Ripping Steel

[CPEO Moderator <cpeo@cpeo.org>]

WIRED MAGAZINE
Ripping Steel
By Christopher S. Stewart
March 2004

Stripping 10,000-ton ships takes thousands of crowbars and blowtorches
in South Asia. Or one high-speed chop shop in southern Virginia.


Moored along a 2-mile stretch of the James River in southern Virginia,
the Maritime Administration's "ghost fleet" of 88 decrepit mega-military
vessels floats sadly in various stages of ruin. Their rusting hulls,
tethered in groups of a dozen or more, are riddled with PCBs and
asbestos and harbor millions of gallons of oil. Forty-five more dying
ships are on the way. Some caltl the fleet a terrorist target; to
others, it's an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Congress
recently mandated the fleet's removal by 2006 and allocated $31 million
to make it happen. The only question is how.

Not long ago, the ships would have been dragged away by monster tugs,
leaking toxins all the way to Bangladesh or India, where a thousand day
workers with oxyacetylene torches would reduce them to pieces. This
process poses danger to the oceans, not to mention the third world
workers and coastal communities. It also creates an international
perception that US ship manufacturers and operators can't clean up after
themselves.

Now there's a new way. Advances in cleaning, cutting, and disposal
technologies are taking much of the cost and danger out of
ship-breaking. A silica-based biodegradable power wash created by
chemical company Amstar EnviroChem disables the deadly chloride molecule
in PCBs, leaving behind only briny water. The X-paK, a tool developed
for Nu-Corp International Technologies, separates hull oil from water
using a mix of heat (as high as 350 degrees) and moderate pressure
(about 10 atmospheres), allowing a breaking company to refine the oil
onsite and reuse it. When it comes to tearing down a ship, the wire saw
and the mobile shear can do the work of hundreds of men, and much
faster.

To Mario Mazza, the tough-as-nails owner of Bay Bridge Enterprises, a
ship-breaking facility near Chesapeake Bay, such technologies are
exactly what's needed to clean up the plague of toxic, crumbling ships
dotting the US coastline. "We got the land. We got everything here," he
says. "The better technology we have to do this faster, to get ships
broken down and off to the scrap mill, the better it is for everyone."

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/steel.html?tw=wn_tophead_7

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