Exxon Valdez...

[BrianW]

...sold for scrap.

http://gcaptain.com/exxon-valdez-sol...nt=Yahoo!+Mail

Damn, we're getting old.

[seanz]

The Oriental Nicety?

Really?

[Bob Adams]

Great, off to India to be broken, one last enviromental insult. With a dash of human suffering thrown in for good measure.

[Gerarddm]

...so I guess Waterworld can't happen now, LOL.

[Jim Bow]

https://searchlightsa.wordpress.com/...azardous-jobs/

[Jim Bow]

Wonder where this one ended up: http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/wp...ron-tanker.jpg

[RichKrough]

The Valdez ( Oriental N) is supposedly being run aground in Alang for scrapping today.

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/def...mmsi=667003306

[Bob Adams]

The Valdez ( Oriental N) is supposedly being run aground in Alang for scrapping today.

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/def...mmsi=667003306

See post 3.

[wharf rat]

Did you guys not read the really important news on the gcaptain link?? Who cares about the Valdez? The Pacific Princess is getting scrapped!

What's going to happen to Ted and Julie and Rodent and Captain Stubby? Now what?

I'm so depressed.

[David W Pratt]

As I understand it, EV was being conned by the
cg at the time of the disaster

[Norman Bernstein]

They can obliterate the boat fairly easily.... too bad they can't obliterate the pollution that remains, and will remain, for decades, if not centuries.

[RichKrough]

See post 3.

Yeah it is definately effed-up. Besides what I have read and seen on TV, one of my friends did some volunteer medical work in Alang a few years ago. He says the living conditions and work conditions these people face everyday still gives him nightmares.

[RichKrough]

They can obliterate the boat fairly easily.... too bad they can't obliterate the pollution that remains, and will remain, for decades, if not centuries.

If you zoom in on Google you can see the oil and contaminates leaching from the ships being broken up. What you can't see is probably 10 times worse.

[Bob Adams]

Did you guys not read the really important news on the gcaptain link?? Who cares about the Valdez? The Pacific Princess is getting scrapped!

What's going to happen to Ted and Julie and Rodent and Captain Stubby? Now what?

I'm so depressed.

Oh wow, I have a tiny connection to that ship, in the 70's I was working at the Farboil Paint Company. I made a couple batches of our 1208 Gloss Whilte enamel (1,200 gallons at a time) that were sent to her.

[Bob Adams]

If you zoom in on Google you can see the oil and contaminates leaching from the ships being broken up. What you can't see is probably 10 times worse.

Once again, see post 3.

Great, off to India to be broken, one last enviromental insult. With a dash of human suffering thrown in for good measure.

[ccmanuals]

I have not pumped any Exon gas into one of my autos in the last 23 years.

[LeeG]

Jeesh, it's just oil, we neeeeeeds it.

[ccmanuals]

Well yes, you probably have, you just don't realize it.

Ok, let me rephrase. I have not pulled into a gas station with an Exon sign to get gas in 23 years.

[Paul Pless]

The Oriental Nicety?

Really?

But not quite a 'happy ending'. . .

[Chris Woodward]

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/25/156732...ille-rip-it-up

The deepwater Port of Brownsville lies inland at the end of a 17-mile channel connecting to the Gulf of Mexico. The long channel provides unparalleled protection from hurricanes and tropical storms.
In the past two decades, the city has become the center of the U.S. ship-recycling industry. Five of the nation's eight recycling companies are here. It's like Home Depot locating right next to Lowe's and Ace Hardware.
Tearing up big ships can be a lucrative business. It's also a messy one. Walk inside a ship that's being scrapped, and you'll find one of the nastiest places imaginable: filthy and rusty, with everything that's poisonous and salvageable torn out.

[Durnik]

Originally Posted by ccmanuals
I have not pumped any Exon gas into one of my autos in the last 23 years.

Well yes, you probably have, you just don't realize it.

Perhaps, but we do what we can.. In addition to permanently crossing any station with the word "Exxon" off my list of possibles all those years ago, I choose (have, for the last 15..18 years or so) to buy petrol only at non-badged outlets. IE, in addition to Exxon, Mobile, Shell etc are _also_ off limits. I may need fuel to live & work in this country, but I can make sure my purchases help other than just those who least deserve the 'help'.

