Hawai`i Superferry: An Audit, a Screed, and a Draft EIS

The Auditor, State of Hawai`i. Performance Audit on the State Administration’s Actions Exempting Certain Harbor Improvements to Facilitate Large Capacity Ferry Vessels from the Requirements of the Hawaii Environmental Impact Statements Law: Phase I [April 2008] and Phase II [December 2008]. Office of the Auditor: Honolulu, 2008. Available online: [url=http://www.state.hi.us/auditor]www.state.hi.us/auditor[/url]

Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander. The SuperFerry Chronicles: Hawai`i’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism and the Desecration of the Earth. Koa Books: Kihei, Hawai`i, 2008. $20.00 paper.

State of Hawai`i Department of Transportation. Statewide Large-Capacity Inter-Island Ferry Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Honolulu, 2008. Available online: [url=http://www.hawaii.gov/dot/harbors]www.hawaii.gov/dot/harbors[/url] and at public libraries statewide.

Three significant works have recently been published about the Hawai`i Superferry. The first to come out was the two-part report of Hawai`i’s legislative auditor, Marion Higa, charged by an act of the Legislature to document the means by which the 351-foot-long vessel was cleared to operate in Hawai`i. The second, The Superferry Chronicles: Hawai`i’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism and the Desecration of the Earth, is, as its title hints, a far more polemical (and far more speculative) account. Rounding out the list is the legislatively mandated “environmental impact statement” for the Superferry – the term is in quotations because, as is well known, the Superferry evaded the usual EIS process, which requires it to be done before any decision to commit state resources is made.

Higa’s two-part performance audit is, for the most part, a step-by-step reconstruction of the interactions of government workers (civil servant, appointed, and elected) and private businessmen that led, ultimately, to the Hawai`i Superferry arriving in Hawai`i waters and shuttling passengers and vehicles between Maui and Honolulu. (A planned route to Nawiliwili, Kaua`i, was scrubbed after it became clear that many of the island’s residents were not likely to stop protests.) The tone of Higa’s work is dispassionate, but the outrage that she obviously feels – over the Lingle administration’s efforts to frustrate her legislatively mandated work, over the damage to the state EIS precedent, and over the costly burden that the Superferry operation imposes on taxpayers – seeps through the text like a slowly rising tide. In both Phase I (released in April 2008) and Phase II (December 2008) of Higa’s Performance Audit, the deceptions of the administration and HSF officers, the contortions they performed to cover up their failure to follow the state’s environmental impact statement law, Chapter 343, the strained attempts to justify a $40 million investment in what will probably turn out to be useless harbor infrastructure – all build to a boiling point on their own. No exclamation point, italicized text, or editorial comment from Higa is given – nor is any required – for the reader to get the point.

The calls of professional staff within the Department of Transportation urging compliance with Chapter 343 and permanent harbor improvements were ignored, Higa found, at the clear direction of the governor. Instead, high-ranking DOT officials opted to build temporary harbor improvements to accommodate the Superferry’s refusal to build its vessel with a loading ramp as well as its “deadline” to settle all environmental issues. “Hawai`i Superferry Inc. officials claimed that the deadline was imposed by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration as a provision of its loan guarantees,” Higa writes. “However, Phase I of our report found that the deadline was not imposed by the federal agency. Rather, it was part of an agreement between Hawai`i Superferry Inc. and Austal, USA, LLC, the [ferry] shipbuilder.”

Superferry officials refused to cooperate in Higa’s work, she writes, “unless we amended our standard audit procedures.” (She did not do so.)

Higa concludes with detailed policy recommendations. The Office of Environmental Quality Control should develop guidelines to ensure that agencies follow all steps required by law before issuing to themselves Chapter 343 exemptions and that state and county officials are properly trained in the environmental impact disclosure law. The Department of Transportation should also investigate a new mooring system for the Kahului pier, determine responsibility for maintenance of the damage-prone barge, and work out who should pay for the costly tug services needed to hold the barge against the pier.

