SAFE HARBOR
Coast Guard crew quietly keeping COVID-19 at bay at our ports.
It was a chilly and windy February day when the LNG tanker Diamond Gas Rose was being towed by tugboats along the Surfside Beach jetties.
The liquefied natural gas tanker left Shanghai on Jan. 4 and had arrived at its destination at Freeport LNG after more than a month at sea.
Cold waves smashed against the jetties. A couple of surfers in wet suits toughed it out in the chilly waters. Families strolled along the ship channel.
A couple of people, including myself, snapped photos of the passing LNG tanker but nobody could have guessed how much their lives would change over the next few weeks.
The coronavirus then was mainly confined to China but it quickly spread across the globe resulting in stay-at-home orders and shutdowns that closed beaches, parks and other public spaces in the Houston area.
As I have learned over the past few weeks, the U.S. Coast Guard and local port officials did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to keep the deadly virus off the docks. Procedures they developed during the Ebola crisis of 2014 and other pandemics such as SARS, MERS, Swine flu and Zika appear to be paying off.
Whenever a cruise ship or tanker is 96 hours away from entering a U.S. port, the ship must file a “notice of arrival” with the Coast Guard stating their destination and declaring if any crew members or passengers are sick. There’s even a form from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to report an illness or death.
Ultimately, it is the Coast Guard that determines if a vessel is safe to enter the channel. As with previous pandemics, the Coast Guard has been monitoring the coronavirus carefully.
The agancy issued a Jan. 24 alert warning about the coronavirus, stating that it was largely confined to China but that two U.S citizens who visited the center of the outbreak in Hubei Province had already come down with the deadly respiratory disease. That was just the beginning. In a Feb. 2 alert, the Coast Guard said commercial vessels that had been to China with no sick crew members would still be allowed to enter the United States but with restrictions — that the crew remain aboard the vessel except for cargo work at the dock and while stocking up on supplies.
Several weeks later, a March 16 alert extended those same restrictions to ships from a growing number of nations dealing with the outbreak of the virus.
Bill Diehl, a retired Coast Guard captain who leads the Greater Houston Port Bureau, said the procedures have been working. There have been very few cases of COVID-19 at facilities along the Houston Ship Channel, and those have been linked to local workers who contracted it in nearby communities, he said.
For the most part, ship crews — even those from nations without travel restrictions — are self-quarantining for their own safety.
Meanwhile, the International Seafarers Center and other port facilities that physically receive crew members from visiting ships are taking precautions such as keeping crews separate from each other.
“Everyone’s holding each other to a higher standard,” Diehl said.
Traffic along the Houston Ship Channel — ships moving in and out of the channel or transfering from one facility to another — averages about 50 vessels a day.
Although those numbers took a dip in mid-April, Diehl said they have returned to normal levels of traffic.
But with limited foreign flights in and out of the United States, Diehl said crew changes have become a little bit more complicated.
“They could still do a crew change in other ports such as Panama,” Diehl said.