Shipper to Pay $3 Million for Polluting Pacific
Matson Navigation Co., the leading shipper of goods between the West Coast and Hawaii, agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $3 million in fines Thursday for lying about dumping oil-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.
The charges are part of an ongoing crackdown by the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency against ocean polluters.
Just two years ago, the city of Los Angeles awarded Matson its “Good Earthkeeping Award” for adopting a strict recycling program for its 21-vessel fleet.
Under Matson’s “zero discharge” program, all vessels were supposed to recycle waste materials while at sea and dump only food scraps overboard.
“Unfortunately, it is with regret that I report that our excellent operational track record has been blemished,” Matson’s president and chief executive officer, C. Bradley Mulholland, said in a statement Thursday from the firm’s San Francisco headquarters.
“What occurred is unacceptable and contrary to the company’s policy of full compliance with all laws and regulations,” he added.
Matson is a wholly owned subsidiary of Alexander & Baldwin Inc., a giant land developer and sugar grower in Hawaii.
According to criminal complaints filed Thursday in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, crew members assigned to the company’s 38,000-ton container ship Lihue lied to the Coast Guard on several occasions when they reported that oily bilge water had been processed through a separator before being dumped at sea.
On any ship, oil drips from engines and other machinery and collects with seawater in the bilges. Environmental regulations require ships to separate the oil from the water, using a device that is expensive to operate. The oil is stored on board while the cleansed water is discharged into the ocean.
When they dock at U.S. ports, ships are required to show Coast Guard inspectors a log documenting that the oily waste water was purified. The Lihue’s crew did so on stopovers at the ports of Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle from 1996 through 1998.
Federal investigators later learned that the log entries were falsified. The Lihue’s oil-water separator was out of commission during that time.
In the Los Angeles case, Matson admitted to four felony counts of lying to the Coast Guard. It agreed to pay $2 million in fines, half of which will be earmarked for environmental projects in the Channel Islands National Park, the Santa Monica National Recreation Area and elsewhere.
In Oakland and Seattle, the shipping line agreed to plead guilty to one count of making a false statement and pay $500,000 fines in each case. Half of those fines will go to environmental improvements at Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California and to Olympic National Park in Washington state.
Assistant U.S. Atty. William W. Carter, the lead prosecutor in the case, said that as part of the settlement, Matson would not be charged for any crimes that might have occurred in Hawaii and Guam, where the Lihue also docked.
Matson will be placed on three years’ probation, during which time the firm must follow a detailed compliance plan.
A Matson spokesman said Thursday that two former Lihue crew members are under a separate criminal investigation, but a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles would say only that the probe is continuing.
The case against Matson is similar to one brought in 1999 against Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. for dumping oily waste water and other chemicals at sea and then lying about it to the Coast Guard. Royal Caribbean paid $27 million in fines for illegal discharges in waters off the East and West coasts.
Other maritime companies caught in the enforcement crackdown include Carnival’s Holland America, which paid $2 million in fines and restitution for polluting Alaskan waters, and Princess Cruises, which paid a $500,000 fine after a passenger on one of its vessels videotaped crew members tossing garbage overboard.
