Kalakala ferry's quagmire: It can't stay or goROB CARSON | Staff writer •The Olympian Published May 05, 2012
In 2004, when he got the phone call from Karl Anderson’s office, Steve Rodrigues thought he had finally found his angel.
Rodrigues and his battered ship, the 1935 ferry
Kalakala, were in desperate straits.
After wearing out its welcome in Seattle, the
Kalakala was being evicted from Neah Bay, where the U.S. Coast Guard was calling it a hazard to navigation and threatening to haul it into the ocean and sink it.
Just in the nick of time, Anderson came to the rescue, offering Rodrigues safe moorage for the
Kalakala on property he owned on Tacoma’s Hylebos Waterway.
As a potential savior. Anderson seemed to have everything Rodrigues wanted.
An heir to Tacoma’s Concrete Technology Corp., Anderson was wealthy and well connected; he had business savvy and – best of all – he owned one of the only graving docks in Puget Sound big enough to pull the 276-foot vessel into and restore it to its original condition.
A lawsuit pending in Pierce County Superior Court shows just how badly that turned out.
On March 21, Anderson filed an eviction suit against Rodrigues, asking for back moorage fees and penalties Rodrigues has no way of paying.
Rodrigues says he’s homeless and penniless, having spent everything he had on the effort to fix up the historic ferry.
At a table at a downtown Tacoma Starbucks, where Rodrigues occasionally sets up a temporary office, he put his hand over his heart.
“At one time, Karl had it in here for the
Kalakala,” Rodrigues said last week. “Now he’s lost it and turned into a bully.”
From Rodrigues’ point of view, Anderson made a lousy angel.
“Karl invested the site,” he said, “but not one other penny.”
Anderson sees it differently. He never intended to be anybody’s angel, he said, and he had no intention of personally bankrolling a
Kalakala renovation.
“I felt sorry for the guy,” he said. “He was being evicted out of Neah Bay and I thought, ‘I’m not using that waterfront. Everybody’s being mean to him.’ So I invited him down.”
Anderson took a position as secretary treasurer on the board of the
Kalakala Alliance Foundation, a nonprofit organization Rodrigues set up to attract investors and save the ship. But all efforts failed.
“It didn’t take me long to realize that Steve had a lot of fantastic ideas about what he wanted to do, but he didn’t really have any chance of actually doing them,” Anderson said. “I tried to help him for a couple of years with ideas of what to do, but he basically ignored everything.
“I thought, if he’s not going to listen to me, why waste my time? I guess it’s like the old saying: ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ ”
A COMPLICATED MESS
The eviction lawsuit is just part of the mess Rodrigues and the
Kalakala are in.
Last winter, water began pouring in through holes in the ferry’s hull, causing it to list so badly it was breaking off rotten pilings on shore.
The environmental group Citizens for a Healthy Bay sounded an alarm, raising concerns that the
Kalakala would break free and go careening up and down the Hylebos, smashing into other ships and docks, or sink and block the heavily used industrial channel, spilling fuel and toxic chemicals.
According to the Port of Tacoma, about 75 ocean-going ships, including log carriers and freighters, go in and out of the Hylebos each year. If the channel were blocked, some businesses would have to cease operations, the port says, and hundreds of workers would be affected.
In December, the Coast Guard declared the
Kalakala a hazard to navigation, an official milestone that gave the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the authority to seize the ferry and dispose of it.
The problem is, there’s no place to take the vessel and, even if there were, the Coast Guard says it’s too fragile to move.
Despite a flurry of meetings and teleconferences over the past few months by the Coast Guard, the Army Corps, the Port of Tacoma, Citizens for a Healthy Bay, the state Department of Ecology, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and worried businesses along the Hylebos, nobody’s been able to come up with a solution.
Even the cheapest possibility, fixing up the
Kalakala just enough to tow and cutting it up for scrap, is estimated to cost between $2 million and $3 million – a cost nobody wants to get stuck with and which has sent those with potential liability scurrying for cover.
CUTTING TIES
Anderson admits his eviction lawsuit is a way of publicly disavowing any connection to the
Kalakala.
With federal regulators and attorneys casting around for parties with the ability to pay, Anderson wants to make sure he’s not the last standing target.
“I filed the lawsuit to let the world know that I no longer want him there, and so everybody would not be pointing their finger at me,” Anderson said. “I own the property, but I can’t make him move.”
Rodrigues says that over the nine years he’s owned the boat, he’s managed to raise about $500,000, all of which is gone. He’s sacrificed his career as a civil engineer to the effort, he said, as well as a house he owned in Tumwater.
“I don’t have a penny,” he said. “I’m homeless. I’ve given everything for this. Under federal law they can take my Social Security. That’s the only thing I have left.”
