The following letter from Mayor Gayle McLaughlin was sent to Sean T. Connaughton, Maritime Administrator, pursuant to City Council directive.

Following the letter are two pieces from today’s San Francisco Chronicle that continue to flail the Mothball Fleet disposal issue. Polly Parks, Director of the North American Ship Dismantlement Association, an industry trade group, editorializes about the economic infeasibility of doing the job in the Bay Area, challenging:

“If a Bay Area company wants to start up and has a viable, competitive, regulatory compliant, business model that works in the regulatory uncertainty of the Bay Area, the Maritime Administration is still accepting proposals for pre-qualification.”

Maybe it would be helpful if Parks would bring one of her constituent ship breaking companies to the Bay Area to initiate such a start up, instead of defending the lax environmental enforcement and cheap labor in Texas where ships are dismantled little differently than in India and Bangladesh.

July 20, 2007

Sean T. Connaughton

Maritime Administrator,

U.S. Department Of Transportation
West Building
Southeast Federal Center
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20590
 

Subject: Suisun Mothball (National Defense Reserve) Fleet

Dear Administrator Connaughton:

On July 17, 2007, the City Council of the City of Richmond voted unanimously to express its enthusiasm for the prospect of dismantling ships from the Suisun Mothball Fleet in Richmond at the former Kaiser Shipyard 3 drydocks. The City Council further directed the city manager to evaluate the feasibility of this concept, including possible ways of reducing labor costs and making such an operation economically competitive by utilizing workers in training and apprenticeship programs.

We believe the prospect for dismantling ships in Richmond offers a confluence of more public policy objectives than any other option for the following reasons:

1.      Unlike the remainder of the expansive WW II shipbuilding facilities in Richmond, the drydocks at Shipyard 3 were intended to be permanent and were funded and constructed by the government with this intention. The facilities were used for ship dismantling, including ships from the National Defense Reserve Fleet, well into the 1970s until such operations moved elsewhere seeking lower labor costs and lax environmental regulations.

2.      Sims/Hugo Neu, the world’s largest metal recycling company, is located within a half mile of Shipyard 3 and is accessible by road, rail and water.

3.      Dismantling in Richmond would avoid the cost of preliminary hull cleaning and towing to Texas, which we understand is about $1 million per ship. Some of the money saved could be used to refurbish and refit the drydocks as required for hip dismantling.

4.      The prospect of a ship breaking up and blocking or contaminating a waterway while being towed to Texas would be avoided.

5.      Richmond has a high unemployment rate and a high crime rate, particularly homicides, compared to the rest of the Bay Area, the State of California and the nation. Unemployed persons could be trained for and provided jobs in ship dismantling. Some of the causes of unemployment in Richmond are rooted in the precipitous abandonment of the shipyards in 1945, which at their peak, were the largest and most productive in the world.

6.      The Shipyard 3 drydocks, while owned by the City of Richmond, are part of Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front National Historical Park. Refurbishing of the drydocks and their use for maritime industrial purposes would enhance the visitor experience at the national park.

The prospect of reviving ship dismantling in Richmond has also caught the supportive interest of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. By dismantling the ships in a safe and environmentally responsible manner in a closed drydock, the water quality of San Francisco Bay would best be protected.

Sincerely,

Gayle McLaughlin

Mayor, City of Richmond

Time to get creative about mothball fleet

Texas can't be only place to dispose of rusting ships

Dan Reed

Sunday, July 22, 2007

It was always enjoyable seeing the watery parking lot for ships, hooked stern to bow, just to the right as we crossed the Benicia Bridge.

I was a boy, going on family vacations or going from my Concord home with my big brother for target practice or to shoot rabbits in the otherwise empty fields just beyond the fleet.

It was a time when "green" was just a color, not a political party or environmental movement.

Times have changed, and for the good. The majestic fleet of ghost ships -- once supposedly at the ready for America's next great conflict -- is a decaying lot leaking toxins into Suisun Bay.

The government is paralyzed about it. Why? This problem has been foreseen for years. Once-valiant ships have disintegrated so badly that experts say many can't be towed to Texas for scrapping, which, for some bewildering reason, is the only place they can be scrapped.

The official title for the 74 mainly obsolete, tired rust-buckets is the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet, but just about everyone in the Bay Area knows the gray ships as the mothball fleet. And at this point -- with some of them being World War II relics -- what are they being held in reserve for? Davy Jones' Locker? A swift kick with a steel-toed boot could probably puncture the hulls of some of them.

"It's a big, complicated problem," said Raymond Lovett, technical director of the Ship Recycling Institute in Philadelphia, "and there is no good answer to this."

Part of the problem is the bureaucratic morass the ships are in. The controlling organization is the U.S. Maritime Administration. It wants to tow them through the Panama Canal to Brownsville, Texas, where there are ship-breaking plants. But that could spread invasive species, which have made a happy life clinging to the moldering hulls, to other waters.

The towing idea set off alarms with the U.S. Coast Guard, which wants the cruddy species scraped before the ships are scrapped. But in cleansing them of the organisms, the workers would probably pull off large hunks of paint loaded with toxic materials, which would sink to the bottom of the brackish waters.

The mothball fleet is not a new problem. In an Associated Press report 17 years ago, some in Congress were calling for the removal of what one politician called "the maritime cadavers," referring to the Suisun Bay ships and those in Texas and Virginia.

Most recently, it's irritated California legislators, especially when they learned that the Maritime Administration had commissioned a report in February to analyze how much paint has flaked off the ships and settled into the sediment below but gave them no word of it.

