Lauren Perez Hoogkamer recently completed her graduate thesis–Assessing and Managing Cruise Ship Tourism in Historic Port Cities: Case Study Charleston, SC–for her Master’s in Historic Preservation and the Master’s in Urban Planning at Columbia University.

Click to check it out – her research and findings are quite interesting: http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A162278

SAVANNAH — A consultant’s report on three potential sites for a cruise ship terminal along the Savannah River has been given to city officials in Savannah, but they aren’t sharing it with residents. The city is refusing to make the taxpayer-funded analysis public, The Savannah Morning News reported. City officials say a provision in the Georgia’s open records law allows them to keep the report secret for now. The exemption pertains to potential land acquisitions.

A Savannah City Council workshop has been scheduled for June 25, and the study will be made public at that time, city spokesman Bret Bell.

The city council awarded Miami-based BEA Architects a contract to perform the study in September. It’s being divided into two phases, and the portion of the study recently given to city officials cost $197,500 to evaluate the sites.

The findings are necessary to obtain U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approval and permits for construction. Results may eliminate certain sites or verify that all three sites, which have not been made public, could be used, the Savannah newspaper reported.

City Councilman Tom Bordeaux had cast the only vote against the study.

Bordeaux said he didn’t think spending millions of dollars on the terminal would be a good investment for the city, considering the amount of time cruise passengers would spend in Savannah.

Bordeaux said he also worried that the terminal would be abandoned if the industry experienced tough financial times, especially since Charleston and Jacksonville, Fla., already have cruise docks.

“Savannah would be the last in and first out,” Bordeaux told the newspaper.

A 2011 report from BEA Architects estimated that Savannah could attract 100,000 cruise visitors a year by investing $18 million, and 300,000 more if it spends another $50 million, though the latter projections have been disputed, the newspaper said.

In downtown Charleston, Carnival Cruise Lines has offered has offered regularly scheduled cruises almost year-round since 2010, when the company permanently based its 2,056-passenger ship Fantasy at a berth on Union Pier Terminal, near the City Market.

The arrival of that business has triggered a backlash among some downtown Charleston residents and preservation groups over the increased traffic congestion, noise and air pollution. Three cruise-related lawsuits are working their way through the court system.

View article here: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130617/PC16/130619398/1009/savannah-studying-cruises-won-x2019-t-share-study-yet-with-public&source=RSS

When one of my favorite cousins — who decided to become a doctor in her early 40s — wrote and said she and her poet/bon vivant husband, both from Los Angeles, would be in Charleston, S.C., for a day and would I consider visiting, I said, “Mais oui! Of course!”

They would be arriving from Key West, Fla., and before that, points in Colombia, the Panama Canal, Costa Rica and Mexico.

My cousins are of the cruise ship culture.

“You can’t miss it,” said Sheila on my cell as I drove into Charleston on a misty, humid Tuesday. “It’s just down from the Old Market.”

How hard could that be?

“Can’t miss it,” the taxicab driver said at the service station, grinning slightly as if he had views to share about the “culture” but was keeping them to himself. “It’s 12 stories tall.”

“Right by the Custom House,” a police officer on Broad Street said.

“I know the rest,” I said. “I can’t miss it.”

I missed it. Every time.

Turns out I had another image in mind. I was looking for a boat. I was expecting a vessel, a ship, maybe even a very, very big ship.

Not a shopping center, a condominium complex, a commercial center, a strip mall, a block of concrete. (And this — the Crystal Symphony — is a midsize boat with only 900 passengers, not 1,500 or 2,000. Here, there was only one boat docked, not three or four.)

“I waved at you from our room when you were walking down the entryway with Michael,” my cousin said. “Didn’t you see me?”

Didn’t I see her? She was a speck, a dot, a smidgen on this white behemoth of a structure sitting absolutely still as if it were a permanent fixture on the horizon. I saw the water, sort of. I saw the beast. I did not see anyone waving at me.