To those who ask "what good does this do", I answer - the whole thing is an exercise in continuing to be aware of my actions.. the what, & the why - on a personal level. What 'good' does that do? It helps me - & just as Mitt is sure that what helps him, helps the world, so, too, am I sure that what helps me, helps the world.. ;-)

Disclaimer, I do buy from Citgo if necessary. That ought to drive the ridiculous right batty.. er, well, if they weren't already batty! ;-)

enjoy
bobby

[Durnik]

From Chris' link..

Bay Bridge Texas is the nation's newest ship-recycling yard, says senior Vice President Barry Chambers. The company, backed by Indian investors with deep pockets, just moved to Brownsville from Chesapeake, Va.

...

Chambers says he moved from Virginia to Texas not just for the warm weather and infrastructural perks, but also for the labor pool. He pays between $10 and $13 an hour for the recycling work.

"The Hispanic workforce that I found here is excellent," Chambers says. "It's attitude more than anything. Every day here is different. This is not an assembly line job, and everyday you have to use your wits."

Profits to India, payroll to Mexico (Guatemala, etc..).. money from U.S taxes (cutting of military ships) & all based on rules Conservatives (Go Mitt!) love so well.. Welcome to the decline of America.. brought to you by 'investors' everywhere..

As for 'attitude', the U.S. indoctrinational system cranks out factory fodder.. er, workers.. & we are surprised at their limitations? Bizarre!

enjoy
bobby

[Old Dryfoot]

Ship breaking is a horrendous, nightmarish occupation. I'd recommend watching a National Film Board of Canada documentary called Shipbreakers. If any industry desperately needed cleaning up, it would be this one.

In the Google Maps return for Alang I was able to count 146 ships on the beach, many looking like this.




In Bangladesh, 25% of the ship breaking workers are between 12 and 17 years of age, working for 12 hours a day for $0.22 to $0.32 cents per hour...



It's criminal in every sense of the word.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I wrote this back in the twentieth century:

OH dear! The one thing that shipowners and their bankers have been able to count on since the dugout canoe - namely that, if you cannot find anything at all to do with your ship, you can at least sell her for breaking up - now seems to be at risk, thanks to the Basle Convention


Now, this is a quite admirable little convention, which in essence says that people in rich countries should not dump their hazardous and noxious rubbish on people in poor countries.

It probably is not going to go away any time soon.

It is worrying people from bankers to class societies. The time-honoured reaction of almost everyone in the shipowning business, confronted with this sort of interference in Our Way of Life by do-gooding busybodies, is as follows:-

1. Express outrage.
2. Find a way round it.

This approach was well exemplified by the British shipowner of the last century who, having fought mightily, but unsucessfully, against Mr Plimsoll's line, found a loophole in the law and painted the loadline on the funnel.

Being, like most shipping people, a traditionalist, I will now offer you a suitable expression of outrage, followed by the way round it.


Outrage first. I am sure we are all distressed to learn that P&O Nedlloyd have had the effrontery to sell a ship for breaking up without having their unwanted object throughly decontaminated first, and that they have thereby condemned some hundreds of scrapyard workers to the possibility of badly paid, dirty and dangerous employment, with the contingent risks of asbestosis, lead poisoning, isocyanate toxicity, industrial deafness, vibration white finger and post traumatic stress disorder.

I am deeply shocked, myself, just as I was when this company's predecessor, OCL, sold a ship bearing the immortal name of Jervis Bay for breaking up and did not insist on renaming her as a term of the sale, so that when she broke her tow in the Bay of Biscay and had to be salvaged, the whole of maritime Britain felt embarrassed.

They simply have not got a clue about how to do these things. This is probably because most of their ships are neither old enough nor clapped out enough to require scrapping, so they lack practical experience.

Now, here is some simple, free, advice for Messrs Harris, Woods & Co. In future, please do as others, more experienced in these matters, do;
like this:-


1. Ring your broker and tell him that you want to sell the ship for further trading, on 'simple terms'. If he is up to his job, he will understand you to mean that you want to sell the ship to a scrap speculator.
Curiously, most of these gentlemen live in London anyway, although they seldom like to hog the limelight.
2. The buyer will then ring his lawyers and buy a Liberian shelf company on bearer shares.
3. You sell the ship to the new company. One of the 'simple terms' is that the ship's name and funnel marks are changed. You have now sold a viable, trading, ship, with certificates for at least another week, from your high profile company in the OECD to an obscure company in an African nation outside the OECD. You have not breached the Basle Convention.
4. The speculator then does what he is best at, which is to sell the ship for breaking.


All these functions can be carried out, by experts of high professional standing, within half a mile of your office doors. That is why London is a shipping centre.


