Last March, residents of Kihei, Maui, witnessed a gruesome spectacle. In the waters fronting their homes, a young, emaciated humpback whale, dragging more than 120 feet of nylon rope, was being eaten alive by a pack of hungry tiger sharks.
A few hours before the attack, the whale had been freed at Ma`alaea by Coast Guard divers from a tangle of mooring lines that had become wrapped around the whale’s flukes. It swam away, still trailing several lengths of rope.
Scientists who examined the whale’s carcass later found it was emaciated and covered with whale lice, indicating it had been sick for some time. Scars on the tail indicated the rope had been on the whale for at least a couple of months.
No one can say for certain that the entanglement caused the whale’s emaciation and disease and eventual death, although it almost certainly played a part. What is known, however, is that despite laws banning the discard at sea of any plastic, anywhere in the ocean, the practice continues, with predictable harmful consequences. About the only thing uncommon about the whale stranding on Maui last March was the fact that it was witnessed by so many people.
On 28 April 1995, *** and I conducted a MARPOL ANNEX V and pollution prevention compliance boarding on the vessel *** while it was moored at Honolulu, Hawai`i. During the boarding I asked the First Officer how they disposed of their garbage. He told me that they throw all their garbage overboard. The ship’s garbage log for the past few months also states that all garbage is discharged to the sea.
All of the log entries reflecting discharge of garbage into the sea occurred in international waters. The vessel did violate MARPOL Annex V.1
Plastic Peril
Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution From Ships (known as MARPOL V) prohibits any vessel from discarding plastic at sea. That includes nets, ropes, monofilament lines, light sticks, food wrap, bait bags, buckets, and the thousands of other plastic items that are part of the equipment found on modern fishing vessels. When Congress ratified MARPOL V as part of the Marine Plastic Pollution Research and Control Act of 1987, it gave enforcement responsibility to the U.S. Coast Guard, effective December 31, 1988.
For several years following enactment of the law, no one seemed to take seriously the matter of plastic pollution at sea. According to a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the Coast Guard “did not begin substantial enforcement efforts until the early 1990s,” following congressional criticism. While the GAO found that “the number of reported cases involving violations of the MARPOL V regulations has increased steadily, from 16 in 1989 to 311 in 1994,” overall, fewer than 10 percent of the cases resulted in the violator being fined.2
Hawai`i and Guam lie in the Coast Guard’s 14th District, which, according to the GAO, ranks second among 10 Coast Guard districts in the number of enforcement cases written up. In a period of just over three years, District 14 had brought some 120 enforcement cases against vessels suspected of illegally discharging plastic or other garbage or otherwise violating MARPOL V regulations.
On 23 December 1994, *** and I conducted a MARPOL ANNEX V and pollution prevention compliance boarding on the vessel *** while it was moored at Honolulu, Hawai`i. During the Boarding I assisted ***’s inspection of the ship’s incinerator. The incinerator was similar to a wood-burning stove. This incinerator is not approved for marine use. This incinerator generates only enough heat to melt plastic into clinkers. We next checked the vessel’s ash container which contained approximately one gallon of ash. This ash contained three small pieces of molten plastic.
*** and I continued our inspection of the ship’s garbage and noted normal use of plastics on the vessel’s mess deck and food storage areas. We were also shown three plastic garbage bags on the fantail, one contained approximately a dozen cans (most of them soda), the next contained approximately four bottles, two of which were plastic and two glass, and the last bag contained assorted messdeck plastic (mostly food wrappers). This appeared to be a day or two’s garbage and seemed to be set up to show USCG MARPOL inspectors.
There are nineteen crew members on this vessel. The master claims that absolutely no garbage of any kind was discharged since leaving Japan approximately three months ago. That statement is inconsistent with the facts and physical evidence present on the vessel, indicating that the ship’s operator did not insure that all plastics were discharged in accordance with 33 CFR 151.65.
Foreign Flags
The GAO report notes that most of the enforcement cases were brought against foreign-flagged vessels for violations that, as suggested in the two boarding officer statements quote above, occurred in waters outside the jurisdiction of the United States. These cases are forwarded by the State Department to the countries where the vessels are licensed.
With rare exceptions, these “flag violations” are not prosecuted vigorously by the vessels’ home countries. The GAO report states that 129 flag enforcement cases referred by the United States were brought to conclusion between October 1991 and December 1994, with just nine of them resulting in fines against the responsible parties. “A State Department official,” the GAO report says, “told us that flag state referrals are typically marginal cases that are short on evidence.”
Slaps at Home
In enforcement cases where U.S. jurisdiction is clear, the proportion of cases that end with penalties assessed is only slightly better. Of 293 such cases brought to conclusion between October 1991 and December 1994, more than half — 157 — were closed or dismissed with no action. Sixty-seven violators were given warning letters. Just 69 cases, or less than a quarter of the number concluded, resulted in a penalty.
Petty Officer William E. Bulman is responsible for MARPOL V enforcement at the Coast Guard’s Honolulu office. Most of the flagrant violations he finds today, he said in a recent interview, involve foreign-flagged vessels. Among the freighters and large Asian longliners that pull into port at Honolulu, “violations are not infrequent,” Bulman said. What is difficult is acquiring evidence.
A year ago, he said, vessels in the U.S.-flagged fishing fleet were also the subject of frequent enforcement actions. Since then, however, he added, the incidence of enforcement cases has gone down dramatically — the result, he said, of an aggressive effort by the Coast Guard to educate captains and crews and a seriousness of intent on the part of the Coast Guard enforcement officers.
But, he acknowledges, it might also be the fact that crews now “are smart enough to lie to us. They know it’s illegal now, and the wrong answer, even if it’s the truth, can get them in trouble.”
Inter-Agency Cooperation
The GAO report notes that the Coast Guard’s enforcement efforts have been hampered by poor cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which also boards foreign vessels pulling into port. According to Bulman, that’s not a problem in Honolulu. The APHIS inspectors’ checklist includes a section on MARPOL V compliance, and, Bulman said, if the inspectors believe a vessel has violated MARPOL V, they are quick to alert his office, which can then conduct its own inspection.
One of the best sources of information about MARPOL violations on U.S. longline fishing vessels could be the federal observers hired by the National Marine Fisheries Service to watch for interactions between the longline gear and sea turtles. Observers in a similar program in Alaska are expected to report MARPOL V violations. In Hawai`i, however, the observer program has not cooperated with the Coast Guard at all.
Tom Shear, the NMFS observer coordinator in Honolulu, was asked if there was anything to prevent an observer from reporting MARPOL violations to the Coast Guard. “We have no procedure for that,” he said. “It’s not in our protocol. Our mandate is to observe the interaction between longline fishing vessels and the green sea turtles.”
When asked if observers would be penalized for making such reports, he responded: “Observers are free to do what they want to do.”
A former observer has a different recollection. One month after notifying the Coast Guard that the crew of a longline vessel was routinely throwing plastics overboard, the observer was dismissed.3
1. Italicized paragraphs are quotations from boarding officer witness statements prepared by the Coast Guard as an initial step in writing up MARPOL enforcement cases. Because the cases are pending, the identification of vessels and personel were not provided by the Coast Guard.
2. U.S. General Accounting Office, “Coast Guard Enforcement under MARPOL V Convention on Pollution Expanded, Although Problems Remain,” GAO/RCED-95-143 (May 1995), page 2.
3. For details, see “[url=/members_archives/archives_more.php?id=1106_0_29_0_C]Longline Observer Reports Intimidation, Indifference to Protected Species by NMFS[/url],” Environment Hawai`i, October 1995.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 6, Number 5 November 1995
Leave a Reply