I showed my passport (though previously vetted), emptied my pockets, left my driver’s license with the uniformed guard and entered another world. I’ve never been on a cruise ship before. I’ve never been anywhere with a karaoke bar, a well-stocked library, a bridge room, a computer room, a whirlpool, a sauna, a golf driving net, a cigar bar, a sommelier, a movie theater or a Las Vegas-style showroom under one roof. It’s a small city.

The library looked impressive.

“How many books have you read?” I asked.

Five for Sheila, three for Michael.

On our way to a restaurant that’s open all day, we passed many fine, upscale stores. By agreement with the port city, none are open when the ship is docked. Once it sets sail (well, that’s the terminology, but I doubt there are any actual sails), the shops open for business.

“Are you hungry? Want some coffee?” Michael said.

We headed to the buffet table of lox, croissants, fruit, bagels — and that was just the cold stuff. In minutes, a beautiful latte was delivered to the table.

When we finished, we got up for a spin around the ship. There was no bill. There’s never a bill.

The menus on the ship’s restaurants do not include prices. No one needs to carry money on a cruise ship. There’s no money exchange.

It’s all “handled” ahead of time. More food? More wine or beer (not the really good stuff; that costs extra)? Bring it on.

“A friend of mine likes to say after he got back from a cruise he went out to a restaurant and when he was finished he got up without paying,” Michael said. “The same friend said he had to remind his wife to put her napkin on her lap. Usually it’s the waiter who tends to such things.”

Or a butler, if you want to pay for it.

Later that day we left the ship — the efficiency of waiters cleaning the carpet, setting up for lunch, the conviviality of other guests — and headed to Charleston for lunch (though who could be hungry?) It was low tide, the sky a teal blue, the pluff mud a shiny, squishy gray.

I stopped to consider the sweet, pungent yet rotten-egg odor of the marsh and I wanted to take my shoes off and feel the mud in my toes.

I took a deep breath. My shoulders dropped three inches.

Then I thought about Savannah as a port for cruise ships. I thought about more horse-drawn carriages crossing Liberty Street, more tour buses ambling around the tender infrastructure of River Street, more multiple bicycle thingeys clogging up Bull Street, and my shoulders went up three inches.

When we parted, we hugged and kvelled (Yiddish for being happy and proud) and said how great it was to be with family, especially since we’re so spread apart.

“But if we do meet again on a cruise ship,” I told them, “Please, dear God, don’t let it be in Savannah.”

Jane Fishman’s columns appear weekly in Accent. Contact her at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045.

View Entire Article Here: http://savannahnow.com/accent/2013-05-25/jane-fishman-trip-cruise-ship#.UcNQIuvNcnX

California is about to become the first state to require shore power at its ports. A new law mandates at least half of a shipping line’s fleet to shut down their diesel engines and plug into shore-side electric power when they unload their cargo. It’s part of a larger effort to cut pollution at the state’s busiest ports, but costs have been a sticking point.

Visit http://www.npr.org/2013/05/20/185437447/calif-law-to-require-ships-to-cut-pollution to listen to the story

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Two ports, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, handle almost half of all of the consumer goods being shipped into the United States. Together, these two ports are also the single largest polluter in Southern California, a region famous for its smog.

NPR’s Kirk Siegler reports on a new California law that will soon require some of the largest diesel-guzzling ships to kill their engines and plug in to shore power at the docks.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Shipping is a dirty business and it’s hard to regulate. Ships register in distant countries, they burn dirty bunker fuel thousands of miles off the coasts. And when they get into port, these massive vessels that are four football fields long, can’t just shut down when they unload their cargo for three days. See, aboard its more floating city than ship, with plumbing systems, lights, computers, climate-controlled containers.

RENE MOILANEN: And typically they’re running their auxiliary engines that entire time. It’s essentially like leaving a car idling in front of your driveway.

SIEGLER: On a drizzly morning, Port of Long Beach environmental planner Renee Moilanen stands on the slippery deck of a small patrol boat; a humbling place beneath the 20-story high red cranes unloading cargo. She says requiring the vessel above us to shut off its diesel and plug into electricity is the emissions equivalent of taking 33,000 cars off the road for each day they do it.

