The Albert Lea Tribune’s thumbs down to the covering of the pirate crisis involving the Maersk Alabama shows that you may be out of touch. The solutions that the Albert Lea Tribune proposed showed a lack of background investigation of the topic. I believe and I think most Americans and Albert Leans would agree with me that the issue of maritime safety involving Americans is extremely important. If we didn’t care about the crews aboard American vessels, do we really care at all about our fellow Americans? The Tribune dubbed this incident a debacle, but it is not an isolated incident as the Tribune indicated.

According to the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center, in 2008 there were 42 vessels and 815 crew members taken hostage. To me, that sounds like a big problem. It would be great if we could simply ignore the waters around Somalia; unfortunately, it’s estimated that pirates roam an area of 1.1 million miles of water around the coast. That’s a really big area that cuts deep into important shipping lines.

The question of what are our ships doing over there popped into my mind. After about 30 seconds on Google I found that a lot of oil is shipped through that area. If the safety of American vessels in the waters surrounding Somalia cannot be guaranteed, not only could we see an inflation of gas prices at the pumps, we could see the deaths of regular Americans just trying to make a living. I imagine most people care about that.

Steve Piper II

Albert Lea