The Elliott Bay/Duwamish restoration program: A status report

Injuries to natural resources from the release of hazardous substances into aquatic environments have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in compensatory damages awarded under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) and other legislation. The institutional mechanisms for negotiating and carrying out the terms of CERCLA natural resource settlements are still in their infancy, and each case has a unique set of injuries, assigned damages, payout schedules, trustee council membership and operating procedures, and environmental conditions and constraints. One of the settlements that has made significant progress toward large‐scale habitat enhancement has occurred in Elliott Bay, a busy, seriously impacted urban harbor in Washington State. The Elliott Bay case is unique among natural resource injury settlements because of the active involvement of two local governments, the City of Seattle, and Metro, who were named as defendants in a lawsuit brought by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on behalf of the natural resource trustees of Elliott Bay. Both local governments have maintained, and continue to operate, outfalls that discharge into Elliott Bay, and both entities were subject to attempts to recover damages under CERCLA. Following the filing of the lawsuit over injuries to the natural resources of the estuary, alleged to have resulted from the operation of these outfalls, the parties involved negotiated a consent decree settlement. The Elliott Bay/Duwamish Restoration Program has established a process to redress some of the injuries that were attributed to the operation of these outfalls.     

Geography and Coastal Management

This article presents an overview of the relationship between geography and coastal management. It explores the nature of geography as well as the geographical underpinnings of key notions within coastal management, in particular, “coast,” “conflict,” and “integration.” The article considers the integrated coastal management process and tracks the influence of geography on the development of the discipline's theory and practice, as well as its academic infrastructure. The article concludes that although geography both underpins and offers useful insights into coastal management, a challenge remains to explore in greater depth the benefits of applied geographical approaches to the management of coasts.     

The Effectiveness of Coastal Zone Management in the United States

The Coastal Zone Management Effectiveness Study was undertaken between 1995 and 1997 to determine how well state coastal management programs in the United States were implementing five of the core objectives of the U.S. Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA). The five core objectives studied were: (1) protection of estuaries and coastal wetlands; (2) protection of beaches, dunes, bluffs and rocky shores; (3) provision of public access to the shore; (4) revitalization of urban waterfronts; and (5) accommodation of seaport development (as an illustration of the policy to give priority to coastal-dependent uses). Separate articles in this issue of Coastal Management report the findings of the five studies, each dealing with one of the core objectives. Each of the articles assesses issue importance, processes and tools used, and the limited outcome data available for that objective. This article provides an overview of the purposes of the study, the methodology used, the summary findings of each study, and overall conclusions and recommendations of the study team. State coastal programs are found to be effective in addressing the five CZMA objectives examined, but this conclusion is based on very limited information about program outcomes. A more definitive conclusion will require better outcome information. Coastal managers in the United States have not agreed upon indicators of success, which severely inhibits systematic and sustained collection of outcome information. A national outcome monitoring and performance evaluation system is recommended to address these deficiencies and allow better determinations of program effectiveness in the future.     

Shipping control and the changing use of marine space

In this paper Professor Couper discusses the divisions of marine space as set out in the Revised Single Negotiating Text of UNCLOS III in relation to maritime accidents. This is followed by a contribution by Mr Burger on statistical material related to the incidence of marine accidents in North-West European waters. The third section of the paper by Captain S. Abdelgalil, is devoted to a technical discussion on traffic lanes in confined waters.     

Linking mercury exposure to habitat and feeding behaviour in Beaufort Sea beluga whales

