JUNEAU -- Though state environmental officials have apparently believed for years cruise ships have been violating air quality standards in Alaska, they failed to cite the cruise lines until this spring, according to the officials.
The violations had been occurring year after year, the state Department of Environmental Conservation now says, and had been documented at the time by DEC's Cruise Ship Program.
In March, DEC issued notices of violation to companies operating the ships. The violations were first reported last month by TradeWinds, an industry publication, which learned of them from filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Two of the big cruise lines say they've begun internal investigations.
Carnival Corp., Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines made public the fact the state issued notices of violation in each company's most recent quarterly reports. The state is now involved in secret settlement negotiations to resolve those complaints, according to DEC staff.
But the enforcement delay raises questions about why it has taken five years for DEC to address the air quality issues.
Southeast Alaska Conservation Council's Guy Archibald said he's concerned when it came to air quality, "DEC took a 'wait-and-see-if-they-would-improve-on-their-own' approach, rather than enforcing the law."
The state's air quality regulations monitor the "opacity" of the emissions from cruise ship stacks -- judging how thick the smoke is by how much of the view through the exhaust is obscured.
When the background is obscured by more than 20 percent for a period of time, the ship can be hit with a violation.
This spring DEC issued 19 notices of violation, covering 44 incidents between 2010 and 2014. Most were in Southeast's big cruise ports of Skagway, Juneau and Ketchikan, but they also included violations in Anchorage, Tracy Arm and while underway with locations not specified.
The observations leading to the notices of violations are performed by specially trained DEC staff or contractors, or by the U.S. Forest Service in Tracy Arm.
Cruise lines once faced regulation of their air emissions in Glacier Bay National Park as well, but Chief Ranger Albert Faria said that program was eliminated in 2012 because of federal budget cuts.
While the regulations target visible emissions, they're aimed at protecting the public, not the view, said Jason Olds, DEC environmental program specialist.
"The goal is health and human safety," he said. "The opacity standard can be a surrogate for all those other pollutants."
For example, higher sulfur emissions would correlate with higher opacity, he said.
The notices of violations, which can come with fines, came early in the administration of Gov. Bill Walker, but the new administration is not the reason for the enforcement, DEC staff said.
Commissioner Larry Hartig, who has worked for Walker and his predecessor, Sean Parnell, decided to delay action to see if new federal rules requiring low-sulfur fuel would resolve the issue, Olds said.
"DEC expected the reduction of sulfur in fuel would have a positive impact on visible air emissions," Olds said. Those decisions were made before Olds' time with the cruise ship program.
Those anticipated reductions didn't happen, and after five years, 2014 was the worst year for emissions violations. Further, Olds said, the statute of limitations on the 2010 violations was running out.
But Juneau cruise ship watcher Joe Geldhof says Walker is enforcing laws former Gov. Parnell did not.
Hartig should have enforced them all along, he said.
"One can't help but think he's inspired now that there's actual leadership in the Governor's office," Geldhof said.
Parnell led the rollback of environmental and tax provisions of the 2006 cruise ship initiative for which Geldhof was a sponsor. Parnell said he wanted to encourage more cruise ships to come to Alaska.
Hartig did not respond to an interview request, but a call was returned by DEC spokesperson Candice Bressler. She declined to comment on the role governors may have played in enforcement actions.
She said Hartig confirmed he'd delayed the enforcement actions hoping the industry would reduce emissions with low-sulfur fuels.
None of the major cruise companies wold agree to an interview, but Carnival issued a statement in response to the Alaska allegations saying how important the environment and oceans are to their company and highlighting the steps they are taking to clean air emissions.
"Through the deployment of many innovative efforts, such as next-generation exhaust gas cleaning systems, we have made great progress in the past few years with significant improvements resulting across our fleet," said Vance Gulliksen, Carnival spokesman.
Carnival plans to spend $400 million fleetwide on smokestack "scrubbers" to clean its exhaust gasses.
But the DEC's Olds said the state couldn't wait.
"There's been a delay in implementing those low-(sulfur) fuels," he said. "We are just starting to see a majority of the cruise lines using low-sulfur fuels now, midway through the 2015 season," he said.
The Alaska Cruise Association's John Binkley said the industry tries hard to reduce emissions, because they're evidence of engines not running well, and that's costly to the companies.
"They're constantly trying to correct any anomalies in their engines -- usually a spike in opacity means something is wrong in an engine, an injector is stuck or fouled or the timing is off on an injector, and on a cruise ship that means they're burning more fuel than they should be," he said.
One notice of violation went to the Alaska State Ferry Columbia while docked at Auke Bay in Juneau last year. Spokesman Jeremy Woodrow said the ferry system self-reported that incident. The Columbia's new engines were having problems that have since been corrected, he said.
The cruise companies in their financial reports said they have defenses against Alaska's claims, and they're working with the state to resolve the issues.
Olds said settlement talks are ongoing. If the companies had not reported the violations, DEC would not have revealed the violations until a settlement had been reached, Olds said.
He added the state had not revealed the violations for several years before the official notices of violations were filed this spring.
"We get kind of regular phone calls I guess, from local (news) reporters, asking 'Have there been any violations issued?'" he said, but haven't recently. Since 2009, they've been told "no."
Ben White, manager of DEC's Cruise Ship Program, said the settlement talks involve a per-violation financial settlement, but declined to say what the state was seeking.
"Ultimately, what we're striving for is compliance," he said.
Binkley said it is actually good for the cruise companies to get quick notification of alleged violations, but that hasn't always happened.
"We've tried to work with DEC to get timely notice to the cruise lines, so if the DEC or their contractors are seeing a problem and the ship is not seeing it, they can rectify it," he said.