Rear Adm. Thomas P. Ostebo, who commands Coast Guard operations in Alaska, estimates that the summer of 2012 will see 1,000 ship transits, up from a few hundred per summer in recent years. The traffic increases the risks of collisions and groundings for both commercial and tourism operations. ...
"We've been surprised time and time again," Ostebo says. Last August, he arrived in Barrow, on the North Slope, only to learn that two days earlier a German cruise ship with several hundred passengers had anchored offshore and brought tourists to town on boats. Coast Guard officials had thought all cruise ship activity was ended for the season.
"We were going ‘What?!'" Ostebo says. "I get asked a lot by small native communities up there, ‘How do we know who these people are? What are the customs and immigration controls?'"
And if a cruise ship does founder -- as the Clipper Adventurer did in the Canadian Arctic in 2010 -- the Coast Guard is likely to be far away, Ostebo says. Read more.
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