Aren’t some of them at sea for up to a year almost? What do they do with their poop? Burn it? Dump it in the ocean? Just curious. Thanks.
Poo and other biodegradable waste goes into the ocean, while non-degradable waste is sorted out and stored until a port call.
Haven’t you ever heard of the poop deck?
I forget what the distance is from shore, it’s either 6 or 12 miles out and everything goes overboard. Close to shore it’s held in tanks until you dock. Then lines are connected and it’s pumped into the local sewer system.
Not everything is dumped overboard. At least as early as 1990, all plastic garbage was retained for offload in ports.
IIRC, it was 12 miles in the mid-90s.
Submarines dump all of their trash at sea, too.
All ships, really. As long as it’s not polluting.
This is not quite true. I was on the USS Ranger, a ship commissioned in 1957. I served on her in the late 80s and our Sewage went to CHT tanks to partially break down via Microbial Additives.
Actually a lot of incorrect answers exist in this thread. Why not give a question a chanced to be answered before you start wagging.
We only dumped trash when we were 50 miles out.
Jim
After it is compressed, canned and then sunk to the bottom, no?
General rule:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/deepeast01/background/dumping/dumping.html
http://www.epa.gov/owow/oceans/regulatory/dumpdredged/oceandumping.html
But:
and see, Kira Schmidt, “Cruising for Trouble” (2000): http://www.earthscape.org/p1/sck01/sck01.html
Michael Collins, “Ship of Stools
Ocean activists target sewage dumping by Royal Caribbean ‘sludge boats’” Los Angeles City Beat November 2003: http://69.94.104.186/article.php?IssueNum=25&id=424
Regulatory history of ocean dumping: http://www.epa.gov/owow/oceans/regulatory/mprsa/events.html
Laws related to ocean dumping: http://meso.spawar.navy.mil/law1.html
And a summary of the Ocean Dumping Act: http://www.ncseonline.org/nle/crsreports/briefingbooks/laws/f.cfm
I don’t know if he was pulling my leg, but someone who was on a ship in the Persian Gulf around the time of the First Gulf War told me they had tidal charts and used them to know when to dump sewage overboard so that it washed up on Iranian shores. Really. Can anyone confirm if he was telling me the truth?
Actually, the USS Ranger was in the Persian Gulf for the First Gulf War* though I was already off the ship, it was shortly after I got out and many of my friends were still onboard. One of them told me this did happen with some of the smaller ships like the Frigates. A very similar story, so it is possible that it is true.
Of course he heard it from someone on the smaller ship, so it is a friends retelling of what someone he met once told him. In its favor, he told me the story back in 1991. So, at least it just after the war.
Jim
- This was a shock to me, I actually went through some training were they explained why a Carrier was never stationed in the Persian Gulf, it was too tight of a space to maneuver herself and her protective fleet properly and made her a much easier target. I was flabbergasted when I realized the Pentagon considered an old conventional fuel carrier to be worth putting at a higher risk. All the Carriers stationed in the Gulf in that war were old conventionals launched in the 50s.
Thankfully nothing bad happen and one of the multi-use copters from the USS Ranger actually captured a small defended Island by mistake with no small arms more powerful that a flare gun. They flew over the Island and the Iraqi regular army units surrendered to them. They had to send someone else to get their prisoners-of-war.
My time shipboard was 1991-1994, aboard USS Virginia.
Sewage, at that time, was generally dumped overboard, during normal steaming - so long as we were some distance away from shore. I think the minimum was 6 or 12 miles, not the fifty mentioned up thread. I’m very confident of that because our onboard CHT tanks were good only for about 12 hours of normal use.
The absolute worst liberty port my ship ever went to was Montego Bay, Jamaica. We had an admiral embarked and the [del]rat-fucker[/del] gentleman-by-Act-of-Congress wanted to play a few links at the golf course there.* Montego Bay is not a deep water port, and has no provision for ships to tie up, nor did it have at that time any of the service industries that develop in regular large ship ports: No fresh water barges, no rental liberty launches to bring people ashore, and most especially no honey barge. So, in order for us to satisfy the dual requirement of refraining from overflowing our CHT tanks, and still allowing the blue-shirt scum to eat, drink, and still follow the biological imperatives - we had to keep a full steaming watch onboard, and take the ship out to the minimum dumping distance every eight hours.
The trips were about an hour and a half to two hours in length, and while it may have been theoretically possible to reach a 50 mile limit and come back in that time, I can assure you we weren’t setting any speed records.
Similarly, keeping all normal waste aboard Virginia until such time as we could get back to port to fill up a honey barge, was impractical, if not often impossible. Waste is always less compact than stored supplies - so there’s the problem of room. Then there’s the simple health hazards of keeping untreated garbage aboard ship. We did have a sheltered, but still open to the environment, space where we could store about 24 hours of normal waste accumulation aboard ship, but that got pretty ripe, pretty quickly. Especially in the Caribbean.
