13 November 2003 – The Caloosahatchee is the leader of a “ghost fleet” of former US Navy vessels whose journey to a shipbreakers’ yard in northeast England generated a mighty transatlantic row, High Court battles and a bitter argument over the risks posed to the environment.

After the storm came a brief calm yesterday afternoon, a pale sun breaking over the bleak industrial landscape of the Tees estuary as the 10,000-tonne former stalwart of the US Sixth Fleet, built in 1945, sedately completed her five-week voyage.

With the ropes of the grey hulk safely tied to their mooring at Able UK’s recycling facility near Hartlepool, Peter Stephenson, the company’s managing director, spoke of his conviction that the £10 million contract to dismantle 13 ageing ships would proceed as planned.

Out of sight, their modest protest restricted to a beach half a mile from the Able complex, were the local and national environmental campaigners who have vowed to continue their fight to prevent the world’s only superpower from “dumping its toxic waste in our own backyard”.

The Caloosahatchee, an auxiliary oil tanker which once refuelled aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, will be followed into the wet dock this morning by the Canisteo, a veteran of Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis. About a week behind them are two more ships continuing a steady progress across the Atlantic, unperturbed by government pleas for them to be turned around and returned to America. A further nine vessels remain at their moorings on the James River in Virginia, awaiting the outcome of a legal challenge brought by American environmentalists.

If they are given approval to depart, Able boasts that its 10-hectare (25-acre) wet and dry dock facility, the largest in Europe, will be able to house all 13 ships at the same time. First, however, it must gain permission to carry out the work.

Able UK’s Teesside environmental reclamation and recycling centre is situated in an ugly wasteland with a nuclear power station and a steel factory as neighbours. Indeed, it might seem surprising that the residents of Hartlepool have bothered to raise such a fuss about a few old ships.

Mr Stephenson blamed Friends of the Earth for “hyping up” the toxicity of the vessels and spreading “false information”, which threatened the future of a project that would create 200 permanent jobs in a part of the world that is no stranger to high levels of unemployment. The James River ships, he insisted, presented no more danger to the environment than any of the hundreds of ships that passed up and down the Tees estuary daily.

Ian Fenny, the company’s environment and waste manager, said the ships had relatively small quantities of asbestos, which would be buried securely in the nearby landfill site together with the plastic fittings that contained tiny traces of carcinogenic polychlorinated bi-phenyls.

Far from protesting, Hartlepool should be proud, he said, that Able had beaten competition from 70 companies across the world to win the contract.

“Why are we all here then?” asked one member of the international media army that had gathered in the Able yard. “Beats me,” Mr Stephenson said.

A host of different, passionately argued answers to the same question could be found in the neat pavilion of Seaton Carew Cricket Club, whose immaculately tended ground occupies a different planet from the nearby industrial complexes.

Here, Friends of the Earth and local campaigners gathered, together with Caroline Spelman, the new Shadow Environment Minister, to demand a public inqury into the Government’s “shambolic” handling of the issue.

Tony Juniper, the campaign group’s director, pointed to nearby Seal Sands, a designated site of special scientific interest, and asked why, if the US Maritime Authority was satisfied that the James River vessels posed a risk to sensitive estuarine habitats, the people of Hartlepool should be willing to accept them? The ball now lies in the Government’s court. The Environment Agency approved the contract in July, only to withdraw its permission 13 days ago, by which time the first four ships had sailed and the Americans had no intention of turning them around.

Britain wilted under American pressure and agreed to give them a home over the winter pending the various legal, licensing and planning rulings that will determine their fate.

For now, the Government will allow no dismantling to take place and insists that the four ships must be returned to America early next year. It is a message that local campaigners want Tony Blair to repeat to George W. Bush during next week’s presidential state visit, but they are not holding their breath.