US Navy Halts Plans to Send 'Toxic' Ships to UK
by Mark Sage, PA News, in New York
21 October 2003 – Plans to send nine more ships in a toxic “ghost fleet” of ageing American Navy vessels to Britain have been put on hold, officials said today.
The US Government was hoping to send the nine ships, currently languishing in the James River in Virginia, to Hartlepool on Teesside for scrapping.
But amid an ongoing court battle, and with more environmental tests pending on the ships, the plans have been postponed until April next year at the earliest, the US Marine Administration (Marad) said.
Four ships in the fleet, which is contaminated with asbestos and other deadly chemicals, are already sailing towards the north east of England.
Environmentalists fear that the dilapidated ships could break up on the journey, releasing deadly toxins into the sea.
Friends of the Earth is still considering legal moves to block the ships’ entry into the UK, where they say they could create a health hazard.
Marad said it was now carrying out further “environmental assessments” on the ships.
It added that a court date to hear a challenge from US environment groups had been put back from this week to April 2004 and the ships would remain in dock until then.
“We are conducting environmental assessments and in addition the ships are being held until there is a resolution of the legal issues,” a spokeswoman said.
It is believed that the vessels contain more than 350 tonnes of PCB chemicals, 620 tonnes of asbestos, and 470 tonnes of old fuel oil.
“These ships are the United States’ environmental problem, and we can and should deal with them here,” said Martin Wagner an attorney for the campaigning law firm Earthjustice, which is leading the legal battle to keep the ships off the open sea.
“We’re concerned that these ships are the tip of a toxic iceberg consisting of over 150 other decaying, poison-laden US ships that the Bush administration plans to send to developing countries like India and Bangladesh, where environmental and worker-protection standards are nearly non-existent.”
Mike Town, of the green group the Sierra Club, said: “We have facilities that can do this job right here in Virginia and provide much needed jobs while sending a signal to the world that we solve our problems, we don’t just export them.”
Two auxiliary oil tankers were the first of the ships to leave for Teesside on October 6. They were followed by another two ships 10 days later.
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