Hallelujah! Fuel Spills Subside at Caribbean Hurricane Hole – Loose Cannon
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When all else fails, try journalism. Hallelujah! Fuel Spills Subside at Caribbean Hurricane HoleLeaky Fishing Fleet Finally Leaves Luperon Bay, a Wildlife Refuge
I started to write this story about Luperon Bay in the Dominican Republic two Mondays ago, but at 7:30 a.m. I got the message that Fernando Capellan’s luxury catamaran was destroyed by lightning. That news changed the focus of my workday, as you can see:
The story I had been about to publish was actually good news for this popular hurricane refuge, and the fiery doom of Capi IV, herself docked at Luperon, did not really fit that narrative. The good news: Luperon Bay appears to have turned the corner regarding it’s chronic petroleum spills. This slow-motion environmental disaster had begun sometime after 2021, when Dominican authorities exiled Puerto Plata’s ramshackle fishing fleet so as not to spoil the view for cruise ship guests arriving at the city’s newly opened Taino Bay cruiseship port.
This was the very definition of a Faustian bargain: Send your fishing fleet to a designated national wildlife refuge to spare American tourists the sight of rusting hulls and petroleum sheens near the cruise ship dock. After the move, fuel spills became a regular occurrence in Luperon Bay, often saturating the air with a smell of petroleum strong enough at times to wake members of the foreign sailboat population from a deep sleep.
American Captain Liza Hash, former master of a dive boat, is serving three years in U.S. federal prison right now for pumping her oily bilge overboard at sea, not in a wildlife refuge. There was no corresponding law enforcement effort to combat multiple offenses in Luperon, even though Dominican laws are similar. The elephant in the room was the fact that some number of the fishing fleet—25 or so boats at its height—were controlled by members of a drug cartel. Apparently, this had a paralyzing effect on local officialdom. Once the principals were arrested as part of “Operation Buffalo NK” in September 2024, three of the fishing boats under their control were seized and today remain in Luperon Bay tied to mangroves.
At the same time, the fleet was shrinking because of what could be described as a Darwin factor. Beginning in May 2023, five fishing boats were destroyed by fire attributed to careless fuel handling, not including a boat damaged and its crewman killed by an explosion caused by him cleaning the engine with gasoline. And then, recently, the rest of the fleet just went away—no official statement or fanfare. Spills have stopped (except for that one time when a salvage boat was being refueled at the government dock during the effort to remove the sunken hulks of the burnt vessels). According to a source, the next water-quality challenge will be to connect more homes in this village of about 17,000 people to its sewage treatment plant, operational since January 2021 but never built out fully.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Sometimes he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
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