Click the below image to read today’s Post and Courier op-ed written by Executive Director, Carrie Agnew. It announces our coalition with two other major historic port cities, Venice and Key West.
Editorial by Executive Director, Carrie Agnew
No Grandi Navi!
The Oct. 20 Post and Courier Commentary page hit home on two counts: Alan Farago’s call for cruise regulations and Clemson President James Barker’s vision of the proposed Clemson Architecture Center at Meeting and George streets.
Having just returned from my fifth river cruise, with a post-stay in Prague, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Farago.
The continuing unabated growth of cruise tourism will surely affect Charleston’s character, its quality of life and the environment.
The Charleston peninsula is simply too small to accommodate mammoth ships and hordes of passengers arriving and departing via personal automobiles.
Building the terminal in downtown Charleston would be a huge mistake.
Why can’t Mayor Joe Riley see that the sensible location for the cruise terminal is at the shipyard in North Charleston or across the river in Mount Pleasant?
Cruise passengers are accustomed to being bused to the day’s venue, often at some distance. It’s part of the adventure.
And to Mr. Barker’s desire for the proposed Clemson Architecture Center to become an architectural landmark in the city, I suggest he go back to the drawing board.
The low-level expanse of glass will quickly fill with potted plants, cluttered desks, dangling wires and the backs of computers — not a pretty view from the outside-in.
State of the art it may currently be, but an inspiring icon it will never be.
Let Clemson design an eye-popping, jaw-dropping, aah-arousing building that will have every tourist snapping a photo and buying a postcard, such as Prague’s amazing Dancing House completed in 1996 on a historical site destroyed in WWII. Now there’s an icon, Charleston.
Rose Hutchinson
Indigo Lane
Goose Creek
Friends of the Earth’s just-released 2013 Cruise Ship Report Card grades 16 cruise lines and 162 ships on their environmental practices, and once again Carnival Cruise Lines gets a failing grade for its treatment of the ocean.
With 22 ships using 30-year-old sewage treatment technology, Carnival has the worst impact on our oceans of any other cruise line. The U.S. EPA has found that sewage treated with this old technology often contains significant amounts of fecal bacteria, heavy metals, and nutrients in excess of federal water quality standards.
But Carnival’s problems don’t end there. In June Carnival announced plans to leave the Port of Baltimore and move the Carnival Pride ship back to Florida. This is in response to new, life-saving air quality standards that would require it to use cleaner fuels. By sailing from Florida they can burn more cheap ‘bunker fuel’ that is 2,000 times dirtier than diesel fuel sold at gas stations.
And if that weren’t enough, according to a New York Times report by David Leonhardt: “Over the last five years, the company [Carnival Corp.] has paid total corporate taxes — federal, state, local and foreign — equal to only 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits.”
Carnival has no excuses. It can afford to stop polluting our oceans.
Other cruise lines have stepped up and retrofitted the majority of their fleets with advanced sewage treatment systems and yet Carnival keeps launching ships that rely on antiquated technology to treat its sewage. Together we can send them a message a make a difference for the oceans.
Sincerely,
Marcie Keever,
Oceans and vessels program director,
Friends of the Earth
The federal government shutdown is not cause for an extension in a lawsuit challenging a $35 million cruise terminal the State Ports Authority wants to open in downtown Charleston. In a recent ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Gergel said the shutdown doesn’t give him the authority to change a deadline coming up this week in the federal complaint. The lawsuit is challenging an Army Corps of Engineers permit for the proposed passenger building at Union Pier. The Army Corps asked Gergel this month to extend Wednesday’s deadline to respond to his order requiring the agency to go back and review the project more thoroughly. The Army Corps said in court records that the federal shutdown has caused a lapse in funding at the U.S. Department of Justice, which is representing it in the lawsuit. The Coastal Conservation League and the Preservation Society of Charleston filed the case after the Army Corps issued a permit allowing five pilings to be driven on the waterfront. The pilings are needed to help transform an existing warehouse into the new passenger building.
