Ship-disposal discord Contra Costa Times

Contra Costa Times Article Launched:07/09/2007 03:02:22 AM PDT

Richmond may renovate its dry docks

  Councilman wants to revive World War II-era shipyards to recycle Mothball Fleet, add jobs By John Geluardi

CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Contra Costa Times

Article Launched: A Richmond City Council member has been generating interest in a plan he says will revitalize the city's World War II-era dry docks, create jobs and solve a knotty environmental problem.

Councilman Tom Butt wants to renovate some or all of the five dry-dock basins at Richmond's historic Shipyard No. 3 and ready them to dismantle many of the 53 obsolete government ships that have been contaminating Suisun Bay with tons of toxic material.

A new shipbreaking industry would generate much-needed city revenue and provide hundreds of low-skill jobs for residents, Butt said last week as he walked through Shipyard No. 3's long-abandoned concrete worker galleries.

"All you have to do is put new water-tight doors at the mouth of the basins and install some water pumps and you have a functioning dry dock," Butt said. "This isn't rocket science. In fact, it's the exact opposite."

Although they've stopped short of endorsing the unstudied idea, the proposal has intrigued environmental groups and federal, state and local government agencies, including the U.S. Maritime Administration, which oversees the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet; the U.S. Coast Guard; the San Francisco Bay Area Water Quality Board; the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission; and the city of Richmond.

Shipyard No. 3 is part of the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park because of its role in building Liberty and Victory ships during the war. Since then, the once-bustling basins have fallen into disrepair and have been used mostly as boat storage docks.

But the basins, which are large enough to accommodate most of the ships slated to be dismantled, are fundamentally intact and can be made functional again at a relatively low cost, Butt said. Another possible advantage is the shipyard's proximity to Sims Metal, the largest metal salvaging company on the West Coast.

U.S. Maritime Administrator Sean Connaughton has received more than 50 e-mails, many from Butt's constituents, supporting the plan, said Connaughton's special assistant, Chris Moore.

"The administrator said that something like this could be a good solution," Moore said Friday. "But he wants to see how the idea develops before supporting it."

On Thursday, Connaughton lifted his moratorium on towing the ships from Suisun Bay to Brownsville, Texas, where a few ships a year had been sent for scrapping. The program was put on hold in February because of problems related to a federal requirement that the hulls be cleaned of all living organisms before the 5,000-mile trip through the Pacific Ocean, Panama Canal and Gulf of Mexico.

Last year, when the hull of a World War II-era Victory ship was cleaned in Richmond, the process knocked loose sheets of decayed metal, paint and hull coatings more than a third of an inch thick. The toxic scrapings were left in the water, according to the contractor that performed the work.

The Maritime Administration is touting a new procedure to capture hull scrapings in sheeting, but state officials have not yet reviewed the procedure for effectiveness.

Baykeeper, a San Francisco Bay watchdog group, is concerned about revitalizing the Richmond dry docks because of potential worker health hazards, the disposal of large amounts of toxic materials and the possibility of airborne pollution, said Baykeeper executive director Deb Self.

"We are very interested in looking at a proposal to break the ships down locally," Self said. "But the Richmond community has already been exposed to so much toxic pollution that the U.S. Maritime Administration could spare no expense in protecting the Bay and the Richmond community."

Bruce Wolf, executive director of the Water Quality Board, said a Richmond dismantling operation could solve a lot of problems.

"The plan sounds good. The challenge is how soon it could be implemented and where the funding would come from," Wolf said. "But it sounds like one of those common-sense solutions that would work, especially when not dismantling the ships in Texas could save the Maritime Administration about a million dollars per ship."

It cost $4.9 million to prepare the latest five Suisun Bay reserve ships for the "dead tow" to Texas. The Wawbash, a World War II tanker, cost $1.4 million.

But a local operation wouldn't necessarily realize a savings, according to Gary Whitney, a marine surveyor who has bid to scrap several ships on the West Coast but has never been successful.

"We've come within a few hundred thousand dollars a couple of times, but never closer. They underbid us," he said.

The reason, Whitney said, is labor. Even with towing factored in, it costs Texas scrappers less to destroy a ship than it would to do the work in California. Whitney has estimated the man-hour costs under prevailing wages in California at $58, and $18 in Texas. It generally takes somewhere between 3,000 to 6,000 man-hours to dismantle a vessel, he said.

"Our costs are always more expensive," he said.

Whitney, who is a proponent of using the former Navy dry docks at Mare Island in Vallejo for ship scrapping, said he looked at the Richmond dry docks a decade ago and found them too far decayed to be useful.

Still, there is a historical symmetry to dismantling the ships in Richmond, Butt said.

"In so many ways this harkens back to our history," Butt said. "During the war, they brought hundreds of sharecroppers out here who learned how to build ships in just a matter of weeks. There's no reason we couldn't do that again."

Times staff writer Thomas Peele contributed to this report. Contact John Geluardi at 510-262-2787 or at jgeluardi@cctimes.com