MOILANEN: So if we can reduce those emissions occurring at berth, we can make significant progress in reducing health risks for the local community.

SIEGLER: Ship emissions are just one component though of a huge spectrum of environmental problems at the ports. And until recently, they’ve taken a backseat to bitter fights over pollution from all the trucks and trains that move the cargo out of here. But shore power is one big piece of a broader air quality plan; some of it, the ports have done voluntarily, some by court order, but all in response to the alarmingly high rates of asthma and cancer detected among people in the mostly poor, minority neighborhoods down wind of the two ports.

MAYOR BOB FOSTER: Years ago, when we were putting this plan in place, you know, I was quoted many times as saying, you know, we’re not going to have, you know, kids get asthma or cancer in our city, so that someone in Kansas can get a cheaper television set.

SIEGLER: Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster. His city owns some of the port, a huge economic engine for this region. But he straddles a fine line between port booster and public health advocate.

FOSTER: The ships are just sort of the last remaining big ticket item on pollution. I think this will – well, I know, this will be a much healthier environment. And we’ll still have a robust economy of really good jobs. I think this is the template for the rest of the world.

SIEGLER: But for now, California is the only government in the world to mandate shore power. And there are concerns the less-regulated East Coast ports could poach business once the Panama Canal is widened to accommodate larger vessels. Some shipping lines have grumbled about having to spend on average $1.5 million to retrofit their vessels, just to do business in one state.

It’s just the two cables that we’re looking at?

MOILANEN: Yeah. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

SIEGLER: Don’t over-think it.

MOILANEN: No.

SIEGLER: Back on the patrol boat, the port’s Renee Moilanen points out, what look like two giant extension cords. They plunge over the side of a vessel owned by the Matson Line. It was one of the first here to plug into shore power ahead of the mandate. The cables disappear under the wharf, which the port recently electrified.

MOILANEN: It looks far less impressive than it actually is. The technology and the engineering behind it is very complicated.

SIEGLER: And expensive, and just one step in the massive effort to clean up one of the largest sources of pollution in a region with some of the worst air in the country.

Kirk Siegler, NPR News.

Original article can be seen here.

Could so many doctors and scientists be so wrong about the ill effects of diesel emissions on people’s health?

It would be tempting to read today’s commentary by Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Berkeley, and breathe easy about cruise ships emissions. But to do go there, you’d have to ignore the Charleston County Medical Society; the South Carolina Medical Association; the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; the Air Resources Board; the New England Journal of Medicine; the Journal of the American Medical Association; and the World Health Association.

Mr. Merrill argues that air quality in Charleston is fine, and that moving the State Ports Authority’s passenger terminal upriver 300 yards will make it even better. He says that the air meets state and federal requirements, and that cruise ships in port aren’t an issue for concern.

What he doesn’t say is that Carnival Cruise Lines, which has up to 104 cruises a year initiating in Charleston, is working to weaken federal air quality standards. Or that Carnival has helped other ports it calls on mitigate emissions by installing shoreside plug-in power. Someone there must see merit in using electricity and thus allowing cruise ships to turn off their diesel engines while docked.

The SPA contends that the cost of installing shoreside power does not justify doing it. Government standards, and a port in compliance with them, are enough to protect people who live nearby.

But the state medical association felt strongly enough about the matter to pass a resolution promoting shoreside power.

And numerous scientific research efforts have concluded, among other findings, that people who work around diesel driven equipment are more likely to develop lung cancer than those who are not exposed to diesel emissions; that diesel exhaust is associated with eye, nose, throat and lung irritation, headaches, lightheadedness and aggravated chronic respiratory problems; that fine particulate air pollution leads to an increase of lung cancer deaths and cardiopulmonary mortality; and that particulate matter is related to an increase in the risk of infant deaths.

Perhaps on Daniel Island, where Mr. Merrill lives, people don’t see it. But residents who live close to the passenger terminal complain that their porches and cars are black from the emissions. They don’t feel they can breathe a sigh of relief.

Not yet.