The 79-foot endangered blue whale that washed ashore in Northern California in May was no match for the ship that hit it. Nor was the 56-foot endangered fin whale found floating near the Port of Los Angeles two years ago.

More than 80 endangered whales a year die from ship strikes off the coast of California, according to a recent study. Many of the carcasses sink to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen.

“Even a grazing blow by a passing ship can be catastrophic to the whale,” said Sean Hastings, an expert on ocean policy at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’ Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.

Now, Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, wants to stem the problem. This week he introduced legislation that would create a special awards program recognizing shippers who slow down along the Santa Barbara Channel, and would call on NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuaries to look at expanding a pilot program to alter shipping routes all along the Pacific, from the border of Canada to Mexico.

“The vast majority of tragic, fatal whale strikes occur in just a few highly trafficked stretches of the Pacific Coast,” Lowenthal said in statement.

Vessel strikes have been a consistent problem around the nation’s busiest port hub in Los Angeles, Long Beach as well as near the San Francisco Bay Area where shipping lanes intersect with important whale feeding grounds.

In 2013, those routes were altered as part of a pilot program, most prominently in the Santa Barbara Channel, where blue whales regularly feed, and in the Bay Area.

But the voluntary programs reaches only a fraction of the thousands of ships that speed through the oceanic highway.

Deadly commerce

Ship strikes are believed to be the biggest killer of blue and fin whales, and the second greatest cause of death for the humpback whales, along the West Coast.

During the summer months, stretches of water from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area are important feeding grounds, particularly for the blue whale. There’s an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 of those blue whales, with the world’s largest concentration along the California coast, according to the Marine Mammal Center.

R. Cotton Rockwood, a lead researcher in the study and an ecologist at Petaluma-based Point Blue Conservation Science, said only a sliver of the whales that die actually wash ashore. Most sink to the bottom of the sea, making it difficult for scientists to confirm whale strikes.

In the study, researchers used models to determine how many mortal whale strikes there were during a six month period from July to December. Based on their projections, they estimated during that period 18 blue whales are hit by ships, 22 humpbacks and 43 fin whales along the West Coast.

“These are important ecological areas for whales where they congregate and spend time being social and feeding,” he said. “There is (also) an abundance of ships between the Bay Area and Southern California. There is a lot of risk.”

Rockwood said regulations along the East Coast forcing shippers to slow down and modifying lanes have reduced whale deaths by 60 to 85 percent.

Mighty creatures

Whales are the largest animals to have lived on earth. The blue whales are 80 to 100 feet in length and can weigh 100 tons. There heart alone can be as heavy as an automobile.

But they pale in comparison to some modern container vessels that ferry billions of dollars each year of consumer goods – from tennis shoes to couches – between Asia and West Coast ports.

Stacked high with containers, the ships can run the length of three football fields and their tonnage is astronomical, said Hastings.

“The ship strike itself causes blunt force trauma, breaks bones and causes internal hemorrhaging,” he said.

The ships are so large that many of the captains don’t even know that they have struck an animal. And the whales, some of which can be 50 to 100 years old, don’t realize the threat of these ships because they simply haven’t evolved with the hulking tools of commerce.

Almost extinct

Hunting of whales through the 1800 and 1900s nearly wiped out much of their population, but the practice was outlawed in the United States by 1972. And while some species have bounced back, like the gray whales, the blue whale remains on the endangered species list.

Hastings, who had reviewed the study, said the findings were “pretty convincing” that many of the West Coast whales were killed by vessel strikes.

“The blue whale population is not increasing at a rate that you would be expecting it to,” he said.

But there remains hope, Hastings said, that programs like those run from the sanctuary will grow and help diminish hits. When it was first introduced in 2014, seven shipping companies participated agreed to slow their ship 12 knots or 13 miles an hour. The $200,000 program administered by the sanctuary and paid for by the local air district provided 125 rewards of $1,000 for slowing down.

“Slower ships are also cleaner and quieter ships in terms of air pollution and human impacts,” he said.

In Long Beach and Los Angeles port speed reduction programs are also in place to help reduce the impacts of dirty burning engines.

The benefits aren’t always obvious to those inland, but they are numerous, he said.

“It’s out of sight and out of mind,” he said. “But the ships pass on the horizon and the ships’ affect is felt by all of us in terms of pollution and ship strikes.”