More cruise traffic in Alaska is followed by more wastewater violations, officials say
Tourists walk along Juneau's harbor on April 26, 2024, next to the docked Carnival Spirit, a ship operated by Carnival Cruise Line. Cruise ship visitation to Alaska has increased in recent years, and so have measured violations of wastewater standards. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
As cruise ship visitation has increased, so have water-quality violations, state officials told lawmakers last week.
Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation representatives presented a summary of this data on Thursday to the environmental subcommittee of the House Finance Committee. In addition to tracking the raw numbers, it shows a contrast in the number of violations — also known as 'exceedances' — between the time when onboard observers called 'ocean rangers' monitored wastewater discharges and the period after that program was abolished in 2019.
'We are seeing an increase in exceedances, but we're also seeing an increase in compliance response, post-ocean ranger,' Gene McCabe, director of the Division of Water, told the subcommittee.
Compliance actions, which range from letters of warning to enforcement steps, more closely tracked the number of wastewater violations after the ocean ranger program ended, McCabe said. That is because the ocean rangers did not have enforcement powers and could merely forward information to enforcement agencies, he said.
For cruise ships, pollution limits are set for what is known as graywater, which is runoff from sinks, kitchens and showers, and for blackwater, which is generally treated sewage. Monitoring is done through water samples, which typically number between about 1,4000 and 1,800 each year, according to the DEC presentation. Large ships, with space for 250 or more passengers, are regulated differently than smaller ships, but wastewater from both categories is tracked, according to the presentation.
From 2015 to 2018, while the ocean ranger program was in place, there were generally about 20 to 25 exceedances a year found in samples from both large and small ships, and generally about 10 compliance actions a year, according to the DEC information. But in the past few years, total detected exceedances ranged from about 60 to about 75 a year, according to the DEC information.
Cruise traffic has increased dramatically over the past decade.
There were a little under 1 million cruise passengers who visited Alaska in 2015. That number grew to about 1.1 million in 2018, according to the DEC presentation.
After cruise traffic to Alaska ground to a halt in the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020, numbers started to climb again. In 2023, a record 1.65 million cruise passengers visited Southeast Alaska, the state's main cruise destination. Numbers last year were similar, and bookings this year indicate another record, with about 1.9 million cruise passengers expected, according to the DEC presentation.
The Cruise Lines International Association 'does propose that Alaska is North America's No. 1 destination, and the numbers are proving that out,' McCabe told the committee.
The ocean ranger program was created as part of a 2006 ballot initiative imposing a per-passenger fee and a set of environmental regulations on the cruise industry. Money to employ the ocean rangers came from that fee.
The program was abolished after Gov. Mike Dunleavy in 2019 vetoed its funding.
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