Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

20/ WHO’S IN CHARGE?

271 271 Establishing a regime that addresses the introduction and transfers of potentially harmful aquatic organisms via ballast water is my highest marine environmental protection priority. —U.S. Coast Guard Commandant James M. Loy, 2001 When it comes to invasive species, the Coast Guard has always been a shield for the shipping industry, not a regulator. —Mark Coscarelli, former Michigan Office of the Great Lakes staffer, 2007 20 WHO’S IN CHARGE? I n the fall of 2007, I received a surprising e-mail from an official in Transport Canada’s Marine Safety Division. I had been pestering Michel Boulianne for permission to observe how government officials inspected the ballast tanks of transoceanic freighters when the ships arrived in Montreal. You would have thought I was asking for a private meeting with the Canadian prime minister. After several e-mail exchanges, Boulianne finally relented. We agreed on a date in September when I would meet his crew at St. Lambert Lock. There, Transport Canada officials would allow me to board an ocean freighter with them and observe how they checked the salinity of ballast water in ships entering the St. Lawrence Seaway from distant waters. I packed my bags a few days later and began the 14-hour drive from my home in Michigan to Montreal. Boulianne sent another e-mail a few days before my scheduled 272 C H A P T E R 2 0 272 visit. The tour was off—national security concerns, he said. My initial fears that my name was on some government watch list for potential terrorists turned out to be unfounded, thankfully. The problem, Boulianne said in his final e-mail, was that it would take weeks to get the proper security clearance needed to board a foreign freighter entering the Great Lakes. His advice? Come back the following year. Undaunted, I reverted to Plan B. I telephoned the U.S. Coast Guard’s office in Massena, New York, to see if officials there would allow me to tag along as they inspected an incoming ocean freighter. Lieutenant Commander Matt Edwards, who supervised the Coast Guard’s marine-safety detachment in Massena, was very accommodating. Stop by the next day, Edwards said, and his staff would take me along as they performed a ballast water inspection. The U.S. Coast Guard inspected some of the so-called “salties” at St. Lambert Lock, near Montreal. The agency inspected all others when the ships traveled between the first two locks on the U.S. side of the Seaway, the Snell and Eisenhower locks. I looked forward to the trip with great anticipation, only to be waylaid by a logistical nightmare. What transpired over the next 24 hours could only be described as surreal. I arrived the next morning at 180 Andrews Street, on the north side of Massena. That was the address of the Coast Guard’s Massena ship-inspection detachment. But the building didn’t look like a Coast Guard office—there was no Coast Guard sign or logo on the front of the building. The reason: The building was the New York office of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp., the government agency that operated the U.S. portion of the Seaway. That was odd. I was sure I had the right address. I asked the secretary in the vintage 1950s office of the Seaway Development Corp. where I could find the Coast Guard office. “It’s downstairs,” she said. The regional office of the Coast Guard, the agency responsible for inspecting ocean freighters entering the Great Lakes, was located in the basement of the agency that owned and operated the Seaway. The arrangement seemed akin to having a branch office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency located in the basement of Dow Chemical Co. Allowing the Seaway Development Corp. to share office space with the Coast Guard may have saved U.S. taxpayers some money on rent. But it did nothing to alleviate widespread claims that 273 W H O ’ S I N C H A R G E ? 273 the Coast Guard was a paper tiger when it came to regulating ships plying the Great Lakes. Lt. Cmdr. Edwards assured me that the Coast Guard wasn’t compromised by its ties to the shipping industry, but was on top of the ballast water situation . The...