Finally, in case anyone is curious, radioactive waste.
This was dealt with in two general ways. Either it was solid waste, which we stored aboard ship, for transfer to an appropriate rad waste disposal contractor, via a few links, of course. We’d transfer it usually to the tender, then the tender would transfer it to someone, eventually it got to a contractor, who was paid by volume, provided gross activity was no more than some small amount. We were always being told to minimize rad waste, for cost saving measures. (Note: this is low-level rad waste, generally less activity, AIUI, than medical rad waste. Generally longer-lived isotopes, since Co-60, our major isotope of concern is not often used in medical circles, other than as a source for x-rays.)
Liquid waste was kept in an onboard storage tank. Where it was allowed to decay towards MDA. This wasn’t precisely a designed feature when the ship was built, but something that quirks of construction and activation made a Good Idea. We’d keep the tank going until it was filled to about 75% of capacity, then discharge overboard. The requirement for distance from land before we could do this was far more restrictive than normal trash, or sewage. And we had to mix, sample the tank, and keep a complete record of all fluids pumped overboard. I won’t say the exact number, because I can’t recall whether I’ve ever seen it mentioned in non-classified sources.
Activity from this tank was usually detectable, but total activity discharged was really small. It was detectable, but only just, and only with highly sensitive radiation detection equipment - a standard Geiger counter wouldn’t have picked up anything over background activity.
Looking again at Gfactor’s post, I would point out that I believe that there is a difference between sewage, and sewage sludge. Okay, doing some quick Googling, I’ve got 40CFR503.9(w) which defines sewage sludge as -
I’m not sure, but I think that phrase “generated during the treatment of domestic sewage” may allow for an out for Naval vessels, as well as the specific exclusions I’ve seen elsewhere for fisheries vessels. I’ll admit, I may be wrong about this, but I really do remember things like smelling the CHT discharge pipe when sea action uncovered it, during Muster to Quarters - our muster point was about 30 feet aft of it. And you could tell when the HTs were dumping.
*Not having been privy to the discussions of people that high in the chain, I can’t really say why we got sent to that lousy port, but that was the most popular theory. ETA: There really wasn’t all that much else that was attractive in Montego Bay, but that one resort and it’s obscenely manicured golf course.
Yes. That’s right. Sorry I wasn’t clear on that.
Actually, Gfactor your post very largely misses the mark. The London Convention is the international convention controlling the dumping of waste at sea ie it is concerned with taking material to sea for the purpose of dumping it.
It does not cover operational discharges from ships. Operation discharges from ships are covered by the “International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, 1973, as modified by the Protocol of 1978 relating thereto” commonly known as MARPOL.
MARPOL has a series of annexes:
I - oil
II - noxious liquid substances in bulk
III - harmful substances in packaged form
IV - sewage
V - garbage
VI - air pollution from ships
Clearly what we are concerned with here is Annex IV. I don’t know the extent to which the US has implemented Annexe IV: that’s a question I will leave to a US lawyer, but I do note from **Gfactor’s ** second to last cite that the US “Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships” 33 U.S.C., Section 1901 et seq. implements" MARPOL. I also know however that internationally many countries have nominally enacted MARPOL but not in its entirety and in some cases with exceptions to cover certain categories of vessel such as naval vessels.
What precisely Annex IV allows and prohibits is complicated because there are various protocols which any given jurisdiction may or may not have implemented, and there are grandfathering provisions for older vessels. However, in a few years time countries that are diligently implementing this annex will be enforcing laws that prohibit anything but the discharge of comminuted and disinfected sewage using an approved system at a distance of more than three nautical miles from the nearest land or sewage which is not comminuted or disinfected at a distance of more than 12 nautical miles from the nearest land.
Except that the poop deck isn’t where sailors went to poop. They went up front near the bowsprit and sat on toilet seats that simply hung out over the bow. The poop deck is the upper most deck at the rear of a large ship.
Thanks for the correction.
At the risk of screwing this up again I’ll try to underscore Princhester’s last sentence. Here is part of the second section of the statute:
*paragraph (2) applies the dumping rules:
**paragraph (1):
Thanks again for the corrections Princhester. It’s been a long time since I looked at this stuff, and I’m looking at it under less than optimal conditions just now.
That’s true, and it’s where we get “pooped”, meaning exhausted and beaten up. The helmsman works up there. When a sailing vessel was running with a gale at her back, sometimes a big wave crashes over the poop deck. It’s terribly dangerous to the ship to get pooped. If the helmsman survives at all, :eek: he’s feeling truly pooped.
I’ve paraphrased from Olivia Isil’s When A Loose Cannon Flogs A Dead Horse, There’s The Devil To Pay.