The Lingle administration is raked over the coals in Higa’s report – but so, too, is the Legislature. After the Hawai`i Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that an environmental impact statement was required before the Superferry could begin operations, the Legislature, in a special session called by Lingle, enacted a law, Act 2, allowing the ferry service to continue pending a statewide environmental review. “In effect,” Higa writes, “Act 2 bargained away Hawai`i’s environmental policy process to benefit a single operator.” This, she notes, “compromised the state’s environmental laws and set a worrisome precedent for future government accommodation that puts the interests of a single business before the state’s environmental, fiduciary, and public safety requirements.”
Hot and Heavy

Contrasted with Higa’s cool description of the Superferry fiasco is the fever-pitch prose of Mander and Paik. Mander, of San Francisco, is a public relations professional and an activist against economic globalization. Paik is a filmmaker and writer based on Kaua`i. Their recounting of the events surrounding the Superferry’s arrival is enveloped in a breathless blue cloud replete with italicized text in nearly every paragraph, unbounded speculation, and at times a casual regard to fact. Every event they describe, every motive they assign, is a brick in the ideological edifice they build – one that places the Superferry smack in the middle of a vast conspiracy to militarize the Hawaiian islands and, more generally, the entire Pacific.

The evidence they adduce in support is circumstantial and the weight one accords it depends in large measure on one’s political predilections. The authors get a lot of mileage from the fact that an investment firm owned largely by John F. Lehmann, former Navy secretary, took the reins of the Superferry company in March 2005. “Is it a coincidence that Lehman moves in just as soon as the money is secured by a federal agency and the pesky EIS requirement is circumvented?” the authors ask rhetorically. (All italics are in original.)

Tying the Superferry to a larger military purpose is a theme that helps explain the inclusion in the volume of events that, on their face, seem to have little bearing on the vessel’s operations. Much attention is given to the plans of the Army to deploy a Stryker task force in Hawai`i. Noting that an August 2004 report of the General Accounting Office found that the Army’s Stryker vehicle will be difficult to transport in C-130 aircraft, the authors write: “It would not be long before the management and board of the Hawai`i Superferry, as well as [shipbuilder] Austal USA, begin to see a rich opportunity not only in potential government contracts to transport those Stryker vehicles to military bases within the Hawaiian Islands, but also in much larger contracts to transport them and other equipment to war zones and military bases around the globe.”

The book is rife with sloppy mistakes. To take one example, a short boxed section by Paik is meant to bolster claims of environmental harm from the military by describing “Depleted Uranium on Hawai`i Island.” Paik fails to locate the resort nodes and population centers of West Hawai`i in their proper districts of South Kohala and North Kona, placing them instead in rural South Kona. She states as fact that the “means of transporting … Stryker tanks back and forth between O`ahu and the Big Island will soon be the Hawai`i Superferry.” And she claims unequivocally that “the ammunition used by these tanks, and in the exercises at Pohakuloa, are depleted uranium shells.” The depleted uranium at Pohakuloa Training Area derives from exercises in the 1960s, not from current training.

Or, to take another example, the authors state in their epilogue that “panicked Maui residents are fearing extinction of certain species, in the wake of inspections that revealed that, each month during the summer of 2008, hundreds of pounds of seaweed and reef fish had been plundered by Superferry riders.” Some residents may indeed fear that coastal flora and fauna may be depleted, but extinction? That’s a claim no one has seriously made.

The sloppiness is gratuitous. The facts are bad enough. Overstating them or misstating them may add drama, but whatever is gained is more than lost in terms of the overall credibility of the authors. What’s more, it’s a sign of disrespect for readers: do we not deserve an account that pays attention to getting things right?

Other aspects of the book detract more than they add. On the very first pages of the book, for example, Mander treats us to what he apparently expects us to believe is a verbatim transcription of a conversation he had “in New York at a party at the home of a well-known literary editor.” (Is this to set him up as some kind of member of high society, a cosmopolitan man-about-town who has graciously interceded on Hawai`i’s behalf in the writing of this book? Whatever the motive for this self-serving section, it should have been junked before going to press.) The conversation, which runs to a page and a half, is obviously contrived. Who really believes that Mander or anyone could say, in the course of cocktail-party conversation, that the Superferry is “an environmental nightmare, and it also carries hundreds of cars out to these little islands that are choking from traffic already, and it moves all kinds of bad bugs and animals like mongoose – that eat up everything in sight – and anyway, it’s owned by this really scary New York military-finance guy, John F. Lehman, one of the most aggressive right-wing neocon war promoter militarists…” By now, whoever Mander had cornered would have wandered off in search of another martini.

