Tidewater Inc.

Pan-American Life Center 

601 Poydras Street, Suite 1900 

New Orleans, Louisiana 70130-6040 

Telephone: (504) 568-1010 

 Tidewater 

03 December 2009 

Docket Management Facility 

U.S. Department of Transportation 

West Building Ground Floor, Room W12-140 

1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE. 

Washington DC 20590 

Reference: USCG-2001-10486 

Subject: Standards for Living Organisms in Ships’ Ballast Water Discharged 

in U.S. Waters 

Tidewater Inc., through its various subsidiaries, provides offshore supply vessels 

(OSVs) and marine support services to the offshore energy industry with the world’s 

largest fleet of offshore marine service vessels. The company was incorporated in 1956. 

With a fleet of 430 vessels at 31 March 2009, the company operates in most of the 

world’s significant oil and gas exploration and production markets and provides services 

supporting all phases of offshore exploration, development and production, including: 

towing of and anchor handling of mobile drilling rigs and equipment; transporting 

supplies and industrial personnel necessary to sustain drilling, workover and production 

activities; assisting in offshore construction activities; and a variety of specialized 

services including pipe laying, cable laying and 3-D seismic work. 

While we applaud the direction of USCG in seeking to protect domestic waters from the 

harm caused by certain invasive species, it should be pointed out that the international 

model, IMO Ballast Water Management Convention takes its cue from the IMO’s 

mandate to suggest regulations palatable to Flag Administrations while placing the bulk 

of the burden on vessel owners. We respectfully submit that that approach is limited, 

because of its mandate so it cannot face the issue squarely. We submit that, in order to 

fulfill the mission tasking laid out by the legislature; a more logical and focused scheme 

is called for. The apparent simplicity of proposed equipment requirement plan, we 

submit, overlooks the variety of vessel types and their operating modes. 

The Problem: 

Any discussion of invasive species and their associated introduction vectors into U.S. 

domestic waters should necessarily encompass the whole issue lest over simplification 

leads to unintended consequences. 

Additionally an appraisal of our domestic waters needs to acknowledge regional 

characteristics and histories. Examples of this have already been made in oral 

comments in the hearings; one being the notion that the waters of the Mississippi and 

her tributaries eventually flow past New Orleans. We would add that the waters of the 

Gulf of Mexico themselves conspire to defy the proposed rule by virtue of their circular 

currents through the 7th District Zones into the 8th and then from Sector Mobile’s zone 

through the intermediate COTP zones all the way to Sector Corpus Christi. The 
USCG-2001-10486 Docket Tidewater, Inc. Comments 

December 2009 Page 2 of 4 

longshore littoral transport alone is indicative of this water movement from the white 

sand beaches of the Upper Florida Gulf Coast into the big muddy’s effluent plume until 

the larger sediment has settled by the Matagorda Bay area and then the cleaner 

beaches of South Padre island. We have pointed before to the cyclical breeding 

patterns of the aquatic species which breed inshore and live offshore, they too would 

tend to carry any parasitic species inshore, which, we submit, is reason enough to 

consider the Gulf of Mexico a single “zone” for the purposes of future ballast water 

regulation. 

By the same token, we are concerned about mid-ocean ballast water exchange in the 

Gulf of Mexico, we submit logically a Caribbean Control Area be established to prohibit 

these exchanges in the Gulf and Caribbean (which may already have been created in a 

de facto sense, since there may not be areas beyond 200 NM of land). We believe that 

sea lanes in general are restricted by great circle transit routes; this tends to make 

certain areas common for the deep sea traders’ mid-ocean exchange practices. While 

we believe that organism dispersal is probably below viable thresholds, we submit that 

the current trend for the tonnage of deep sea vessels to incrementally increase is likely 

to lead to increases of these concentrations. 

During the presentation at the recent public hearing in New Orleans, the brief coverage 

of the Great Lakes invasion by Zebra Mussels mentioned in passing that this species 

was found to be filling an apparently empty ecological niche in the Great Lakes 

ecosystem. We wonder how many opportunistic species are currently filling niches left 

vacant either from a water body’s previously polluted state (with the resultant lost of 

native species) or whether a particular niche had never previously been filled. This 

poses the question whether a maritime defense against a given invasive species is 

even viable with a vulnerable ecosystem since without a healthy ecosystem there would 

be no competing species or predators. We submit that in a vulnerable ecosystem there 

would be additional damage if, for example, de-oxygenated waters were continually 

added, particularly in large volume to the body of water. In our opinion this is the likely 

result of BWMS treated waters being dumped, by current and future deep sea large 

tonnage vessels, into port areas. While we have not researched the matter; logically it 

would appear that if each port maintained the means to segregate ballast waters 

arriving from foreign routes, those waters could be used to make up trim for those 

vessels departing for foreign voyages. Perhaps this could be effected by means of 

shoreside tank farms piped to the docks or via dedicated tank barges. As an aside, 

creation of these sorts of port services seems in line with the current administration’s 

desire to provide environmentally desirable opportunities. 

