Noxious cargo

[eric myers 2]

Noxious cargo
Loophole in ballast law lets invasive species in
By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 30, 2005
Second of three parts

Massena, N.Y. - The red freighter pinched between the St. Lawrence Seaway's battered lock walls on a muggy July morning was bound for Milwaukee with a load of foreign steel - and, perhaps, something more sinister.


Two uniformed U.S. Coast Guardsmen climbed aboard the 730-foot-long ship Lake Ontario at the Snell Lock in upstate New York and spent the next hour testing its ballast tanks to ensure that ship operators had followed U.S. rules intended to stem the flow of invasive species into the Great Lakes.

The law requires oceangoing vessels that carry ship-steadying ballast to flush those tanks in mid-ocean and take on a fresh load of saltwater. The idea behind the high-seas exchange is to expel - or kill - any freshwater species a ship might have unwittingly sucked into its ballast tanks at a previous port.

Ships like the Lake Ontario that pass the saltwater test are allowed to steam on into the heart of the continent.

Those that don't are either turned away or the captain must pledge not to discharge any ballast while in the Great Lakes, and prove he hasn't done so with another test on his exit from the Seaway.

The zebra mussel invasion of 1988 spawned this exchange rule. Despite the hassle involved, the shipping industry has come to embrace it.

"Here is the truth: Some species came in that can be attributed to ballast," says Helen Brohl, executive director of the United States Great Lakes Shipping Association. "It wasn't done intentionally, and from the very first day it was brought to the industry's attention, the industry immediately implemented voluntary ballast exchanges."

That voluntary rule has since become mandatory, and while everybody agrees that this is a good practice, most also agree it doesn't go nearly far enough in protecting the Great Lakes from the next zebra mussel, or quagga mussel, or round goby, or ruffe, or spiny waterflea - all Great Lakes invaders scientists blame on ballast spills during the last three decades.



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