On a chilly fall morning in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the Queen Mary 2, the luxury liner known for its opulent black-tie dinners and ballroom dances, docked under blue skies while a fleet of 50 or so taxis jostled for position on the wharf.
Thousands of passengers disembarked. Looking dazed, they leaned on luggage in the hectic loading zone. It was a brusque re-entry after seven days of living a dream. Onboard, there had been a live orchestra for afternoon tea, a planetarium and a Canyon Ranch spa.
Between stops around the world, the ocean liner always returns to Brooklyn, its home port. It docks for about 11 hours, unloading and restocking on the edge of New York Harbor amid an endless procession of commuter ferries, like the one that motored by that day with Adam Armstrong on board.
As the ferry passed the Queen Mary’s mountainous hull, Mr. Armstrong steadied his footing. He focused his camera, yet again, on the object of his obsession.
“You have about six seconds to see it,” Mr. Armstrong said, pointing toward the industrial clutter on the pier that would soon block the view.
“Ah,” he said. “There it is.”
He quickly snapped photos of a little blue crane holding electrical plugs the size of milk jugs.
“It’s plugged in today,” he said with a hint of disappointment, perhaps hoping to catch the cruise line in the act. Mr. Armstrong, a jazz musician who lives with his family up the street from the docks, has been at war with the Red Hook Cruise Ship Terminal for years now.
“Well, that’s good,” he finally said. “That’s the way it should have been for the last decade since they built this thing.”
“This thing” is the $21 million plug-in station that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to introduce in Red Hook several years ago in an effort to eliminate 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide, 25 tons of nitrous oxide and tons of hazardous particulate matter spewed out each year by cruise ships idling off Brooklyn’s coast.
When not using shore power, a single cruise ship docked for one day can emit as much diesel exhaust as 34,400 idling tractor-trailers, according to an independent analysis verified by the Environmental Protection Agency. When a ship is plugged in, the agency said, its exhaust is nearly eliminated.
But the system has hardly been used after going into operation in 2016. And New York City is expected to announce design plans next year that would expand and modernize terminals in Brooklyn and Manhattan to accommodate the world’s largest cruise ships, and more of them.
Yet there is no plan to further expand the shore power system.
Neighborhood residents, led by Mr. Armstrong, are sounding the alarm. They want the pollution controls that were promised by the Bloomberg administration. They fault the city and state for failing to force the matter, and the cruise line companies for failing to use the system.
Carnival Cruise, which owns the three big ships that dock regularly in Brooklyn, including the Queen Mary 2, agrees that the issue is important.
“Protecting the environment and environmental compliance are top priorities,” Carnival’s spokesman, Roger Frizzell, said in an email. Forty percent of Carnival’s fleet is equipped to use shore power, he added.
“We have invested millions of dollars to equip our ships with shore power capabilities and other emerging next-generation technologies that are a pathway to lower emissions and a cleaner environment,” he wrote.
Figuring out why Brooklyn’s shore-power system hasn’t eliminated cruise ship pollution has become a guessing game involving various government agencies, activists and the cruise lines themselves.
One thing is certain: Cruise ships in New York don’t have to plug in if they don’t want to.
The Red Hook plug-in station makes shore power available to ships that are docked in Brooklyn. Pioneered by the United States Navy decades ago, the system — essentially a giant plug on the wharf that extends to sockets onboard — lets ships in port turn off their massive diesel engines and draw power from the local electric grid.
But since the mechanism was installed in Brooklyn three years ago, cruise ships have connected to shore power there just 30 out of 96 times at port.
“Now they’re talking about bringing in bigger ships and more ships, with no guarantee they’ll plug in,” Mr. Armstrong said, “while our children continue to fill their lungs with noxious fumes.”
Fourteen years ago, appalled by the pollution in his neighborhood and inspired by shore-power initiatives in places like Los Angeles and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mr. Armstrong began a social media and letter-writing campaign to bring plug-in technology to Brooklyn.
Mr. Bloomberg committed to the idea, and the Port Authority argued that shore power for docked cruise ships was urgent: Idling ships release potent diesel air pollution — similar to diesel exhaust from automobiles but in much larger quantities, and laced with harmful metals — that is linked to cancer, asthma, heart disease and other serious health problems.
