The steady increase in marine debris arriving on Pacific shorelines as a result of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan is starting to tax US state budgets as well as deepen concerns over invasive species.
Soccer balls, a Harley-Davidson and a 188-ton dock have already made landfall. En route is an armada of flotsam, from rooftop shingles to capsized fishing boats, spread across an area of ocean three times larger than the contiguous United States.
The tsunami towed an estimated five million tons of debris into the ocean. Thirty percent of that, or some 1.5 million tons, is said to remain afloat and to be arcing north of Hawaii toward the Pacific coastline. Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii and British Columbia are bracing to manage the debris, but strapped federal and state budgets could make that difficult.
The Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation, with a standard two-year beach debris response budget of $85,000, says it has spent more than $250,000 on beach cleanup in the past three months.
This is a slow-rolling disaster, said Julie Hasquet, a spokeswoman for the office of Senator Mark Begich of Alaska. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced $250,000 in grants on July 17 for the five affected Pacific states, but this will serve only as a brief stopgap, according to those involved in the cleanup.
We’re of course grateful for the initial grant, but we believe the administration is underreacting, Ms. Hasquet said. This is a major disaster, and it needs to be treated as one. In May, Senator Begich, a Democrat, requested $45 million from the federal government for all five states over two years.
NOAA is the federal agency charged with most marine debris management but alone does not have the resources to launch a large-scale removal effort, its press office said in an e-mail.
Most of the Pacific shoreline, from the southern tip of California to the Aleutian arm of Alaska, is public land and therefore the responsibility of government. While we get trash all the time, said Chris Havel, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of
Parks and Recreation, officials are worried about a rapid increase in volume.
If we could plan for it, then we could write a check, but right now it’s as if we’ve been thrust into a dark room, Mr. Havel said. We can’t budget that way.
Alaska recently spent two weeks cleaning an estimated 40 tons of trash that appeared almost overnight on the shores of Montague Island in Prince William Sound. In early July, Gov. Chris Gregoire of Washington released $500,000 from a state emergency fund to deal with incoming tsunami debris.
Quick diffusion of the debris made it invisible to commercial satellites six weeks after the tsunami, so NOAA has a relatively spare foundation of data. The unexpected arrival last month of a 188-ton, 66-foot dock on the Oregon shore pointed up the limitations of computer projections of the location and extent of the debris. Suddenly everyone’s schedules changed, said Mr. Havel.
The dock was encrusted with nearly two tons of biological matter, including a few species with potential for really serious harm to local ecosystems, according to Jim Eckman, director of the California Sea Grant Program. I don’t want to be alarmist, but we’ve got to be worried, he said.
Clinging to the dock in Oregon, for example, were northern Pacific seastars, which can decimate farmed or natural oyster and clam populations, and wakame, a brownish seaweed that quickly fouls coastal environments and can ruin prime spawning habitats.
2012 The New York Times Company