A 2,200-passenger cruise ship is no longer planning to anchor in Virginia’s York River, a temporary win for some residents of Yorktown, who opposed it. But the group has since expanded its area of concern to include the environmental impact of all cruise ships pulling into Virginia’s coastal and Chesapeake Bay waters.
They are now asking the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to consider enacting a broader suite of regulations that would apply to “ocean-class” passenger cruise ships in state waters.
“Mega cruise ships are like floating cities that generate power and discharge waste on a scale far exceeding that of other vessels,” members of the group called Protect Virginia wrote in an op-ed for the Newport News Daily Press.
Their petition to the state, which is open to public comments on both the air and water implications until Nov. 11, asks the environmental agency to require cruise ships in state waters to use low-sulfur fuel and to ban the use of open-loop scrubbers, technologies that one report said “take harmful pollutants out of the air and dump them into the water.”
The petition, which will be considered separately by both the air and water boards of the agency, also asks the state to restrict discharges of “graywater, blackwater and other environmentally detrimental waste products” coming from the ships. It suggests that requiring cruise ships docking near cities to tap into the local power grid could reduce near-shore emissions coming from the vessels while they are idling at ports. Cruise ships are subject to some international and federal regulations, but some reports have found enforcement and monitoring to be lacking.
“Virginia should have tougher regulations than the federal standards,” Yorktown resident Elizabeth Wilkins said. “Several states have done that as well.”
Virginia’s cruise ship traffic is currently concentrated in Norfolk but has been growing as the industry recovers from the coronavirus pandemic.
Carnival Cruise Line has been visiting Norfolk since 2002 but began continually operating out of the port from May to October in 2023. About 250,000 cruise passengers visited the city that year, according to Leisure Group Travel. And, starting in 2025, the cruise line’s 3,875-passenger Carnival Sunshine will begin sailing out of Norfolk’s port on the Elizabeth River year-round.
Princess Cruises, a smaller subsidiary of Carnival, had planned to bring a ship carrying 2,000–3,600 passengers up the York River to call at the historic city of Yorktown this year. But the cruise line cancelled that plan in February, opting instead to bring the ship to Norfolk.
Frank Wagner, a former state representative and current lobbyist for Princess Cruise Lines mentioned in an August op-ed the cruise industry’s ongoing interest in bringing more tourists to the state, especially to historic sites. And he indicated that the company’s hopes to travel the York River, though cancelled for now, have not waned.
“Our current traffic situation precludes running buses from Norfolk to these locations, which opens up opportunities for cruise ships to call on Newport News or on the York River,” Wagner wrote. “Cruise schedules are put together a year or two in advance. The time to act is now.”
