Feds To Remove Toxic Ships From Suisun Bay

[Kadie]

Mar 31, 2010 10:23 am US/Pacific
Feds To Remove Toxic Ships From Suisun Bay By 2017

BENICIA, Calif. (AP) ― The federal government has agreed to remove a decaying armada that has shed toxic paint and other harmful substances into a San Francisco Bay estuary for decades.

The Natural Resources Defense Council on Wednesday said the U.S. Maritime Administration has settled a lawsuit and will remove the decrepit collection of more than 50 obsolete military vessels from Suisun Bay.

Studies by the federal government suggest the old warships have dumped more than 20 tons of copper, lead, zinc and other metals into the estuary. The waterway is a critical habitat for a number of endangered species.

The settlement with environmental groups and state water quality regulators will see half of the "ghost fleet" removed by September 2012. The rest will be gone by September 2017.

http://cbs13.com/local/ghost.fleet.removal.2.1602745.html

[Captain Hilts]

1. I've been to the ghost fleet in the James River many times. nt

[kestrel91316]

2. "Remove" - that's sort of like "away"........where are they going to remove them TO?

Unless they take them out of the water and dismantle/recycle them, they haven't solved the problem.

[old mark]

3. I saw those exact ships in Suisun bay in 1975 - they were there since WWII.

What are they going to do with that old junk? Are they usable for scrap or will they be sunk for reefs for fish?

OK - another article on these ships :

http://cbs13.com/local/ghost.fleet.san.2.1362290.html

They will be cleaned in dry dock and towed to Texas for dismantling. The Bush regime held up this project because they wanted to clean them in place.
It should have been done decades ago, but of course politicians were too "busy".


mark

[LeftinOH]

4. That's a lot of $crap metal; shouldn't the 'non-restorable' vessels have been sold for

their scrap value?

[cloudbase]

5. Nobody would take them for scrap value.

They have to be towed to the breaker's yard, and the breaker incurs the costs of dismantling the ship and other things like asbestos abatement. I probably sailed on one or two of those ships back in the day.

[Xithras]

6. There's no real reason for them to be there anyway.

The Ghost Fleet was placed there because it its proximity to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The thinking was that, if they were needed again, the ships could be tugged to the shipyard, restored, and put back into service.

Mare Island was closed in 1996, and has been completely privatized at this point. While the drydocks still exist, the other facilities needed to restore these ships have long since been relocated to other bases.

The Ghost Fleet was left behind because there was no way to tow them elsewhere, and none are capable of moving under their own power. Rather than dealing with it at the time, the Navy decided to ignore them and deal with the problem later.

The simple reality, though, is that any opportunity for these ships to reenter service ended when Mare Island closed. It's good to see that they're finally getting rid of them.