Jan McGirk, Chinadialogue, June 08, 2025
In California, rusting US navy ships that were poisoning bay waters for decades are being cleaned up, moved and recycled - thanks to a legal victory by local environmental groups. Jan McGirk reports.
read the full article:
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/3658
Saul Bloom, Arc Ecology’s executive director, said: “MARAD had been doing the minimum possible, just to keep these ships from sinking. Under the previous administration [of George W Bush], they had not been a big believer in compliance, as they were preoccupied with other things. They saw this fleet-recycling as a needless distraction. We had been concerned for many years.”
Bloom’s group runs an innovative programme to combat military pollution and to assess war’s long-term effects on the environment. “I saw the ghost fleet out in the bay 25 years ago,” he said, “but there was no political will ’way back then to do anything. Ship recycling is a dirty, messy business.”
“Arc Ecology’s concern is that ships might eventually get towed out to Saipan, a small American protectorate in the Marianas, in order to obtain savings and not run afoul of the trade laws in ship-breaking,” Bloom said. “Well, it is not Bangladesh … We don’t have families living on the site, children under 14 risking their limbs and lungs, and losing on average 10 individuals per vessel. But we’ll have to see about the likelihood that Saipan will comply with our human-rights values and environmental concerns.”-
this article also appears in Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/giving-up-the-ghost-ships_b_604713.html
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