The Albert J. Myer is slowly being righted. But not to fight another day. All the effort and expense is to keep the 57-year-old ship -- and the more than 136,000 gallons of oil sloshing around inside -- floating and upright in its watery purgatory.

The ship is just one of 71 decommissioned cargo and military support vessels in the government's so-called Ghost Fleet, aging rust buckets, all docked together here in the middle of the James River. They are bloated with nearly 13 million gallons of oil and fuel -- by comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons -- and crammed with PCBs, their brittle hulls thinning by the day. The vessels increasingly present a high environmental risk and a potential terrorist target.

"They're a ticking time bomb," said Lynn Ridley, "riverkeeper" for the James River Association.

A large spill could oil much of the James River within 48 hours, including military installations and a nearby nuclear power plant. A spill of 300,000 gallons would foul miles of riverfront, including historic Jamestown, and kill tens of thousands of fish and birds, according to the U.S. Maritime Administration.

Today, there are 99 ships anchored on the river and maintained by the Maritime Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. They include a half-dozen vessels that are kept in top shape and ready to sail. Two have just been activated for a possible war with Iraq. Others could be quickly taken out of mothballs in the case of a major war.

But the vast majority consist of the 71 outdated, outmoded, best-forgotten hulks -- half of which are 50 years old or older. Tied together in groups of a dozen or more several miles upriver from Hampton Roads, they look like antique erector sets left out in the rain.

"Some have deteriorated to a point where a hammer can penetrate their hulls," said a report by the Department of Transportation's inspector general. A 2001 Rand Corp. study found that "as the current inactive ships age and corrosion takes its inevitable toll, accidental spills and discharges become more likely."

In the past three years, there have been nine oil spills, including one that released 1,000 gallons of oil, according to Maritime Administration records.

Just keeping the fleet afloat and upright requires 75 workers and more than $2 million a year.

But there's little indication that the ships will be moved any time soon. Congress has appropriated $31 million toward scrapping the fleet. But the money is only a down payment; it could cost more than 10 times that to finish the job, according to government estimates.

The ships have long been blockaded on the river by environmental regulations, international political pressure and the inattention of the federal government, maritime observers say.

The decommissioned ships used to be sold overseas for scrap at a small profit to the U.S. government. But since 1994 the process has been stopped over concern about environmental and working conditions in the ship-breaking yards of India and Bangladesh, where the vessels were moved. As a result, surplus ships have accumulated here. The number stuck on the James River has doubled in the past five years.

So for now, the Albert J. Myer and the rest of the Ghost Fleet still lie at anchor, the floating dead.

Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) called the situation "somewhat ironic."

"We need to be cognizant of the international environment, but we're concerned about the potential damage here -- to the James River and Virginia," he said.

The state has threatened to sue the federal government unless it moves the ships or drains them of oil and fuel.

The area where the ships are docked is important to commercial fishing, seed oyster beds and intake lines for municipal water systems. And the James, with its width, wind and strong tides, would make an oil spill an extreme challenge even in the best conditions, reports say.

"How can you be prepared?" Ridley asked. "I'm not confident that if there was a major event like a hurricane, a spill can be adequately contained in that part of the river."

Two storms, Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and Hurricane Floyd in 1999, caused havoc to the fleet, ripping some of the ships from their moorings. In response to Floyd's damage, the Maritime Administration installed a new anchoring system at a cost of $2.3 million.

All told, the price tag for cleaning up a worst-case disaster could reach $123 million, according to a federal government assessment, money that is not budgeted.

Ridley said that the James River is a shipping community and that few object to the presence of a well-maintained ready reserve fleet. It is the obsolete surplus ships that worry area residents who depend on the river.

"If they're going to put them out there and forget about them, without any maintenance, without any plan or end game, that's where the potential problem lies," Ridley said.

Working on the decrepit ships can be deadly. Two years ago, a scrap worker was killed when working on a Ghost Fleet ship in Texas. He was climbing on the ship's ladder when it crumbled under him.