Then there’s the Kaua`i-centric approach to events, a reflection almost certainly of Paik’s involvement and interest. To be sure, the sight of hundreds of surfers and paddlers in Nawiliwili Bay as the Superferry pulled into the harbor was stunning and memorable. But much if not most of the action that drove events occurred on Maui, where attorney Isaac Hall artfully – and nearly single-handedly – pressed the legal case against its operation without a sanctioning environmental impact statement. Hall’s lawsuits, on behalf of the Sierra Club of Maui, Maui Tomorrow, and the Kahului Harbor Coalition, are mentioned briefly in an eight-page chapter summarizing litigation over the Superferry, but he is not given his due. It was, after all, the Supreme Court decision arising from Hall’s challenges that precipitated the Superferry’s sudden start of operations in August 2007 and the explosive events that followed.

The Long Awaited EIS

In January, the after-the-fact draft environmental impact statement for Superferry operations, required by Act 2, was made public. Use by the two planned Superferry vessels of state harbors at Nawiliwili, Honolulu, Kahului, and Kawaihae will have an impact on cultural uses, traffic, humpback whales, and will exacerbate problems caused by invasive species. But, the document states, “with the mitigation measures proposed in this EIS, significant adverse impacts can be substantially or fully mitigated, with the exception of certain cultural uses at Kahului Harbor.”

Early critical comments on the EIS are to be found on the websites of many Hawai`i bloggers, including that of Save Kaua`i (http://savekauai.org), Brad Parsons’ Hawai`i Superferry Unofficial Blog (http://hisuperferry.blogspot.com), and Ken Stokes’ SusHI (Sustainable Hawai`i) blog (http://kauaian.net/blog).

The Superferry’s extravagant carbon footprint is one of the points discussed. According to the draft EIS, the total annual greenhouse-gas emissions, in terms of carbon-dioxide equivalence, is 87,882 metric tons. In 2007, greenhouse-gas emissions in Hawai`i (excluding air transportation) were calculated to be 16.61 million metric tons. Figured as a percentage of the 16.61 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from Hawai`i sources (excluding air transportation) in 2007, the Superferry emissions represent a non-negligible increase of half a percent.

Propelling the Superferry are four 8200-kilowatt diesel engines. Power within the vessel itself is provided by three electric 425-kW electric generators, also powered by diesel. Jeff Mikulina of the Blue Planet Foundation estimates that the “climate impact of Superferry is equivalent to adding 26,500 cars to Hawai`i.” Brad Parsons has commented that the four engines alone “put out enough energy to power 16,500 Hawaiian households … [The Superferry] burns 15 times the petroleum-based fuel (MDO diesel) … that a Hawaiian [Air] airplane burns to cover the same route, and even if you multiply the Hawaiian flights up to [the Superferry’s maximum] capacity, Hawaiian is still at least twice as fuel efficient as [the Superferry] at transporting people interisland. There are those who might say, yes, but Hawaiian Air can’t transport vehicles. For which the response would be, in this day and age, given the oil situation now and in the future, consumers in Hawai`i don’t really need to move their personal cars quickly for leisure 100+ miles between islands.” (Italics in original.)

The impact of the Superferry on humpback whales has received much attention. In the “conditions and protocols” imposed by Governor Lingle on the vessel’s operation, condition A.2. deals with this topic – weakly. The Superferry is to avoid the operating within the boundaries of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary or in waters less than 100 fathoms deep from January 1 to April 30 unless the vessel is approaching port or operation in shallow water “is in the interest of passenger safety and comfort or vessel safety.” If operating in shallow water, the Superferry’s speed is not to exceed 25 knots, the condition stipulates.

But, according to the draft EIS, “vessels larger than 80 meters long [the Superferry is more than 100 meters in length] and traveling at speeds greater than 14 knots have a tendency to inflict the most severe or lethal injuries to whales,” while at speeds greater than 20 knots, the probability of a lethal injury occurring as a result of a strike is near 100 percent.

One of the greatest concerns about the Superferry’s operations is the potential to spread invasive species of plants and animals to islands where they are not yet found. The draft EIS mentions the requirements imposed by the governor on Superferry operations to address this risk, but acknowledges that the “Rapid Risk Assessment of Operational Compliance and Environmental Risks of the Hawai`i Superferry” found that inspections were not always effective. Many dirty vehicles “seem to show up at the terminal facility,” and while they are not supposed to be allowed onboard until they are clean, the inspections, especially of vehicle undercarriages, are not thorough.

The full draft EIS and appendices are available online and at public libraries. The deadline for comment is February 23.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 19, Number 8 February 2009

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