The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina

Author:Ian Urbina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

11

WASTE AWAY

You wouldn’t think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we’ll do it one day. That’s how negligent we are.

—Ian Rankin, Blood Hunt

For centuries, humanity has viewed the ocean as a metaphor for infinity. The assumption was—and frankly still is for many people—that the enormity of the sea came with a limitless ability to absorb and metabolize all. This vastness is what lends the ocean deity-like potential. And more narrowly, it is also what has provided us over the years with the license to dump virtually anything offshore. Oil, sewage, corpses, chemical effluvium, garbage, military ordnance, and even at-sea superstructures like oil rigs could disappear into the ocean, as if swallowed up by a black hole, never to be seen again.

I began my explorations of the sea with investigations of the exploitation of men and how life and work at sea damaged them. Over time, I realized the abused fishermen I talked to and the illegal fishing vessels they worked on were just one tiny part of a vast ecosystem. Looking at exploitation of the ocean required looking at the ocean itself—not as a passive backdrop, a canvas for bad behavior, but as a living organism in its own right, a creature that men and women skate across the surface of, like the sea lice that cling to the skin of a whale. It wasn’t enough for me to study the lice; I needed to understand the whale as well and how its parasitic passengers were making it sick.

A newly hired engineer on an American cruise ship, the Caribbean Princess, Chris Keays was also trying to understand how things work offshore. But on August 23, 2013, he knew immediately that something was amiss in the ship’s engine room. The twenty-eight-year-old Scotsman was a low-level engineer who had just graduated from nautical school when he had signed up for what he believed was his dream job aboard the 952-foot-long ocean liner, one of the largest passenger ships on the planet. The famed ship was a floating village, with a mini golf course, a casino, an outdoor movie theater, and nineteen decks, with room for more than three thousand passengers and roughly a thousand crew members.

Keays was on his second stint on the ship, which was twenty-three miles from its destination in Southampton, England, when he went exploring in the engine room. A cavernous three-story maze of tangled metal with massive shiny pipes big enough that a small child could crawl through them, the engine room was located in the bowels of the ship and staffed by four dozen men who were surrounded by dozens of pulsing machines and glowing monitors. Venturing into an unfamiliar section where he did not typically work, Keays saw something that swiftly soured his exuberance over his new job: an illegal device known in the industry as a magic pipe.

From his marine studies in Glasgow, Keays knew exactly what he was looking at. Several feet long, the pipe stretched from a nozzle on a carbon filter pump to a water tank.

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