The opposition groups have said the agency didn’t take into account the impact on historic properties. Gergel agreed. In September, he ordered the Army Corps to redo the study with a more extensive review of the effects on the environment and historic properties. The ports authority, which has joined the lawsuit as a defendant, has been seeking to relocate its cruise terminal to the north end of Union Pier from the south end for about three years. The complaint before Gergel is one of three lawsuits targeting cruise-ship operations in downtown Charleston.
Reach Tyrone Richardson at 937-5550 and follow him on Twitter @tyrichardsonPC.
Friends of the Earth has just released its Cruise Line Report Card for 2013, which can be viewed by clicking here.
This year’s Report Card compares the environmental footprint of 16 major cruise lines and 162 cruise ships, in order to help vacationers decide which cruise to take based on a cruise ship or cruise line’s environmental and human health impacts.
The Carnival Fantasy, for the fifth year in a row, earned an overall grade of an “F.” Carnival Cruise Lines began homeporting the Carnival Fantasy (the oldest ship in its fleet) in Charleston beginning in 2010.
The ship’s grade is the result of the following:
Carnival Cruise Lines as a whole earned an overall grade of a “C-.” This is an improvement from prior grades over the years. Carnival Cruise Lines has 24 ships, and only two of those ships have advanced sewage treatment systems. The line has one ship operating in Alaska, and during the graded year received four citations from Alaskan authorities for violations of the state’s water pollution standards.
It is also important to distinguish that Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise holder, owns nearly half of the lines in this report, not just Carnival Cruise Lines.
We recently updated both the Venice and Key West pages with information pertaining to their “battles” for cruise ship regulation. Please check them out and notice how each mirror what we face in Charleston!
Don’t ruin city
I live in Houston, and have made numerous trips to Charleston to be treated time after time to the most pleasant, lovely, historically fascinating, gentle and delightful city in America. I have lodged in hotels downtown, in private homes, and at Middleton Place, and dined in many of your fine restaurants. I cannot say enough about the attractiveness of Charleston.
You are about to ruin this idyllic city with cruise ships. You have a sophisticated city with much appeal to thoughtful travelers who don’t care to jostle on crowded sidewalks with hordes of tourists whose main interest is buying another trinket or a beer.
For the sake of Charleston, don’t let cruise ships make your city a tawdry place. Keep it what it has been for centuries, an historical magnet for the discerning visitor who comes to Charleston for several days, and sometimes weeks.
We spend real money in your fine hotels and restaurants, and some of us may eventually choose to live in Charleston. Don’t spoil it with cruise ships. If you do, we won’t come back, and a treasure will be lost.
Christian N. Seger
Ivanhoe Street
Houston, Texas
As taken from The Post and Courier, by Frank Wooten:
Shoreside power to the cruise ships!
That variation on “Power to the people!” won’t generate a rallying cry for Charlestonians demanding that cruise ships use shoreside power when docked here.
But that contentious issue is still sparking hard feelings.
As plugged-in colleague Bo Petersen reported on our front page Wednesday, getting electricity to a cruise ship that “switches off its engine in port to keep from burning polluting fuel” requires an “outlet that zings enough juice to light up several thousand homes.”
However, the venerable Carnival Fantasy, which home-ports at the State Ports Authority’s cruise terminal on the south end of Union Pier, isn’t equipped for shoreside power.
Our story also reported that what “started this whole mess and continues to drive it is toxic black exhaust from the cruise ship smokestacks at dock as the engines provide the ship’s electric power.”
And that powers much of the opposition to the proposed new $35 million SPA terminal at the north end of Union Pier.
Charleston Mayor Joe Riley is on board with SPA President/CEO Jim Newsome for that plan, which includes an extensive — and expensive — waterfront redevelopment beyond the new terminal. Both men stress that you can’t have one (that grand redevelopment) without the other (that swell new terminal).
The Coastal Conservation League and Preservation Society of Charleston are among the groups challenging the terminal construction permit in court.
Some folks see the new terminal and its accompanying redevelopment as needed economic-engine boosters in what is, after all, our Port City.
Some folks question why the city gives cruise ships a virtually free regulatory ride — and why those massive motors should keep belching unhealthy emissions while those vessels are docked.
Some dignified downtown folks are aghast at the unseemly spectacle of cruise passengers clad in T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops roaming freely about our Holy City.
Hazardous voyages
Enough about that divisive power debate for now.
