Maritime industry looks at its pollution -- and it isn't pretty

To prepare the Puget Sound region for the immense amount of trade thought to be coming this way from Asia, the local ports and their private industry partners are planning to reduce the amount of toxins the ships, trucks and other transport devices pump into the air.

To do that effectively, they had to know just how much of that stuff the maritime industry was producing. On Tuesday, they got what they needed: the fullest account of a year's worth of maritime air emissions ever produced here.

The results weren't pretty, but they are a start.

The Puget Sound Air Emissions Inventory measured air pollution created in 2005 by oceangoing vessels, cargo-handling equipment, trucks, rail and harbor craft such as ferries. The area studied extends from the Strait of Juan de Fuca east to the Cascades, north to the Canadian border and just south of Olympia.

In 2005, maritime activities produced more than 1,444 gross tons of diesel particulate matter -- more than half of the studied area's total -- and an additional 3,109 gross tons of fine particulate matter such as dust, dirt, soot and smoke. The study also measured nitrogen and sulfur-containing compounds, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide.

"Everybody understands that trade is great, but if I can't breathe, what's the point?" asked Bruce Anderson, principal of the Starcrest Consulting Group, which conducted the inventory with port staff and comment from the public sector and representatives of the cruise, cargo and rail industries.

The port, private industry and state environmental regulators formed the Puget Sound Maritime Air Forum, which sponsored the comprehensive study.

What should be done with the information remains an open question. Once the final draft has been examined, it will be more than a month before local recommendations are made at a clean air summit May 16 in Seattle.

Although maritime activities were found to be major contributors to each pollutant category, Puget Sound Clean Air Agency Executive Director Dennis McLerran said the port should focus on reducing the particulate matter in diesel exhaust, as well as lowering particulates such as smoke, soot, dirt and dust.

Such particles are a concern because their small size allows them direct access to the lungs; exposure can lead to respiratory disease, asthma attacks, heart attacks and premature death.

"This inventory will help us refocus our ongoing emissions-reduction efforts," said Stephanie Jones, the Port of Seattle's senior manager of seaport environmental programs. "We want to double our cargo volumes over the next 10 to 15 years, and reducing air emissions is a key part of that."

The port is trying to avoid problems faced by the West Coast's largest ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., where a lack of environmental controls over time led the ports to crack down with harsh regulations that face severe legal challenges.

Anderson said the quantity of pollutants emitted must be balanced against the amount of people nearby to inhale them.

"Not all emissions are created equal," Anderson said. "You have to look at mass emissions versus risk."

Risk is where the people are, which is why McLerran supports the Port of Seattle's strategies for focusing on the place where it has the most influence: the docks.

The Puget Sound region is in the top 5 percent of the nation for potential cancer risk from air toxics, according a major national study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency defines air toxics as "air pollutants known or suspected to cause health problems" such as cancer, birth defects, lung damage, immune system damage and nerve damage.

That agency has identified the port and the industries that support its economic activity as responsible for a large part of the diesel particulate matter that accounts for 78 percent of the potential cancer risk from all air toxics in the Puget Sound area.

Living near a major port such as the Port of Seattle, which handles 7.9 percent of all port cargo on the West Coast and was ranked in 2005 as the seventh-largest U.S. container port by the U.S. Department of Transportation, poses a health risk that cannot be ignored, health advocates say.

"If you think of diesel, think of asthma first and cancer second," said Robin Evans-Agnew, director of medical and scientific affairs for the American Lung Association of Washington, a study participant. He said 10 percent of the population has asthma, which comes out to about 640,000 asthmatics in the state. He said someone dies every four days of asthma in Washington.

What the maritime emission study did not measure was individual communities' exposure to the air pollution, but McLerran said he would prefer to spend the money on emissions-reduction programs rather than further costly modeling. "For every dollar that we spend on diesel emissions reduction, we get $10 back in public health benefits."

After the oceangoing vessels, harbor craft such as ferries were the second-largest contributor to diesel particulate matter, adding 456 gross tons to the air in 2005. In 2002, Washington State Ferries began to upgrade their engines, but they are still one of Puget Sound's largest polluters.

The ferries switched to using low sulfur fuels in 2004, and have been testing ultra-low-sulfur fuels and biodiesel, which cuts emissions across the board, as well as ways to reduce the use of fuel since then.

The Port of Seattle has preferred to work through voluntary emission reduction measures, unlike the harsh regulations implemented by the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach that have resulted in lawsuits that could overturn the environmental measures.

In cooperation with many ports in the region, members of the Northwest CruiseShip Association use low-sulfur fuel while in Washington, British Columbia and Alaska waters. In addition, cruise ships can plug into shore electrical power at the Port of Seattle's cruise facility at Terminal 30 and turn off their engines, reducing emissions to nearly zero while at dock.

Both American President Lines at Terminal 5 and "K" Line at Terminal 46 have committed to burning lower sulfur fuels in auxiliary engines while at dock.

APL estimates that will cut emissions of toxic diesel particles from APL ships while in port by 75 percent, or 3.5 tons a year.

The Port of Seattle's largest terminal operator, SSA Marine, switched its cargo-handling equipment to a 20 percent blend of biodiesel, which SSA Executive Vice President Andy McLauchlan said cuts emissions across the board by 15 percent.

Still, what has been done so far is the low-hanging fruit.

Ships in transit through the Strait of Juan de Fuca were the biggest contributors by far to emissions of oxides of nitrogen, sulfur dioxide, diesel particulate matters and other particulates. Oceangoing vessels in transit put 11,390 gross tons of nitrogen dioxide into the air in 2005 as well as 497,000 gross tons of greenhouse gases.