The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which runs the cruise terminals, said at the time that the Brooklyn plug-in system would save $99 million in health care costs over 15 years.
But the story since then, Mr. Armstrong said, has been “disheartening.”
The fledgling shore-power system, which has yet to expand beyond the Red Hook terminal, has faced various obstacles, according to the development corporation. Mundane issues like wind or ship maintenance can cancel the connection. A few times, according to Carnival, shore power was simply not available. (A spokesman for Con Edison, the local electrical utility, said that there were problems with the way the system was built; the utility has suggested a redesign to add a power backup.)
Plugging in is also expensive: By one estimate, using shore power in Brooklyn exclusively would cost Carnival $1 million more a year than burning fuel at port.
To help encourage cruise lines to plug in while docked, the city and the New York State Power Authority agreed to help pay half of Carnival’s electric bill as long as the company agreed to retrofit its ships, at a cost of up to $4 million, to plug in.
Carnival said it was working with the city to increase the frequency with which its ships plug in.
“There is a coordinated effort in place,” Mr. Frizzell said in an email, “to enhance the shore power system so it can work reliably.”
Mr. Armstrong and some of his Red Hook neighbors are highly skeptical.
For years, he said, the development corporation would claim that the cruise ships were plugging in regularly. They were not.
“I could see from my deck they were spewing smoke,” Mr. Armstrong said. “I would go down and take the ferry around, and see the plugs dangling in the wind.”
Last summer, a few blocks from the Brooklyn terminal, Karen Blondel stood outside the Red Hook Houses, the second-largest low-income housing project in the city.
A community educator for a local nonprofit organization, Ms. Blondel was talking to Larry Wiggins, a retiree who has asthma and bronchitis. A recent survey found that asthma rates in Red Hook were almost twice as high as the citywide average.
Ms. Blondel, who, like Mr. Wiggins and Mr. Armstrong, is directly in the path of the ship emissions, said that she could not understand why the cruise ships were not using shore power all the time.
“Where is the air-monitoring equipment?” she asked. “We should have it right here.”
There haven’t been working air monitors in Red Hook since 2010. The Bloomberg administration installed one there to detect pollution for the city’s first community air survey. Vanadium, a toxic metal in marine fuel that can cause lung damage, was found near cruise terminals in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
The study’s findings were what prompted the administration to make shore power a priority.
“The oil that ships use has a lot more heavy metals in it that have a negative impact on human health,” said Adam Freed, who was the deputy director of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability in the Bloomberg administration. “We understood how important of an impact it could have.”
Nonetheless, the cruise industry is big business, and the city seems intent on expanding it. By the end of 2019, 35 cruise ships will have docked at the Brooklyn terminal; 179 will have docked in Manhattan. The city estimates that cruises brought one million visitors to New York in 2018, and $228 million in spending to the local economy in 2017.
In 2017, the city set plans in motion for a $50 million expansion of the Brooklyn and Manhattan terminals to accommodate even more of the world’s largest cruise ships, those with room for 6,000 passengers each — 50 percent more than the Queen Mary can accommodate.
In June, at a neighborhood meeting of Resilient Red Hook, a committee that was formed after Hurricane Sandy, residents expressed their frustration to officials from the development corporation, who had come to discuss the expansion plans for the first time.
The Brooklyn cruise terminal was “extremely important” to the city’s cruise business, said Michael DeMeo, a vice president at the development corporation at the time. (Mr. DeMeo has since taken a position at a marine trade organization.) To increase the number of ships, he said, upgrades were needed.
The crowd was less concerned with the tourism industry than with the quality of the air in their neighborhood.
“New York is not world class right now,” said Gita Nandan, an associate professor in the graduate school of planning at Pratt Institute. “You go to Los Angeles, to Seattle — I go to Croatia, and everyone is plugging in,” she added.
If ships were required to plug in, Mr. DeMeo said, then they would just go across the harbor, he said, and dock in New Jersey.
“We can’t force them,” he said.
The crowd jeered.
“They can pay our hospital bills,” Ms. Nandan yelled.