What powers cruisers our way in the first place?
From Carnival’s web site:
“Give in to the genteel feel of the old South on Carnival cruises from Charleston, South Carolina. This is a gracious city of antebellum homes and sprawling plantations, best appreciated from the comfort of a horse-drawn carriage. The city’s unique Low country cuisine and dozens of delicious restaurants make it a southern foodie destination.”
Gee, and we genteel types lucky enough to live in these parts can do all of that without packing ourselves like sardines with strangers on a big boat (actually, a ship).
Most of us who live here even know that Lowcountry is one word.
Anyway, regardless of your present location or desired destination, why risk the ordeals endured by far too many cruisers?
Three months ago, Carnival figuratively threw co-founder Micky Arison overboard from his 35-year job as CEO.
From an Associated Press dispatch: “Arison came under fire during Carnival’s bad publicity earlier in the year when a string of its cruise ships suffered through mechanical problems and fires. The most dramatic of them was the Carnival Triumph where passengers were stranded at sea for five days as toilets backed up and air conditioners failed. There were media reports of raw sewage seeping through walls and carpets.”
We non-cruisers drew fresh validation from those gruesome plumbing details.
Fortunately, though, you can vicariously savor high-seas romance without smelling any broken-down cruise-ship stench.
Just watch vintage reruns of “The Love Boat” online.
Exciting and new
That 1977-87 ABC diversion features a future U.S. House member (Iowa Republican Fred Grandy as ship’s purser Burl “Gopher” Smith) and guest-star rosters of show-biz has-beens (including future California Republican House member Sonny Bono as a rock singer who falls in love with a deaf woman).
Despite a generally breezy tone, the series’ subtle subtexts frequently explore expanding social consciousness.
A DVD synopsis of my favorite episode, from 1978:
“A beauty contest on board ship divides a couple (Maureen McCormick, Bobby Sherman). A reporter (Vicki Lawrence) falls for a disgraced congressman (Dick Van Patten).”
They don’t make TV shows like that anymore.
But they do still make disgraced congressmen.
And they make cruise ships that can use shoreside power.
Frank Wooten is assistant editor of The Post and Courier. His email is wooten@postandcourier.com.
By Tom Kington, Rome
1:31PM BST 22 Sep 2013
Around 50 protesters dressed in wetsuits, backed by 1,000 supporters, managed to hold up the cruise ships by over an hour as they paddled in the canal – some armed with inflatable rings.
The protest was timed to coincide with a busy day on the canal, as a scheduling quirk meant 12 cruise ships were due to head past St Mark’s Square – well above the daily average of two ships.
“The demonstration was a great success and we now hope the government will take advantage of this momentum and kick the cruise ships out of the Venice lagoon,” said Silvio Testa, a spokesman for the protesters.
Cruise ship operators claim the ships create little damage to Venice’s fragile palazzi and no pollution, while local fears over safety have been spurred by the grounding of the Costa Concordia cruise ship on the island of Giglio last year and the more recent ramming of an observation tower at the port of Genoa by a cargo ship, killing seven.
Defenders of the ships say 5,000 local families are supported by the jobs guaranteed by the traffic, while protesters counter that the city’s character is being crushed by the daily wave of tourists who disembark, buy a souvenir and then leave. On Saturday an estimated 35,000 cruise ship tourists arrived, equal to over half the city’s population.
The decree, however, allows the ban to come into effect only when alternative routes to the port of Venice have been found, possibly along newly dredged channels across the Venice lagoon – a solution that would take years to implement.
But on Saturday, politicians appeared ready to put a halt to the ships before then.
Andrea Orlando, the environment minister, said he would propose next month the gradual switching of ships to Marghera, a mainland port in the lagoon, even before an alternative route was decided on.
“The time for decisions has arrived, the big ships must go as soon as possible,” said Giorgio Orsoni, mayor of Venice.
A photo from a visitor who was enjoying the panoramic pristine views of the Holy City at The Vendue Inn’s Roof Top Bar. Not sure which is more fetching… the smog or the larger-than-life red “whale tail” of a smokestack out of which it’s pouring…
Smokestack over Vendue
(photo credit: Allison Hornberger)
