barnacles were dead.
“There is nothing left of the organisms we found in our first dive back in June,” he said. “The most surprising thing was the very rapid colonization of the hull’s surface. It was almost completely covered with one or two species” native to Pearl Harbor.
Coles said the museum plans to continue monitoring every two months to measure the progress of growth and to see if any seasonal organisms that might not grow in warmer months start to appear as the water temperatures drop. The next dive is tentatively set for December.
Task Force Coda
After a brief existence of little more than a year, the Alien Aquatic Organisms Task Force died in the 1998 Legislature. The DLNR’s Yamamoto, who wrote the report of the task force’s work given to the Legislature, recommended that the group continue past its June 30, 1998, deadline. His report went on to suggest that the task force set standards for the Coast Guard to use as part of its inspection plans; form a ‘rapid response team’ to respond to the imminent arrival of a ‘high risk’ vessel; and evaluate the feasibility of creating a quarantine area and ballast water disposal/treatment facility in Honolulu Harbor.
Another recommendation was that the Legislature shift authority for regulations concerning alien aquatic species to the Division of Aquatic Resources, from the present jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture.
While everyone on the task force agreed that the DAR was the appropriate agency, it had no resources to take on the added responsibility. As a result, legislation to effect the task force’s recommendations died in committee.
Now, Yamamoto says, “everything is in flux. We’re not really sure what’s going to happen next legislative session.”
However, members of the group remain committed to using the task force forum if they see a threat to the harbor ecosystems on their horizons, he said. And this new line of communication gives Yamamoto some cheer. “When issues like the USS Missouri come up,” he said, “people know who to turn to for answers.”
— Heidi Guth
Volume 9, Number 5 November 1998
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