They wrote a letter to Sean Connaughton, the maritime administrator, June 22.

In a news release, Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, said: "We recognize that this is a complicated situation but inaction is not a solution. We intend to keep the pressure on the administration to develop a plan that protects the environment and allows for these ships to be disposed of properly."

The Maritime Administration's office of media affairs did not reply to e-mails seeking comment.

But in a June 30 article, The Chronicle's Carl Nolte described inspecting the fleet of cargo ships, merchant ships, frigates and tankers with Connaughton. He said the administrator seemed pained, flummoxed by the host of regulations needed to be hurdled to get the job done. "It is a conundrum," Connaughton said. "In order to comply with one set of government regulations we would have to violate another set."

So, why not some new clear thinking -- especially after all these years?

Others have ideas. Saul Bloom of Arc Ecology said the Maritime Administration has done little to preserve the vessels. "The ships wouldn't be in this condition if they were spending any money on maintenance," he said. "The fleet is a floating scrap heap."

Bloom believes that the Maritime Administration wants to move them to Texas because, while California and the Lone Star State have similar environmental regulations, California enforces them more stringently.

"They're transferring our environmental problem down to Texas," he said by phone from his San Francisco office. "They're looking for the least environmental cost possible."

Bloom's group, which has been working on this since 1993, thinks it makes more sense to put the ships in at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo or Hunter's Point in San Francisco for dismantling instead of trying to make them stay afloat for the 5,000-mile tow to Texas.

Bloom also says that unemployed shipwrights, who lost their jobs because of base closures, could do the job. "We could put these people to good effect."

A congressional aide, who has sat in on meetings with the Maritime Administration but didn't want to be quoted as representing his boss, said, "It's not good for them to be sitting in the bay, and to move them might not be good for the bay, either."

Enough. It's time to get this thing fixed, so when we ride across the Benicia Bridge, as I did as a boy, we'll be able to admire the few remaining ships that are still able to defend us, not think they're decaying and polluting our waters.

Dan Reed is a Bay Area writer. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/22/INGC6R23F61.DTL

The high price of dismantling a fleet

Why job may be neither economically -- nor politically -- feasible in the Bay Area

Polly Parks

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Does it really make sense to dismantle the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet in a dry dock in the Bay Area?

As any engineer will tell you, there is an engineered solution to any problem -- the issue is really time and cost. In this instance, what that means is if California or Bay Area local governments want to bear the high costs, environmental risk and delay associated with subsidizing the engineered solution, more power to them. As to whether U.S. taxpayers should do so, we think not.

The vessels are rusting away, becoming more structurally unsound. They contain regulated materials that must be recycled or properly disposed of. Our members of the North American Ship Dismantlement Association with facilities in Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana and Texas must deal with this and other environmental and structural problems in dismantling the vessels. We are a highly experienced -- and a highly regulated -- industry. We are not at capacity.

Believe me, if it was economically and politically feasible to dismantle vessels in California, my members would be setting up shop. After all, we have experience with the vessels, and the U.S. Maritime Administration makes sure we are capitalized before they give us a vessel to dismantle. Every company complies at its own facility with stringent federal, state and local requirements, including the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permits.

Is it really unsafe to tow the vessels over open water? The U.S. Coast Guard is responsible to ensure that the Dead Ship Tow is safe. We implement what they dictate.

So why aren't U.S. dismantlement companies scrapping their vessels in dry dock? It is exponentially more expensive and it is inefficient.

The days of the federal government paying companies to dismantle federal hulls are over. The process, whether for sales bid or fee-for-service, is competitive and offers the government its best value. Our companies are paying part, if not all, of the cost to recycle federal vessels. We also take on all the risk once the "as-is, where-is" bid is accepted. When unanticipated environmental or structural problems crop up, the federal government doesn't pay. Any company in the Bay Area has to be capitalized to manage that risk, as well as the political risks associated with press coverage.

We have watched with dismay as supposedly environmental, but actually commercially aligned, sources played on the naivete of some of the Bay Area press and exploded an executive branch turf battle into a showdown with California state and regional authorities. Instead of scientists and industry experts, we found commercial reefing contractors who compete for federal maritime dollars, a company with an unsolicited and expensive proposal for an untested "full containment" device, and a handful of uncapitalized entrepreneurs who don't understand the process much less the commodity market that underlies our industry.

The articles have put out a tremendous amount of misinformation about both our industry and the environmental risks. The sources' irresponsibility led the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board into a needless confrontation with federal maritime authorities this spring, which led to the shutdown of new federal contracts -- endangering the livelihood of the more than 2,000 directly employed and subcontracted workers in our six facilities, and further exposing the area to increased environmental risk from the vessels moored at Suisun Bay. Even now, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Arc Ecology are contemplating a lawsuit "to protect the bay." If they go forward, the government will be forced to shut down the program nationwide again.

Frankly, none of this makes sense.

If a Bay Area company wants to start up and has a viable, competitive, regulatory compliant, business model that works in the regulatory uncertainty of the Bay Area, the Maritime Administration is still accepting proposals for pre-qualification. Slowing the process down does not solve the key problem facing the vessels: the metal is structurally weakening. The longer you wait, the worse it gets. If they sink while waiting, it will be a massive environmental problem.

We say accelerate the award process. The critical issue is getting the vessels to the yards so they can get cut up - and recycled into our domestic steel production.

Polly Parks is director of the North American Ship Dismantlement Association, an industry trade group. E-mail us at insight@sfchronicle.com.