Mercury (Hg) levels in the Beaufort Sea beluga population have been increasing since the 1990's. Ultimately, it is the Hg content of prey that determines beluga Hg levels. However, the Beaufort Sea beluga diet is not understood, and little is known about the diet Hg sources in their summer habitat. During the summer, they segregate into social groups based on habitat use leading to the hypothesis that they may feed in different food webs explaining Hg dietary sources. Methyl mercury (MeHg) and total mercury (THg) levels were measured in the estuarine-shelf, Amundsen Gulf and epibenthic food webs in the western Canadian Arctic collected during the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES) to assess their dietary Hg contribution. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report MeHg levels in estuarine fish and epibenthic invertebrates from the Arctic Ocean. Although the Mackenzie River is a large source of Hg, the estuarine-shelf prey items had the lowest MeHg levels, ranging from 0.1 to 0.27 μg/g dry weight (dw) in arctic cisco (Coregonus autumnalis) and saffron cod (Eleginus gracilis) respectively. Highest MeHg levels occurred in fourhorn sculpin (Myoxocephalus quadricornis) (0.5 μg/g dw) from the epibenthic food web. Beluga hypothesized to feed in the epibenthic and Amundsen Gulf food webs had the highest Hg levels matching with high Hg levels in associated food webs, and estuarine-shelf belugas had the lowest Hg levels (2.6 μg/g dw), corresponding with the low food web Hg levels, supporting the variation in dietary Hg uptake. The trophic level transfer of Hg was similar among the food webs, highlighting the importance of Hg sources at the bottom of the food web as well as food web length. We propose that future biomagnification studies incorporate predator behaviour with food web structure to assist in the evaluation of dietary Hg sources.     

The long island response to the risks of outer continental shelf oil production

Abstract

The legal battles employed as a strategy to secure increased environmental safeguards identified by the technical studies demonstrate the role of public opinion in shaping federal actions. This article approaches the question of risk from OCS oil production activities by discussing the methodology developed to identify the probability of impact to the south shore of Long Island from the potential of an oil spill, either from drilling or transport activities. A set of probability curves were developed in accordance with seasonal climatic and current patterns in order to establish a range of hazard zones to enable the development of regulatory policy for the location and relocation of shipping lanes that would minimize direct impact to the near shore waters and coastline of Long Island.     

Experimental Study of System Optimization for Suppression of Vehicle Vibration

The improvements of ride comfort and vehicle maneuverability in the vehicle design can be achieved by using an active suspension. However, the problems in such a control are the complex control logic because of the control laws incompatible with the improvements of ride comfort and maneuverability, and the cost increase because of various sensors to be attached. Therefore, we examined the control abilities of ride comfort and maneuverability on a unique control law using frequency shaped LQ, and controlled the characteristic of the contact between tire and road without a road displacement sensor     

锻件材料可以延长车轮寿命

在车辆修理的总费用中,轮对维修的费用-般会占到30%.轮对维修的费用主要发生在用于车轮镟修和轮对的更换上.尽管材料因素限制了车轮的使用寿命早已成为共识,但到目前为止,在采用新型材料以显著提高车轮寿命方面并没有太大的进展.     

Evaluation of automotive forward collision warning and collision avoidance algorithms

Collision warning/collision avoidance (CW/CA) systems target a major crash type and their development is a major thrust of the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative. They are a natural extension of adaptive cruise control systems already available on many car models. Many CW/CA algorithms have recently been proposed but the existing literature mainly focuses on algorithm development. Evaluations of these algorithms have been usually based on subjective ratings. The main contribution of this paper is the utilization of a naturalistic driving data set for the evaluation of CW/CA algorithms. We first collect manual driving data from the ICCFOT project, then process the data by Kalman smoothing, and finally identify 'threatening' and 'safe' data sets according to vehicle brake inputs and vehicle range behavior. Five CW/CA algorithms published in the literature are evaluated against the identified data sets. The performance of these algorithms is determined through a performance metric commonly used in signal detection and information retrieval under unbalanced data population.     

Lessons in ownership, regulation and management from 100 years of bus transport in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka observes 100 years of bus passenger transport in 2007. During this period the country has seen different forms of service providers ranging from private sector monopolies to state sector monopolies. It also has seen several changes in state policy ranging from welfare orientated service provision to entire market determined without any regulation. The existing regulated mixed competition is also characterized by poorly equipped regulators. In conclusion, the paper traces the different stages of failure that have led to the poor quality of bus transport services existing at present.