Bilge water handling at US ports

This is a question posed by my brother who is a seaman. It being a piping related query, I am posting it here.

Ports in the US where they off-load Crude Oil have stringent regulations that does not allow the ship to discharge ballast / bilge water off the ship. Many of these ports don't have the facility to handle these discharges off the ship, so much so that they have to contain this on board, to find another port which can receive this. Would anyone know, why the enforcement agencies also not require the ports to have these facilities functional.

Sajit

Save a tree...please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to. Received on Tue Sep 11 10:04:00 2007