Cruise ships, too many legal loopholes

Venice - New limits imposed by the government on the transit of cruise ships in the Venetian lagoon will have a significant impact on the development plans of the Venice Passenger Terminal (VTP) as of 1 November 2014. From that date all ships exceeding 96,000 gross tonnes can no longer travel through the Giudecca Canal. How has this limit been defined and what technical merit does it have? It has been rumoured that at first the government was inclined to set the new limit to 90,000 GRT, but then raised it by another 6,000 tonnes after pressure from shipowners to allow entry to Venice to all cruise ships now known as ‘Panamax’ (i.e. with dimensions fit to pass through the locks of the Panama Canal).

Between 2000 and 2010 various classes of ships with these features have been built, but after the Panama’s new locks project this limit had been exceeded. In fact all companies and construction sites have already focused on building vessels over 120,000 GRT, allowing greater economies of scale. Following these limits coming into force VTP is expecting a loss of up to 174 dockings for 2015, corresponding to a decrease of 1,037,397 passengers (-60% compared to traffic forecast for 2014), with a loss of 260 million euro of direct local and induced spending and at least 2,553 employees. An impact that may be reduced if companies would take into account the new Venetian parameters when building their vessels. It will therefore depend on the brands currently using oversized ships in the Lagoon (MSC, Costa, Celebrity, Princess, P&O) whether repercussions on the Venice passenger terminal’s activity can be limited. VTP will certainly not register the record numbers of recent years, at least until the new channel to reach the Marittima is developed, which would allow this capacity limit to be exceeded. But a timeframe has not been set as of yet.

According to the government the 96,000 GRT limit will protect Venice’s delicate environment. It is questionable whether that is really so: there are no scientific studies that prove it and it wouldn’t make any difference in terms of manoeuvrability. As for pollution reduction systems, the largest ships are also the most modern and therefore the most state-of-the-art, due to progress in this field in recent years. VTP had in fact initially proposed a qualitative instead of a quantitative (gross tonnage) criterion for the new restrictions, as was later decided. However, as the gross tonnage denotes the total volume of a ship’s enclosed spaces, according to the new limit coming into force at the end of next year, the Costa Fortuna (102,587 GRT) with its length of 272 meters and width of 35.50 would no longer be allowed to travel through the Giudecca Canal.

The Msc Magnifica (95128 GRT), meanwhile, 294 meters long and 32.25m wide, being 22 meters longer than the Fortuna, would be allowed to pass. These are the contradictions of the new limit. Even the Magnifica’s twin ship La Musica (92,409 GRT) would continue docking in the Lagoon undisturbed, even though a picture of it has been used by the “Comitato No Grandi Navi” in promoting the campaign against cruise ships in Venice. And so the controversy is unlikely to end with the government’s decision of 5 November and the waters of the Lagoon will probably remain an issue of contention for a long time to come.