In 2007, Michigan passed legislation requiring ships to certify their ballast treatment before docking at state ports. “Flushing will get rid of many but not all of the organisms in those tanks.”īallast can be sterilized through several methods, such as using ultraviolet light, chlorination, filtration, de-oxygenation or chemicals. “This rule is good but not good enough,” says Jeff Skelding, national campaign director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, a regional network of various environmental and advocacy groups. The new rule, however, applies to all ships, including NOBOBs. ![]() But a residue of plant and animal life remains in the tank, and once a ship unloads at a port, it takes on ballast water that then travels to another port, where it empties the ballast – along with invasive species. Most salties arrive without ballast because they are loaded with cargo. But that law includes a loophole for ships claiming to have “no ballast on board.” Known as NOBOBs, these ships make up about 90 percent of the ocean-going freighters – or “salties” – entering the Great Lakes. The 1990 National Aquatic Invasive Species Act already mandates that ocean-going ships clean their ballast tanks at sea. “The shipping industry was saying they only wanted to work with the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard wasn’t getting the job done,” says Joel Brammeier, of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a Chicago-based advocacy group. Coast Guard regulations mandated that ships develop and report individual ballast water management plans. Advocates call this a big improvement on previously existing guidelines – wherein U.S. This saltwater “swish and spit,” as it is known, kills most freshwater invasive species. Department of Transportation called the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation will provide what advocates call a sorely needed stop-gap solution.Īll ocean-going ships will have to rinse out their empty ballast tanks with seawater at least 200 nautical miles from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence Seaway that leads into the Great Lakes. ![]() Starting this shipping season in March, a rule passed by an arm of the U.S. When a freighter takes on a load, the ballast is pumped out.įor decades, environmentalists, legislators and fishermen have been demanding ballast water regulation. Most invasive species in the Great Lakes came from fresh waterways in Asia and Eastern Europe, and were transported in ballast tanks – containers holding a mix of water, sediment and seaweed that’s pumped into ships to stabilize them when they are not weighed down with cargo. ![]() taxpayers from $ 1 billion to $ 5 billion annually. These critters have devastated native organisms and infrastructure, costing billions of dollars per year in harm to the fishing industry and to water intake systems. Zebra mussels, “bloody red shrimp,” quagga mussels and round gobies are a few of the invasive species that have hitched a ride into the Great Lakes in the ballast tanks of ships over the past half-century.
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