Southeast Feature: A Cruise Ship Goes Down; Sinking of the Prinsendam in 1980 led to One of history’s greatest maritime rescues By DAVE KIFFER - At the beginning of most cruise ship sailings, the passengers gather for a safety lecture. It's not really a drill because they don't get into lifeboats or rafts that are then cast off. What takes place is a muster drill in which passengers are told where to gather in an emergency and how to don a life vest.

Sinking of the PRINSENDAM, October 4, 1980. The Prisendam was approximately 120 nautical miles south of Yakutat when the fire broke out.
U.S. Coast Guard Photograph

After all, cruise ship sailings are statistically exceptionally safe. Millions of people travel on them every year and while occasionally ships have problems, a full evacuation is almost never needed.

Once a decade or so a cruise ship faces a more serious problem, rarely, if ever, are passengers faced with a situation in which they have to completely abandon ship and remember those details they learned in their "muster" drills.

In fact, the nearly 1 million cruise passengers who visit Southeast Alaska yearly probably don't even give more than a passing thought to the chance their cruise may be interrupted by the multiple blasts of the ship's horn and the order from the captain to abandon ship.

But that is exactly what happened near Yakutat 35 years ago this month to one of ships in the Holland America fleet. A fire forced hundreds of passenger and crew of MS Prinsendam to abandon the ship before it sank in the Gulf of Alaska. No one died in the incident and some experts have labeled the evacuation one of the greatest in the history of maritime rescue.

On October 2, 1980, the Prinsendam left Ketchikan and headed to Glacier Bay before going into the Gulf of Alaska. Although the Southeast Alaska visitor season was over, the ship was on a special sailing from Vancouver, B.C. to Japan and other parts of Asia. It had made a single stop in Ketchikan, after leaving Vancouver.

By 2015 standards, the Prinsendam, at 427 feet, was tiny. Even in 1980, the ship was the smallest of the five in Holland America's fleet, although it was the newest and, in some ways, the jewel of the fleet. It had been built in 1973 at a cost of $50 million.

Passengers on the Prinsendam had paid between $3,125 and $5,075 for the 29-day voyage from Vancouver through the Inside Passage and then across the North Pacific to Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of the passengers were going to stay on an additional two weeks as the ship visited Malaysia, Sumatra, Bali and Java.

Its total of 524 passengers and crew also seems miniscule compared to modern ships in the Alaska fleet that have six or seven times that number. But the difficulties encountered in safely evacuating even that relatively small number of passengers and crew point out just what trouble could await if a similar disaster happened to one of the leviathans in the modern cruise industry.

Still, the evacuation was also a blue print for just how to successfully deal with such a disaster at sea. It became, what Josh Reppinger called in a 1981 article in Popular Mechanics, the "most successful large scale peacetime sea rescue in history." - More....
Saturday AM - October 10, 2015

Alaska - Nationwide: EPA's WOTUS Rule on Hold Nationwide By MARY KAUFFMAN - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Friday issued a nationwide stay against the enforcement of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule.

The WOTUS rule issued June 29, 2015, expanded the reach of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers and was an update to the Clean Water Act, a piece of legislation that has been adjusted several times since becoming effective in 1972. The update known as the Waters of the United States Rule (WOTUS) went in effect earlier this spring, giving federal agencies authority to regulate smaller streams and bodies of water, including temporary runoff.

The new rule was immediately challenged in ten different suits involving more than 30 states and scores of private parties. The WOTUS rule was considered to be a devastating blow to private property rights and an unlawful power grab by the EPA over virtually all bodies of water in the United States

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided Friday that the updated rule should be placed on hold while further work is done to determine the allowed scope of federal regulatory jurisdiction. While the newest version of the law is in limbo, the immediate previous version is in use. - More...
Saturday AM - October 10, 2015

Fish Factor: Alaskan Pollock Labeling - When is Alaska pollock not really Alaska pollock?

When it is listed as such by the Food and Drug Administration, which governs what every seafood product will be called in U.S. commerce.

For pollock, one of the most widely eaten seafoods in the U.S., the FDA applies the “Alaska” moniker to all fish of that species on its market list, regardless of where it is caught.

“So if the fish is caught in Korea or Japan or Russia, it still can be sold as Alaska pollock in the United States. And that’s not the case with Alaska salmon or halibut or Alaska crab,” said Pat Shanahan, Program Director for the trade group Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers.

“That’s why we are called the Genuine Alaska Pollock producers,” she quipped. “It’s not enough to say we’re just the Alaska pollock producers, because we could be from Russia.

The FDA’s Seafood List guidelines discourage use of ‘geographic descriptors’ in market names, but for more than 30 years that standard has not been applied to Alaska pollock. No one is quite sure how that came to be, but it likely stemmed from the boom in the Bering Sea pollock fishery that began in the early 1980’s, and the flood of new fish was simply tagged “Alaska” by federal bureaucrats. - More...
Saturday AM - October 10, 2015