US sends polluted fleet to the UK

A fleet of 13 rusting US ships, heavily polluted with asbestos, oil and deadly PCBs, will embark on the 4,500-mile journey from America’s east coast to the UK?s Hartlepool facilities in the next month amid warnings from salvage experts that they risk bringing an environmental disaster in their wake says a report in the Guardian.

Seven years ago Bill Clinton ruled that the US navy’s “ghost fleet” of 120 decomposing hulks could not be scrapped in developing countries because their pollution and toxic loads risked the lives of shipyard workers.

But a British company has signed a $17m (£10.8m) contract to dismantle the most fragile vessels at a dockyard near Hartlepool.

AbleUK, which also stands to get two almost-complete oil tankers from the US government as part of the deal, is expected to submit detailed plans of the proposed voyage in the next few days.

Under the contract the company is obliged to remove all 13 ships from the James river in Virginia, where they have been slowly rusting for the past 15 years, by the end of November or face a $1,350 daily fine for each vessel.

They are in such poor condition that to stand any chance of surviving the crossing, they will have to leave by the end of this month, before the onset of autumn storms in the Atlantic.

A leading US salvage expert, who has surveyed most of the ships involved in the contract, has told the Guardian that there is a risk that some of the ships will be breaking up by the time they reach Teesside.

Tim Mullane, of Virginia-based company Dominion Maritime, said: “They’re leaking, and listing, and that’s just sitting at anchor in a river. If they get to sea, some will definitely start to break up.

“A pollution slick will follow them all the way across the Atlantic. When they get to Teesside they will be leaking even more and be more liable to break up. Their bottoms are rotting out and they will leak at anchor.

“Some of them have hundreds of tonnes of heavy oil aboard which will leak out and pollute the river there.”

At least two ships would struggle to make it 15 miles into the Atlantic, he added.

Some of the vessels are almost 60 years old. The 12,000-tonne supply ship Canisteo was launched in July 1945. Over the next 50 years the Can-o-shit, as she was known to her crew, was involved in the Cuban missile crisis and the Korean war.

The Department of Transport’s maritime and coastguard agency said it had asked for a full pollution risk assessments of these ships, a detailed passage plan showing exactly where they would go and what they would do in bad weather, and what alternatives they have in an emergency.