"Some ships, you know that when you walk on them, you're going to find a problem," said Brent Reid, 37, a 15-year marine mechanic who works on the ships in the James. "You're down in a shaft alley, the water's waist deep, more water is coming in, the hull looks flimsy and you're three or four decks down and there's no electricity but this," he said, pointing to his flashlight. "Well, it gets a little tight."

Aboard the Albert J. Myer, the only crew is the flocks of birds that have occupied the officers' quarters. On the decaying deck of the Lauderdale, which was built in 1944, a three-foot-tall shrub grows next to a windlass.

On other ships, pilothouse windows are covered with sheet metal. On an exposed pipe, bits of what appears to be asbestos lining flutter in the breeze. In windswept corners, pieces of ship lie in a heap of deck wood, bird guano and rust. Open hatches lead to the darkest black holes. Documents peppered with military abbreviations are posted for no one to read.

"None are going to sink to the bottom tomorrow," said Robert G. Rohr, a Maritime Administration supervisor whose job it is to ensure they don't.

Rohr is, in effect, running an experiment on how long cargo and military supply ships can be kept afloat, an experiment that costs roughly $25,000 per ship per year.

Sometimes decisions are made based on experience and gut. "We try to make the calls that are the right ones," Rohr said. But with some of the ships, he admitted, "there is some reason to dwell on them after hours, shall we say."

The Lauderdale would fit into that category.

"She pretty much speaks for herself," Rohr said, as his Maritime Administration boat pulled up in front of the World War II-vintage ship. The Lauderdale is so improbably rusty and unstable -- looking as if it has been doctored by a Hollywood special-effects crew aiming for just that appearance.

Rohr's crew tries to visit each obsolete ship at least once a month. Some problems are discovered only by noticing that a ship is listing to one side or observing a pool of oil-slicked water.

To explain why the fleet is so big and in such bad shape requires an appreciation of the laws of unintended consequences.

Through the 1970s, the Navy and the Maritime Administration recycled their surplus ships by selling them at a small profit to dozens of domestic ship-scrapping companies. Since then, the industry has migrated overseas in search of cheaper labor and looser environmental standards. The industry settled in places such as India, Bangladesh and China, where ships are steered onto filthy beaches and dismantled practically by hand by low-wage workers.

Today, most of the world's private surplus ships are still disposed of in that region. And from 1983 through 1994, the Maritime Administration sold 199 U.S. government vessels to the overseas scrappers, according to the General Accounting Office.

But in 1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stopped the practice by ruling that the ships contained enough toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that they are in effect toxic waste. In 1998, in response to international outrage over the shipyard conditions, Vice President Al Gore reinforced the EPA action by obtaining a moratorium on overseas scrapping. The United States has not sold a surplus ship overseas since 1994.

"When the moratorium was put into place, there was no serious effort to find economical and workable solutions to the problems," said William G. Schubert, the chief of the Maritime Administration.

Under Schubert, government officials are looking to once again sell U.S. ships to overseas scrappers. They are eyeing scrap yards in Mexico, India and Wales.

To scrap the surplus ships in domestic shipyards in compliance with U.S. Environmental and worker safety laws would cost $340 million, Schubert said. Two years ago, the Maritime Administration got $10 million, which turned out to be enough to get rid of six of the worst ships.

"The solution is a combination of domestic and foreign scrapping, but only under some very controlled and monitored conditions," said Schubert, who met with top EPA officials last week to discuss the restart of overseas sales.

The effort to revisit foreign sales is certain to create opposition. Environmental groups are gearing up to fight what they say is the Bush administration's attempts to ship the problems from Virginia to India or Mexico. They say the sales would still violate U.S. environmental laws and international treaties.

"It is not acceptable to handle toxic waste by trying to save a buck at the expense of the poorest people in some of the poorest nations in the world," said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, an international environmental group.

Even if officials agreed on a plan to get rid of all the obsolete ships tomorrow, it is unclear whether the ships would even make it in one piece from the James River to a scrap yard.

In December 2001, the aging Wayne Victory was being towed to a Texas scrap yard when, 12 miles off Miami Beach, its hull cracked open. Only $100,000 worth of emergency repairs kept it afloat and prevented a leak, Maritime Administration records show.

Inside the Wayne Victory were 57,000 gallons of oil.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company