Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Fleet of Mystery

November 15, 2003

Scrapped US naval vessels moored in UK

The US Maritime Administration (MARAD) has scores of old Navy rustbuckets moored here and there around the country, from California to Virginia, and it wants, finally, to get rid of them. This is a rather ticklish proposition, for while the tons and tons of steel are valuable, the ships are riddled with nasty chemicals. Recycling the ships safely, then, is quite a job.

Which makes one wonder why the first 13 of the ships were headed for a ship-breaking facility in England until an Earthjustice lawsuit intervened.

One wonders because there are plenty of shipyards in this country eager for work and well equipped to do the job safely. Several reportedly underbid the English facility, to no avail. The theory du jour is that MARAD wants to establish a precedent of dispatching the ships without abiding by the Toxic Substances Control Act (which makes it illegal to export or import PCBs without a special waiver, available only after a public process). The government knew this full well, but evidently figured that no one would pay attention to a plan to offload these vessels on the Brits, making it easier to send many scores more ships to India and Bangladesh for dismantlement in the future once the export precedent had been set, which would save pots of money (and create pots of risk). But why would they want to save money? This administration is perfectly happy to pay top dollar to campaign contributors (think Haliburton) that are trying to rebuild Iraq. It's all quite mysterious, even more so when you hear that our government sweetened the British deal with two expensive oil tankers that the shipyard was to repair and resell for tens of millions of dollars in profit.

Setting the mystery aside for a moment, we can report that Earthjustice attorneys Martin Wagner and Marcello Mollo hauled MARAD into court in Washington, DC, and won an order requiring the agency to leave nine of the first 13 ships in port while it tries to abide by the law. The judge allowed four of the ships to set sail (they're actually being towed by large tugs), but by the time they reached England the fuss had persuaded the government there to stop the dismantling project since the British shipyard was not equipped to do it properly. The ships will likely spend the winter anchored in the English Channel while the authorities decide what to do next.

There's more to this than we yet know about. We'll keep you posted.

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org