At issue, as we see it is that while every vessel may be seen as a viable vector for 

invasive species transportation, this proposed regulation seeks to control ballast water 

for all commercial vessels as though they were deep sea traders; even though most of 

the hulls are on simple coastal or inland routes. In several separate respects is this 

logic suspect; first, as noted the regulations should be targeted at ballast water arriving 

on voyages from differing eco-systems that is actually taken, untreated from those 

waters. While this aspect of the rulemaking concerns itself directly with standards, it is 

apparent that the standards are a moving target; some of this is obvious with respect to 

the solicitation based on the increasingly, over time, rigorousness of the two stated 

standards. What is not mentioned though is that the standards are based upon living 

organisms; not dormant or otherwise spore-like phases of marine life. We submit that 

this aspect is the more troubling from the standpoint of ballast water treatment device 
USCG-2001-10486 Docket Tidewater, Inc. Comments 

December 2009 Page 3 of 4 

standards, since destruction of those phases may well be impracticable at present 

without actually distilling ballast water. Even so any residue may well have to be treated 

as toxic waste on board or incinerated. 

Notwithstanding that approved devices have yet to be deployed, others have pointed 

out and we join with them in suggesting that the financial projections in the rule do not 

reflect what we understand will be the true costs of this proposal. It may be alarmist, 

but true in our opinion, to suggest that the U.S. commercial maritime presence 

worldwide is likely to fall further behind her trading partners if this proposed method of 

addressing invasive species proceeds without radical modification. 

Applicability of the Proposed Rules to Offshore Support Vessels 

Since OSVs typically carry municipal water in their ballast tanks, except in unusual 

situations primarily as a result of maintaining stability in heavy weather operation, we 

submit that OSVs in routine operation should be exempted from the requirement to 

carry BWMS. In the case of those evolutions that do require taking on ballast water 

from the sea, we propose that those waters be transferred to shoreside treatment 

facilities since the tanks will need cleaning prior to accepting municipal water for 

offshore facilities. Furthermore, they generally operate in coastal waters within 200 

nautical miles of shore posing little threat of encountering invasive species not already 

in U.S. waters. 

The original ballast water rulemaking was not focused on or targeted at the offshore 

support vessel industry and so, not surprisingly; the unique aspects of those vessels’ 

operations were not considered in the writing of the rule. To its credit, once the Coast 

Guard understood the impact of the regulations on the industry, it produced Navigation 

Vessel Inspection Circular (NVIC) 07-04 Change 1, which mitigated the negative impact 

of that rulemaking on the industry. 

We note that coastwise Oil Tankers are exempted from the carriage requirement by 

legislation and we submit that OSV routes in oil field service are less prone to the 

acquisition of foreign invasive species than those of coastwise tankers. 

Summary 

Clearly, regulations related to invasive species must be shown to be effective in 

addressing the problem. The Office of Management and Budget has made it clear that 

agencies must review regulations to determine whether they address issues in a costeffective way. We submit that narrowing the focus to vessels actually using foreign 

ballast water would be more likely to result in reduction of importation of invasive 

species via maritime transport vectors. 

We also strongly recommend that port treatment storage and treatment services and 

facilities should be investigated as a more cost effective method of defending our ecosystems. It should also be pointed out that such infrastructures could use ‘greener’ 

sources of invasive species eradication than is available on board sea-going vessels; 

this may well be an issue, air pollution-wise, particularly in west coast ports. 

We understand that Coast Guard has a narrow focus in this proposed rule however we 

feel unable to directly address the posed questions of standards and timeline since the 

context of the application of these standards is, we believe, unrealistic. We have 

attempted to make rational suggestions for addressing this issue both in this comment 

and in previous submissions to Coast Guard and EPA dockets. We stand ready to 
USCG-2001-10486 Docket Tidewater, Inc. Comments 

December 2009 Page 4 of 4 

participate in future discussions on this subject as events permit. Tidewater appreciates 

the opportunity to submit comments on this matter. 

Sincerely, 

Mark Sales 

Regulatory & Systems Engineer 

Tidewater Marine, L.L.C.