Page 11: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2004)

required to work at 15 ppm - and they often don't work well at this higher stan- dard.

When the requirement for the OWS was developed, the international com- munity also established a requirement that the ship maintain an oil record book.

The oil record book is intended to show how much oil is accumulated and how it is disposed. There are three major meth- ods for a ship to legally dispose of waste oil: (1) burning on board. (2) transfer to an appropriate facility ashore, and (3) discharge into the ocean through a prop- erly operating OWS. The oil record book contains detailed entries of oil accumulated and stored, as well as the time, place, and method of any and all disposals. Totals are supposed to match, but this is difficult as measurements, particularly of liquids in storage tanks on a ship at sea, are rough estimates at best.

There are other, more basic problems, though. For many years, governments and ship operators only paid lip service to OWS operation and oil record book entries. Waste oil was routinely dis- charged at sea and few seemed to care.

Chief engineers were under constant pressure to keep operating costs down.

One method utilized was to ignore maintenance of the OWS. When the

OWS wasn't working properly or when the filter needed replacing, the system would be circumvented. This could be done either through use of a by-pass hose to divert the discharge around the sensor unit or by adding non-oily flush water to artificially reduce the level of oil passing the sensor unit to below 15 ppm. Alternatively, false entries could be made in the oil record book to show that more waste oil was burned on board than was actually the case. It is difficult to falsify the amount of waste oil trans- ferred ashore, since signed receipts (and payment records) are required. As long as everyone played by the same rules, the system (while flawed) was stable.

Everything changed on February 1, 1993, when a routine U.S. Coast Guard air patrol observed a long sheen of oil streaming astern of a cruise ship on the high seas off Florida. Review of the ship's oil record book when the ship arrived in port revealed that no entry had been made relative to this discharge.

When the flag state declined to take action, the U.S. government charged with cruise ship operator with making a false statement to a federal official. The cruise ship operator litigated this and a related case, arguing, among other things, that there was no violation of federal law since both the discharge and the oil record book entry were made while the ship was on the high seas. The

Chief Warrant Officer Stan LeCain (left), a marine safety inspector from Marine Safety

Office Mobile inspects ship documents with

Petty Officer 3rd Class Ryan Mitchell, also an inspector from the MSO. The two conducted a follow-up examination aboard the motor vessel

San Miguel Arcangel, a Panamanian cargo ves- sel detained in the Theodore Ship Channel in

Mobile for deficiencies. (USCG photo by PA2 Chad Saylor)

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September 2004 11