Environmental Groups to Sue to Remove Suisun Bay "Mothball" Fleet (70 ww2 era ships)

[The Straight Story]

Environmental Groups to Sue to Remove Suisun Bay "Mothball" Fleet

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Some environmental groups plan to sue the federal government over a fleet of mothballed warships floating east of San Francisco Bay.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups are demanding the U.S. Maritime Administration curb pollution they say the vessels are causing in regional waterways.

More than 70 ships comprise the Suisun Bay Reserve
Fleet, some dating back to World War II.

The old ships were once kept afloat in case of war, but many have fallen into disrepair.



http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=34483

[TheWraith]

1. I'll take one off their hands for five hundred bucks. NT

[The Straight Story]

2. How ya gonna get it home?

:)

[Xithras]

3. There is zero point in them existing there anymore.

The Ghost Fleet (as locals call it) was established there because of its proximity to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and the Mare Island Naval Shipyards. The thinking was that in case of war, these old ships could be quickly towed into one of the two major Bay Area shipyards to be repaired. Hunters Point was closed in the 1970's, and Mare Island closed in the mid 1990's. If a naval war DID break out today and these ships were needed, they'd have to be towed to Long Beach, San Diego, or Washington for repairs. The SF Bay Area no longer has the facilities for this kind of work.

The fleet is actually still there because the Navy doesn't know what else to do with them. None of the ships are really seaworthy enough to travel over the open ocean, there are no shipbreakers in the Bay anymore who can cut them apart, and refurbishing them without a dry dock would be an absolute nightmare. Some of these ships ar HUGE, and the fleet includes the old U.S.S. Missouri battleship which many people want to preserve. Since many of these ships don't even have functional rudders anymore, they can't even be towed safely. They can only be moved using a floating drydock.

And then where do we take them? These ships are basically scrap.

Ideally, these ships should have ALL been refurbished and moved before Mare Island closed, when they could have been sailed off to other ports or sold outright. The BRAC didn't want to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars the fleet refurbishment could have cost, so they were ignored as the base was closed. Now they sit there, slated for demolition on paper and receiving only token maintenance.

I went out and kayaked around some of the ships about ten years ago. They are impressive, but even then it was apparent that few of them would ever sail again. I can only imagine their condition today after another decade of rain and little maintenance.

[mvccd1000]

4. Read up on the James River ghost fleet. Same story on the east coast.

Remember the huge stink when three of them were towed to the UK for dismantling, then the UK said no, we won't take em?

They are very difficult to dispose of, because we follow the law that prevents us from selling them to countries that will not follow environmentally sound practices in breaking them up. (i.e., India, where they run them aground and cut them up with torches in the water.)

Some of the east coast ships have been stripped of PCBs and other contaminants and sunk as artificial reefs.

There are often stories in the Virginia Pilot ( www.hamptonroads.com ) about them.