The Army Corps has about $1 million available from the National Emergency Sunken Vessel fund, but as corps spokesman William Dowell said, “A million dollars isn’t going to take care of this thing.”
The corps has the authority to seize the
Kalakala, but it has paused because it doesn’t have enough money to complete the job.
“We can’t declare it a hazard to navigation and then not do anything about it,” Dowell said. “Once it’s federalized, there’s no turning back. We get out there and destroy it, basically.”
Bill Anderson, the director of Citizens for a Healthy Bay (and no relation to Karl Anderson) said a feeble effort was made to get other concerned agencies, including his organization, the Port of Tacoma and concerned businesses along the Hylebos, but the attempt basically went nowhere.
“That was a no-go,” he said. “The port wasn’t interested and neither was anybody else.”
The port nixed a plan to temporarily secure the
Kalakala by driving pilings into the floor of the Hylebos on its water side.
The
Kalakala is tied to Karl Anderson’s property, but part of it is floating over land owned by the port. The property line runs right through the ship, and the pilings would have to be driven on port property.
“We would actually prefer a much more permanent solution” port spokeswoman Tara Mattina said. “Even if it’s securely fastened in place, there would still be risks. If it’s not a seaworthy vessel, there are risks of it breaking apart.”
Mattina said a preliminary review by the port’s attorney indicates the agency would not be liable for damages if the
Kalakala breaks free. However, she said, the economic and environmental consequences could be significant.
The Hylebos is part of a federal Superfund site. Some have expressed concern that if the
Kalakala breaks away from its moorage and sinks over an area where toxic sediments have been capped, efforts to bring it up could repollute the waterway.
WHO COULD BE HURT
As for businesses along the waterway, Schnitzer Steel has perhaps the most to lose if the
Kalakala sinks in the Hylebos.
Schnitzer, a multinational corporation, buys recycled metals, grinds them up and exports them to Asia in deep draft ships that carry some 30,000 tons per load.
“We’re worried about not getting our ships out,” said Louise Bray, a governmental and public affairs manager for Schnitzer. “It would be economically devastating if this (the
Kalakala) were to go in the channel.
“We’d have to lay people off. We’d have to shut down operations.”
Among the Coast Guard’s many complaints about the
Kalakala is the provisional way it’s been tied to shore. Schnitzer recently donated new mooring cables and, over Rodrigues’ objections of trespassing, Anderson had one of his crews install the cables as the Coast Guard looked on.
Bray said that if the
Kalakala were broken up for salvage, the steel in it would not begin to cover the costs.
“It would be worth something,” she said, “but not much because it’s been rusting and in the water for so long.”
None of the agencies involved believes any hope remains of the
Kalakala being restored.
“You just can’t look at it like that anymore,” said Bill Anderson at Citizens for a Health Bay. “It’s a piece of junk.”
Capt. Scott Ferguson, commander of the Coast Guard’s Puget Sound sector, was less blunt about it, but he essentially agreed.
“There isn’t enough good steel on the vessel,” he said. “We would have to be very careful when we touch her because the steel is so paper thin it’s very delicate.”
“I know there’s historical value here,” Ferguson said. “Ultimately what I would hope is that critical pieces – memorial pieces – could be taken from the vessel and displayed somewhere. The idea of actually trying to fix the
Kalakala is going to be pretty far-fetched.”
Rodrigues emphatically disagrees.
He’s generally a soft-spoken man, but at Starbucks, when asked whether it might not be time to finally give up, his voice rose to a pitch that had other patrons casting glances.
“It’s still feasible,” he insisted. “It’s not a dead ship. To this day we have never given up, and we’re not going to. I’m going to win. I have no doubt.”
He said holes beneath the ferry’s waterline have been repaired, and the vessel is floating 2 feet higher than it ever has.
“Give me a home for the
Kalakala and I’ll show you the money,” he said. “It would be a success anywhere.”
Rodrigues and his pro bono attorney plan to fight Anderson’s eviction lawsuit by contending Pierce County Superior Court has no jurisdiction.
Rodrigues wants the case moved to federal court, where he says the truth will come out about how he’s been treated unfairly by government agencies.
And as for Karl Anderson?
“The best thing I can imagine is that we could somehow bring in a space ship, put it in a transponder and pull it off somewhere,” he said.
And yet … Anderson said he has not completely given up hope that the
Kalakala might somehow be restored.
“I would never say, ‘Never,’ ” he said. “I’ll tell anybody who asks me: I think the
Kalakala is the third most recognized icon in Washington, after Mount Rainier and the Space Needle.
“People love the
Kalakala,” he said. “The media love it. They’re fascinated by it. If somebody on the
Kalakala farts, they want to write about it.”
“It would be nice if somebody came over and said, ‘I’ve got umpteen billion dollars; I’d like to spend $20 or $30 million on the
Kalakala,” Anderson said. “But I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening.”
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