The ship will still end up in India, she will still get broken up, and the breakers' workforce will not be out of employment. The Basle Convention, on the other hand, will have been observed precisely.

That disposes, I think, of the legalities of the situation, as everyone in the industry, except the most righteous and PR-sensitive of liner shipowners, knew in the first place.


And there is not much that environment commissioner Bjerregard and environment minister Pronk and the assembled hordes of Greenpeace can do about it.

We still have to deal with the moralities of the matter. Legality and morality in shipping can get a bit mixed up at times, as in the case of the master in the triangular trade who missed Jamaica, got a sight, realised his mistake, threw part of the cargo over the side to save water and beat back to Jamaica, where he declared general average. (Today, ofcourse, no self respecting cargo underwriter would fall for that 'crew negligence' line; he would have to claim on his club). The resulting outburst of morality was rather spectacular, resulting in one of the very few genuine and lasting improvements in the way humans treat each other.

"It is immoral" (I quote Mr Jayaraman of Greenpeace) "that western companies dump their hazardous waste in the form of obsolete ships on Asia..." Well, Asia is a big place. As Greenpeace may not know, 40% of the world fleet, which will no doubt require scrapping in due course, is owned in Asia.
Can I reassure their owners that they are ipso facto more moral than their European counterparts and will be allowed to scrap their ships?
While this may not be quite as satisfying for them as a rise in Biffex, a nice warm glow of righteousness may be the next best thing, certainly if their bankers are worrying over residual values.

Until recently one of the sights of Manila, close to the North Harbour, was a place called Smoky Mountain. It was the municipal rubbish dump, with some thousands of people living off it, and indeed living in it.


Cruiseships used to berth near the Manila Hotel, where the disembarked blue rinses would take afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches, followed by a short cab ride to aid their digestion within the sight of Third World squalor at its worst.

President Ramos closed it, and rehoused the people who lived there. But not before several thousand people who did not, but who knew a gravy train when they saw one, claimed, with the support of sundry do-gooders, that they lived there too.

Unfortunately for them, the government, not being entirely stupid, had taken a census before announcing the redevelopment.


It was a Filipino friend, neither wealthy nor environmentally unsound, who pointed out to me that people lived in Smoky Mountain because life was better there than where they came from.


It is just possible that Indian shipbreaking workers, who presumably, like Filipino rubbish dwellers, are rational and make rational choices, do the work because that is better than not doing it.

It is possible that they are put at risk, not because of the wickedness of shipowners, but because of the low level of technology available in the Indian breaking industry.

This is unlike the high-tech Taiwanese shipbreakers of a few years ago, whose employers put rather more capital into the process.
And that this in turn is not unconnected with the low level of wages in India, which it is rather hard to blame shipowners for. Dare we suggest that the fault might lie instead with the Hindu rate of growth, which might berather faster if less time were spent on testing nuclear weapons .
My friend also defined 'aid' as "money given by poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."
The more I think about that, the truer it gets.




http://ban.org/library/shipbreaking_oh_dear.html

[RichKrough]

She's aground

[LeeG]

Hopefully it'll be recycled into an improved power grid for India, once they get the political part figured out.

[Durnik]

...

My friend also defined 'aid' as "money given by poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."
The more I think about that, the truer it gets.

http://ban.org/library/shipbreaking_oh_dear.html

Ain't that the truth..

There's more 'truths' in that story, some simply alluded to - some less obvious. Thanks for the story & the link.

enjoy
bobby

[leikec]

Ain't that the truth..

There's more 'truths' in that story, some simply alluded to - some less obvious. Thanks for the story & the link.

enjoy
bobby

Good link!!

Jeff C

[Durnik]

Glad you enjoyed it too, Jeff..

to be clear, the link & original comment were from Andrew Craig-Bennett's excellent post above.

enjoy
bobby

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

She's aground

Every deck officer longs for the chance to do that - to run his ship straight at the beach at full ahead. But because ships are usually sold to specialist speculators who sell them on to the breakers, few "mainstream" people get the chance.

[Paul Pless]

Every deck officer longs for the chance to do that - to run his ship straight at the beach at full ahead. But because ships are usually sold to specialist speculators who sell them on to the breakers, few "mainstream" people get the chance.

like this?

[John Smith]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#48409244

Maddow went into thissome days back. I believe I posted it then, but it's worth a rewatch.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

like this?

Exactly like that. Nice job, despite the annoying Pilot.