For every day it’s anchored or docked in a harbor, a cargo ship’s smokestacks can spew as much nitrogen oxide into the air as 12,500 cars, as much as an oil refinery.
Your car or your wood stove has to meet more air pollution requirements than big ships which burn diesel, bunker oil and other fuels.
“Oceangoing ships are the sole remaining source of pollution in the United States that is not regulated,” Seattle Port Commissioner Lawrence Molloy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
But it’s believed that ships passing through the windy Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Admiralty Inlet — even those anchored in Port Angeles Harbor or at the loading dock on Indian Island — don’t affect North Olympic Peninsula air quality nearly as much as when the ships cram into the metropolitan Vancouver, B.C., Seattle and Tacoma ports.
But no one knows for sure — no measurements are taken in the Strait or in the Peninsula’s harbors.
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The rest of this story appears in Monday’s Peninsula Daily News.