Carnival touts progress on illegal discharges, promises to improve air quality
During Carnival Corp.’s first year on probation, the company said it illegally dumped sewage into the ocean from its ships 21 times. Fast forward to its third year, and the company said it projects it will illegally dump sewage seven times, based on the current rate.
On Thursday, the progress drew a rare pat on the back from U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz, who has been overseeing the criminal case against the company since 2016 as Carnival Corp. executives delivered an update in federal court in Miami on their efforts to clean up the company’s environmental record.
“I truly appreciate what I’m hearing,” said Seitz. “You try something, you evaluate how effective it is, you learn from it, you tweak it, you discard it or you adopt it.”
The latest report brought some good news and some bad. The company has not repeated the same crimes that led to its 2016 conviction, but there have been more incidents of oil leaks, solid objects going overboard and burning unfiltered heavy fuel oil in restricted areas.
Carnival Corp.’s competitors Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. have been charged with similar crimes over the past two decades, but none has faced the level of scrutiny that Carnival has in the last year.
Carnival Corp.’s chief maritime officer, retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Bill Burke, attributed some of the increases to heightened transparency. For example, he said during the first year of probation, each ship reported on average 0.5 incidents per month, compared to 2.16 today.
“It’s easier to ignore it than it is to report it — it dissipates,” Burke said of small oil leaks, which increased from 77 incidents in the first year of probation to a projected 138 in the third, according to the company. “Our people are reporting a heck of a lot more of them.” He said many of the leaks come from lifeboats or paint.
Carnival Corp. has been on probation since April 2017 after pleading guilty to environmental crimes and paying a $40 million fine. In June the company pleaded guilty again to violating probation, paid a $20 million fine, and agreed to more strict oversight during its remaining years on probation.
Ethics and compliance
Thursday’s hearing was the company’s chance to update the court on its progress to reduce environmental violations under its new chief ethics and compliance officer, Pete Anderson, whose position was created as part of a plea deal reached in June. Under his watch, the team charged with investigating incidents has increased from four to eight, the budget for the company’s compliance office from $27 million to $47 million, and the compliance staff in Miami from 29 employees to 55.
To reduce the amount of solid objects dropped or thrown from its ships the company is educating passengers during embarkation that any object that goes overboard is a violation of international law. The number of items overboard has increased from 148 in the first year of probation to a projected 798 in the third year, which ends in April 2020.
While international regulations for dumping waste into the ocean vary depending on the substance, Burke said the company has adopted a rule of 12 miles from land for every substance, going beyond the three miles required for food waste and treated sewage. The company is working to replace manual systems that track what laws apply depending on where a ship is located with an automated software.
Chris Donald, the company’s senior vice president of corporate environmental compliance, said his team is working on getting chat forums up and running so that environmental officers across the company’s 105-ship fleet can communicate in real time about incidents. The company is working to get more of its environmental officers on rotations where they have three months on the job and three months off, which Donald said reduces attrition.
He has led the charge in updating pollution prevention equipment and replacing old food waste systems with new machines called bio-digesters that consume food waste and leave behind plastic, helping to keep it from going into the ocean. He said the company will switch the entire fleet to bio-digesters by 2021. Donald said that illegal food waste discharges decreased from 20 during the first year of probation to five in the third if the current rate holds. The company aims to reduce total food waste across its fleet by 10 percent by 2021.
Air quality
Outside of the terms of probation, Carnival Corp. CEO Arnold Donald — who is not related to Chris Donald — said at the hearing the company has outfitted 40 percent of its fleet with shore power, technology allowing ships to plug in to local power grids while at port and cut emissions to zero. Miami-Dade county’s PortMiami does not allow for shore power, meaning the zero-emission technology is wasted as those ships idle their engines next to downtown.
The company is still struggling with air quality, Burke said. Incidents of ships burning unfiltered heavy fuel oil increased from 32 times in the first year of probation to a projected 63 times at the current rate, representing a .03 percent error rate now, the company said.
“This is not going in the right direction,” said Burke.
Faced with a January 2020 deadline to comply with a new International Maritime Organization law that requires ships to reduce the sulfur content in their fuel, Carnival Corp. said it has invested $660 million to outfit 82 of its ships with scrubbers, machines that suck the sulfur out of emissions and dump the wash water into the ocean. Carnival Corp. isn’t alone; the cruise industry has largely opted for installing scrubbers to satisfy the new law instead of switching to low-sulfur fuel because heavy fuel is more than 30 percent cheaper.
The problem is that the scrubber machines don’t always work. And when a glitch happens, toxic emissions from heavy fuel oil plume into the air. Burke said the company has put an extra engineer on each ship to focus on scrubber maintenance.
Carnival Corp. executives, federal prosecutors and the court-appointed monitor will be back in federal court in Miami on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020.
An earlier version of this story misstated the number of violations in the company’s third year on probation, ending in April 2020.
This story was originally published December 19, 2019 at 4:29 PM.
