Suisun Bay's ghost fleet may finally R.I.P.
Carl Nolte
San Francisco Chronicle
04/01/2010
The federal government and environmental groups reached an agreement Wednesday that will mean the end of the ghost fleet of retired ships in Suisun Bay.
The vessels were once part of a mighty reserve fleet of warships and freighters, but time and neglect has turned them into what one environmental advocate called "a floating toxic waste dump."
Only 52 ships remain of a fleet that once was as big as a good-size Navy, and these rusting old vessels will be removed and cleaned up for an ocean voyage to Texas, where they will be scrapped. The fleet will be reduced gradually, with 25 ships in the worst condition taken out within two years and the remainder by fall 2017. The settlement, which must be approved by a federal court in Sacramento, ends a long dispute over the ships, which have been a fixture in the bay just east of Benicia for generations.
After World War II, there were thousands of surplus ships, and, in 1946, the Maritime Administration began keeping the best of them in reserve. At one time, more than 350 ships were in the fleet, including cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, transports and tankers. Many of them were broken out for service in the Korean and Vietnam wars, but the rest stayed in Suisun Bay and gradually became neglected and obsolete - a fleet of ghosts tied up in rows, waiting for a call to duty that never came.
Rust and paint
They sat waiting in some cases for more than 30 years; the decks rusted and the ships' coats of lead-based paint peeled and fell into the bay. Environmental groups and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board pressured the Maritime Administration to do something, to no avail.
The Maritime Administration relented and last year conducted a survey, which found that more than 20 tons of toxic material from the ships had gotten into Suisun Bay, which is a critical environmental area for fish and wildlife, including the endangered chinook salmon. There are no current plans to clean up the material.
"They were a festering sore in San Francisco Bay," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, who tried to get the pollution stopped for years. "We had people (in the Bush administration) who said nothing could be done."
In January, a federal judge in Sacramento ruled in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups that the ships were illegally polluting Suisun Bay.
"They were a floating toxic waste dump," said Deb Self, executive director for the San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental group.
To the scrap yard
Under the settlement announced Wednesday, the Maritime Administration will not only get rid of the 52 old ships over time, but will clean the surfaces of the remaining ships every 90 days until they're removed to keep paint from dropping in the water, inspect the ships monthly and collect runoff samples for testing.
Once ships are removed from the fleet, they will be towed to the BAE Systems San Francisco shipyard at the foot of Potrero Hill to be cleaned of toxic paint and marine growth. They then will be towed to a facility in Brownsville, Texas, via the Panama Canal, to be scrapped. David Matsuda, the head of the U.S. Maritime Administration, said he did not know how much the program would cost.
"It depends," he said, "on the scrap metal market."
Previous withdrawals
Obsolete ships have been sent to the scrap yard over the years. Four old ships, including two World War II vintage Victory ships, have been taken out of the reserve fleet since last fall. The most recent one was the 66-year-old tanker Mission Santa Ynez, towed out Wednesday and taken to the San Francisco yard.
The Mission Santa Ynez, launched at the Marinship yard in Sausalito in 1943, has been in the reserve fleet for 35 years.
At present, the San Francisco facility is the only shipyard in the Bay Area capable of cleaning the ships.
Fifteen ships, some of them owned by the U.S. Navy and not part of the ghost fleet, will be retained in the Suisun Bay anchorage.
One of them is the battleship Iowa, a veteran of World War II. There have been proposals to dock the ship as a museum in San Francisco, but the idea was turned down by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Other plans to dock the ship in Stockton or Vallejo have come to nothing.
