Clipper Shipping, a part of Norway’s Solvang, has been found guilty of pollution by a court in the Southern District of Texas and ordered to pay a fine of $1.5m.
The US Department of Justice said that the then-chief engineer of Clipper Shipping’s LPG tanker Clipper Saturn that oily bilge water be transferred into the vessel’s grey water tank and then discharged directly overboard during the night of September 27 and October 1, 2021. The vessel at the time was anchored near Lome, Togo.
To accomplish this, the then-chief engineer ordered that a section of piping be removed, and a hose installed onto the eductor system. Personnel then re-installed and repainted the piping in the area to appear that none had been removed. During the US Coast Guard’s inspection of the vessel in Houston on October 28, 2021, authorities learned about the discharges.
“Not only did this ship pollute waterways, but they tried to cover it up. To put it simply, Clipper Saturn wanted to get rid of dirty oily water from their ship. Instead of filtering out the hazardous elements, as required, they decided to cut costs and just release the whole contaminated mess into the sea. Unfortunately for them, they got caught when they docked in Houston,” said U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani of the Southern District of Texas.
“The intentional pollution of U.S. waters is a serious violation that we simply will not tolerate. We will continue to work with the Department of Justice and our federal, state, and local partners to hold accountable those who choose to endanger our natural resources,” added Coast Guard Captain Keith Donohue.
As part of the plea agreement, Clipper Shipping will implement an enhanced environmental compliance plan on nine vessels. It requires independent auditing and monitoring of the vessels as well as imposing requirements to enhance the pollution prevention systems on the vessels.
I wonder why Masters continue to do this ? I cannot imagine Clipper would order him to do it so that Clipper could save money.
what is the Masters incentive ?
Masters didn’t do this. Master could have no idea, what stupid Engineers were doing. In all such articles I never read direct/root causes of such actions. US is only interested in multimillion penalty.