Can cruise lines and the ocean coexist?

From an article by David Rosenfeld on eTurboNews

On a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a few years back, Shauna and David Schober were snorkeling off the coast with a tour company that took them by boat to explore some underwater caves. But their snorkel excursion was cut short when less than a mile away a cruise ship discharged its septic tanks.

“As it was passing, the water behind it was bubbling up out of the back with almost like a sick green algae substance,” Shauna Schober said. “It looked like sewage, and you could smell it – like it was treated with chemicals, almost like it smells in a porta-potty.”

The tour guides said: Get out of the water. “They said the cruise ship was dumping its tanks and it was better not to be in the water,” she said.

The cruise line industry relies on pristine oceans, beautiful coral reefs and marine life to draw millions of travelers on cruise vacations each year. But the same ships that advertise excursions to untouched ocean scenery are threatening these very same natural resources with their standard practice of flushing harmful toxins, mostly as sewage and food waste, into the ocean.

These problems are not new or unknown. But the cruise line industry has been operating effectively with little federal government oversight for much of the past decade since Department of Justice in the late 1990s indicted the top three cruise companies for dumping oily bilge water (the stagnate oil and water that collect in the ship’s hull). Investigators found that ships had installed pipes – hidden in hand rails on some ships – that allowed crew members to bypass oil separators intended to purify the bilge water.