You are hereThe Hawaii Stupidferry and Endangered Species
The Hawaii Stupidferry and Endangered Species
In writing my last-minute comments on the pseudo "Draft Environmental Impact Statement" (DEIS), funded by the Hawaii State Department of Transportation, on "Statewide Large Capacity Interisland Ferries" (i.e. the Hawaii Superferry), I was reading about how this ferry travels at 35 knots in open ocean when historical data provided in their pseudo DEIS shows whale strikes have historically been lethal at 20 knots. This company stinks:
They first promoted, then downplayed (when it proved unpopular and controversial), their deep connection to the military. The company is now run by a retired U.S. Navy admiral and current board member at Northrop Grumman, the evil defense contractor. [Random anecdote: I once interviewed with Northrop (they are one of the few companies that hire mechanical engineers that can ever be found on the UH Manoa campus). I asked the interviewer (knowing I didn't want a job with them) how he justified, from a moral and/or ethical standpoint, working for the military. His response: We're a defense contractor so we're on the defense not offense. Riiiiight.] They spent big bucks lobbying our elected officials to be crafty with exemptions, ultimately convincing our government (ahem, Governor) to allow them to cruise above our HRS Chapter 343 law. And, as if that wasn't enough, they convinced our Department of Transportation to shell out $41M on special harbor improvements (then later revamped their hull design so they don't really need'em). Various non-profit organizations eventually won over the State Supreme Court and the Superferry was ordered to stop operations until a Ch 343 DEIS was completed. The monsters wouldn't have it, instead persuading the state legislature to write a special law for "Statewide Large Capacity Interisland Ferries" to exempt these ferries from Ch 343 law, creating a pathetic new version of Ch 343 that was signed into law as Act 2(*.pdf). The same non-profits took the ferry back to court, challenging the constitutionality of Act 2, but I think we're still waiting for a ruling. Meanwhile, the state auditor slammed the whole process, finally providing some acknowledgement of what we knew all along: the Hawaii Superferry stinks.
I should also point out that the Director of the DOT while the DOT made the bad call of exempting the Superferry from the Ch 343 EIS process was Barry Fukunaga who has since been promoted to Governor Lingle's Chief of Staff.
Aside from whale strikes, the second biggest environmental impact is increased traffic congestion. I thought this might not be such a big deal at first, but looking at their studies it seems the environmentalists have a valid argument. I went to high school just up the road from Nawiliwili Harbor where the ferry wants to dock on Kaua'i....we don't need a traffic light at the bottom of the hill, and we certainly don't need any more cars over there! We're talking about islands here, folks. In dealing with finite land area, there comes a point when widening the road just isn't an attractive solution to traffic congestion in terms of quality of life for people (never mind the other living things). We passed it.
People are always saying Hawaii is the endangered capitol of the world. I've been wanting to dig up this data for a while now. I hope I got all the numbers into OpenOffice correctly. Hawaii could certainly be doing a lot more to protect its resources.
A little perspective on threatened and endangered species (charts only say 'endangered' which is what the main FWS site implies, but upon closer inspection the numbers also include threatened species):
(I'm a little skeptical about the numbers in the last chart. Maybe the rest of the world does things differently? Or maybe these are the species listed just by the U.S. FWS for other countries?)