Divers from the Department of Environment found out on Tuesday that more than 11,000 square feet of live coral was damaged after a cruise ship accidentally dropped its anchor outside of Don Foster’s Dive in George Town last week.
“It was a significant area of destruction that is not easily repairable, and will take a very long time to recover naturally,” said Timothy Austin, deputy director of the Department of Environment.
Divers spent two hours conducting an environmental impact assessment, collecting underwater video footage of the damage, and found the coral impacted from moderate degrees to near complete destruction.
“Our early estimate based on a reconnaissance dive [Tuesday] and video analysis of data collected on that dive puts the total impact footprint at approximately 1,100 square meters (11,840 square feet). Within that footprint, approximately 500 square meters is severely impacted with near complete destruction. The remaining 600 square meters (6,458 square feet) has varying degrees of impact from severe to moderate,” said Mr. Austin in an email.
The Carnival Magic cruise ship was mistakenly guided by Bodden Shipping Agency pilot boats to anchor 650 feet outside the designated public port anchorage, dropping its anchor on a previously untouched patch of coral reef.
The Port Regulations (2011) list four anchorage areas for vessels in the George Town port.
“We have four designated anchorages, and we assign the cruise ships to those areas,” said Joseph Woods, the Port Authority’s cruise operations and security manager.
When a cruise ship is entering George Town Harbor, which extends approximately from the north side of Eden Rock to Pageant Beach, the Port Authority then gives authorization to the pilot boat to guide the cruise ship to one of the four designated anchorage areas.
“The pilot directs them in to the anchorage area and assists and lets them know where to anchor,” said Mr. Woods.
Carnival Cruise Lines said in a statement Thursday, “Carnival Cruise Lines places extraordinary importance on preserving the pristine and sensitive marine environment in the Cayman Islands and everywhere we operate. We take every precaution to ensure that our ships do not cause damage to any marine habitat and all environmental-related rules and regulations are followed.”
“As such, when anchoring in Grand Cayman we employ the services of a local harbor pilot to provide our captains with very specific instructions on where to drop the anchor. On both occasions [on] August 27 when Carnival Magic anchored off Grand Cayman, it was done so under the direction of a local pilot as well as the Port Authority. We are closely examining this very important matter,” the statement read.
Sanctions
Under the Marine Conservation Law, it is an offense for boaters to damage any species of coral reef in Cayman waters by way of an anchor. At the moment, though, there are no regulations or restrictions in place in the Port Authority Law in terms of policing pilot boat captains in the George Town Port.
As a result, Department of Environment officials said it was unlikely that any sanctions or fines would be administered.
“The Marine Conservation Law makes it an offence for anyone to damage coral with an anchor and chain anywhere in Cayman waters but there are exemptions for the Port Anchorage,” said Gina Ebanks-Petrie, director of the Department of Environment.
“The difficulty here is that the vessel which was guided by one of the Port Authority authorized port pilots anchored outside the accepted area for Anchorage 4 which is the southernmost of the four designated anchorages for cruise ships. The result was the destruction of reef that had not previously been impacted by anchors.”
Mr. Woods said the onus was on Bodden Shipping Agency. “The Port Authority does not employ any pilots, we don’t have any pilot staff and neither do we provide pilots for the cruise ships.”
Bodden Shipping Agency, the company employing the pilot captains, declined to comment Thursday.
Mr. Austin said the Department of Environment would be concentrating on repairing the damage and would be working on ways to prevent these kinds of from happening again.
“We’re going to try and look at ways to prevent this from happening again. We need to agree that cruise ships need to kept in a closer proximity of the anchorage except under emergency situations,” said Mr. Austin.
Repairing the damage
Department of Environment officials said there was a possibility that the coral could be saved through a restoration project, similar to the Maasdam reef restoration on the George Town Harbor in 1996.
On January 12, 1996, a Maasdam cruise ship dropped its anchor in Soto’s Reef in George Town and damaged about 1,000 square meters of reef.
The 1996 restoration project required about 9,000 hours of underwater work carried out by Department of Environment and community divers. Mr. Austin believes the damage to the coral in front of Don Foster’s Dive may require similar efforts.
When restoring the coral in 1998, divers carried out various tasks including: sorting coral and rubble, taking rubble off the site, and reattaching 3,000 individual corals, as well as monitoring of the site.
Coral reef can take more than six decades to grow back, environment officials say.
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This is another example of why permanent moorings should have been put in place 20 years ago!
This problem exists due to the lack of foresight exhibited by the very first governing body that opened our islands to tourism, without a permanent mooring. It has been compounded by the in-fighting of successive administrations, all of whom would rather play hot potato with the issue than solve the problem. Shouldn’t the tax we collect from each cruise ship passenger be split between two funds? A fund to build a permanent mooring and a fund to finance regular coral monitoring and maintenance projects. 9000 man hours is a massive undertaking it requires some form of compensation, but more to the point-if the problem were regularly addressed it would be more manageable. Surely no one believes the reported incidents are the only ones that have occurred?
I believe the usual course of action is to evaluate the damage and put a figure on the repair cost, even if no punitive fines are envisaged.
There is already a figure for the 1996 incident which is comparable so it could be adjusted for inflation and increased area, maybe in the order of 10 million.
Even if only a partial repair can be made, e.g. 75 percent, the remaining 25 percent can be mitigated by for example creating artificial reefs and reef balls to improve viability at other locations – the skills there are comparable to those in construction and there are unemployed Caymanians in that sector.
Next you establish culpability.
The captain of the cruise ship is ultimately responsible for the safe operation of his vessel.
Do international marine charts show that area as being protected?
Internationally it is common to administer a blood test after such an incident – it helps as a defence to show the pilot to be clear of alcohol and drugs.
Even if the pilot gave the location – did he issue specific permission to drop anchor? Remember that on rough days the cruise ships are re-directed to Spotts but are NOT allowed to anchor – They have technology to ‘keep station’ without dropping anchor.
Once this has all been established it may be shown as 40:60 80:20 or whatever. That’s how you split the bill.
Even if their share comes to say 4 million – Bodden Shipping must surely have Liability insurance which will cover – They are dealing with 100 Million dollar vessels on a daily basis!
Or do Bodden Shipping and Carnival expect the CIG to pickup the tab for cleaning up their mess?
Typical. No one wants to take responsibility. Of course the entity that is responsible for this mess will not comment. If that was someone throwing a bottle out of a window they would throw the book at them or if someone ran their car into a fence they would get charged with something. But here is a reef that took thousands of years to grow, completely destroyed in a few careless hours and no one is going to be held responsible. This is ludicrous. They wonder why the youth of today don’t care about the environment. This is a good example of why they don’t. If no one is held responsible for this mess we are only showing our children and anyone else that it is ok to destroy the environment carelessly. That video did a very good job of showing the damage but it is something you need to see first hand to really get the full effect. I have dove that very same piece of wall 5 times in the last year. Four times before and once a few days after the incident and it was heart breaking to see an area that was so beautiful with lots of huge coral formations of different species, soft sponges, and dotted with little caves teaming with life reduced to unrecognizable rubble. What makes it worse to me is that there could have been divers right where that anchor dropped that morning. Not only was this tragic in the sense we lost a beautiful dive site but it was reckless and I firmly believe that whoever was responsible for anchoring that ship there should be charged with negligence and reckless endangerment and held culpable.