In New York, the decision about whether to use shore power is left to a ship’s captain, and the plug-ins are not monitored. Carlos Menchaca, a City Council member who represents Red Hook, wants to change that.
In April, Mr. Menchaca, a Democrat, proposed legislation that would require all cruise ships docking in Brooklyn to use shore power. The proposal is in discussions, a spokesman for Mr. Menchaca said.
There appears to be a groundswell for other laws to decrease air pollution with the goal of stemming climate change.
Last summer, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed into law state climate legislation that set ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Mayor Bill de Blasio has also started an initiative to reduce the city’s emissions by 80 percent. Neither the state law nor the city initiative monitors cruise ship exhaust.
When it comes to cruise ships and air pollution, the Eastern Seaboard is the Wild West. As little use as the Red Hook plug-in system gets, it is the only shore power system for cruise ships on the Atlantic in the country.
A question remains: If cruise ships are not required to plug in, why do they do it at all?
Call it altruism, says Carnival.
“When docked at the port with our ships, we operate our shore-power system when available because it is a core part of our environmental and compliance strategy around the world,” Mr. Frizzell, the Carnival spokesman, said in an email.
California, unlike New York, has made plugging in mandatory. Under a strict 2007 diesel-emissions law, the state requires that 70 percent of visiting ships — including container and refrigerated cargo vessels — connect to shore power.
Thousands of ships, from Long Beach to Oakland, use shore power every year. Problems with providing electricity are rare, and the state enforces the law vigorously. Last December, the state fined a Swiss container ship company $630,000 for repeatedly failing to plug in.
Governments in other countries are also reacting to cruise ship emissions.
Officials in London last year quashed a proposal for a cruise ship terminal because of air pollution. Candidates for national office in Australia have promised to install shore power in Sydney after residents protested about air pollution and noise from the ships. Seattle recently earmarked $30 million to expand its shore-power system.
China may be taking the strongest stance of all. Last year, the country adopted a measure requiring all cruise ships to use shore power by 2021. Cruise ships visiting China now must plug in if they have the ability to do so.
In Brooklyn, while other cruise ships are welcome to use the plug-in system, the Queen Mary is the only one that can easily access shore power because the electrical sockets on other ships do not line up with the shore-power crane, according to a development corporation spokesman.
Solutions for the problem do exist, said Mike Larkin, a sales director for Cavotec USA, which built the connections at Long Beach and Los Angeles, including a mobile unit that can carry electrical cables and plugs up and down the wharf. One such unit costs $600,000 to $800,000, Mr. Larkin said.
Jim Tampakis, 62, the owner of Marine Spares International in Red Hook, which provides shipping equipment and supplies, said that Brooklyn’s shore power system was operating at a “C-minus” level.
“It’s unacceptable,” Mr. Tampakis said. “They never anticipated flexibility in the connections. And we spent all this tax money.”
The morning after the Queen Mary 2 arrived in Brooklyn in October, the Regal Princess, another Carnival Cruise ship, berthed there for the day. Mr. Armstrong headed out his front door and looked toward the harbor.
He could see the huge white vessel and the Princess line’s iconic blue logo, made famous by “The Love Boat.” The ship dead-ended his street.
He walked down the block, where he could see faint signs of emissions.
“See that smoke coming out?” he said, pointing to haze at the ship’s stacks. “It’s actually the microscopic stuff that you can’t see, the fine particulate matter in the exhaust, that is the most dangerous to human health.”
He wanted to inspect.
The Regal Princess made headlines 18 years ago in Juneau, Alaska, when it became the first cruise ship in the world to use shore power with a plug-in built by Carnival. Just last month, it plugged into a newly built station in Kristiansand, Norway.
Mr. Armstrong strained his neck over the water to see whether the ship had plugged in, as it did here once before using an enormous extension cord. He climbed over some jagged rocks and a cement outpost, but equipment on the dock obstructed the view.
“No, you can’t see it,” Mr. Armstrong said.
“It shouldn’t be up to the likes of me,” he added, “a regular citizen, to take the ferry around and see if it’s plugged in or not.”
He took the ferry anyway.
The Regal Princess was not plugged in.
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