Concerns raised over breaking up ships

Concerns raised over breaking up ships
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jul 6, 7:37 PM ET





SAN FRANCISCO - Water-quality officials and environmentalists raised concerns Friday over the Bush administration's abrupt decision to move full-steam ahead with breaking up old warships rotting in California's "mothball fleet."

The federal Maritime Administration announced Thursday that it would next month lift its moratorium on disposing of the ships. A collection of more than 50 troop transports, tankers and other vessels are rusting in limbo northeast of San Francisco.

Such a step would set in motion the towing of some vessels from Suisun Bay, a shallow estuary, to the former Naval Air Station Alameda, where the warships would be scrubbed of sea life before being hauled to a ship-breaking facility in Texas.

That scrubbing causes toxic paint to flake off into the water, and that is what worries environmentalists and state water-quality regulators.

"It looks like they're using San Francisco Bay waters as a dumping ground," said Michael Wall, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has followed the issue.

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a San Francisco environmental group working to make the ghost warships disappear, said the Maritime Administration "seems to be the one agency that is most committed to ignoring the nation's environmental regulations."

Bloom said he was disappointed that the agency intended to scrub the warships at Alameda, a military base near Oakland that was shuttered a decade ago and portions of which are currently Superfund cleanup sites. The ship-scrubbing could complicate ongoing cleanup efforts, he said.

Moreover, Bloom said he was dismayed that the Maritime Administration had not committed to obtaining permits under the Clean Water Act for the scrubbing.

Bruce Wolfe, executive officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, said his agency — charged with enforcing clean-water standards — does not want to demand such permits from the Maritime Administration.

Insisting on permits would slow the removal of the ships from Suisun Bay, Wolfe said. "We would much rather come to an agreement with them on what are the best management practices they'd use" for scrubbing the warships, Wolfe said.

Still, Wolfe said he had several concerns about the Maritime Administration's announcement.

Just last week, staff for the agency's head, Sean T. Connaughton, had pledged to provide the state with the results of tests the administration had conducted on a contaminant-containment system used on ships in Virginia, he said. The system uses six-foot-wide scrubbers to filter the paint-laden water, Wolfe said.

The Maritime Administration also had promised that hull cleaning in the bay area would start with a pilot program. The project as described in Connaugton's letter makes no provision for a "pause" to study the possible pollution generated by the first few ships, Wolfe said.

Wolfe said he also wants answers about the maintenance of dozens of ships that would remain indefinitely in the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet. Even under the most optimistic projections, the Maritime Administration only has the budget to move 15 old ships out of three facilities nationwide in the next year, Wolfe said.

That is the same number that Connaughton pledged to move out of Suisun Bay within a year. That would still leave nearly 40 decaying.

The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board was preparing a letter to the Maritime Administration to inquire about those concerns, Wolfe said.

Under a congressional order, the Maritime Administration had a 2006 deadline to dismantle ships in reserve fleets classified as no longer useful. That hasn't happened because of budget shortfalls, a shortage of facilities that can dismantle the giant ships and environmental concerns.

Recently the Maritime Administration reached agreements with Virginia and Texas that paved the way for cleaning to resume there.

"We recognize they have a challenge and they have a mandate from Congress, and they need to comply with federal law," Wolfe said of the Maritime Administration. "We want to work with them to ensure they can do that, because it can't be the environment left out in the cold in this whole process."

Contacted by The Associated Press on Friday, officials at the Maritime Administration did not respond to the concerns raised by the regulators and environmentalists.












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