Feds agree to remove toxic, decaying ‘ghost fleet’ from San Francisco Bay estuary by 2017

Rotting ships to be removed from Suisun Bay

BENICIA, Calif. — The federal government on Wednesday said it would remove a decaying armada of military vessels dating back to World War II from a San Francisco Bay waterway that has been polluted by the boats for decades.

Most of the vessels, including some that chased submarines during World War II and others that delivered troops and supplies to battlefields in subsequent wars, are destined for the recycling yard, the U.S. Maritime Administration, or MARAD, said Wednesday.

The agency said it settled a lawsuit and agreed to remove most of the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet, known as the “ghost fleet,” a collection of mostly obsolete military boats.

The gray and rust-red hulks, some stretching between two-and-three football fields long, are anchored in rows in Suisun Bay, a shallow estuary between San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Studies by the administration have suggested the old warships have dumped more than 20 tons of copper, lead, zinc and other metals into the estuary, a critical habitat for a number of endangered species.

“We are moving expeditiously to remove the worst polluting ships first and diligently moving to clean the rest,” said David Matsuda, acting administrator of MARAD.

The settlement involving MARAD, environmental groups and state water quality regulators will see half of the ships deemed obsolete — the 25 worst polluters — removed by September 2012, with the rest gone by September 2017. In all, 52 ships eventually will be recycled at various MARAD yards or other facilities it contracts with.

The federal agency plans to keep more than a dozen of the ships anchored in the bay that are in better shape or still considered useful, including the iconic battleship USS Iowa that once served as transport to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Some of the removals have already begun, with four ships taken out since November 2009.

On Wednesday, tugboats dragged the SS Mission Santa Ynez toward San Francisco Bay. The ship, once a U.S. Navy oil and fuel tanker used from World War II through the late 1960s, was on its way to a dry dock in San Francisco, where it would be cleaned and prepared for the longer journey through the Panama Canal to a recycling yard in Brownsville, Texas.

“There are a lot of spirits of soldiers on these boats, I believe that. A lot who never made it back,” said John Muller, a U.S. Navy veteran and chair of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, a state regulatory agency that joined environmental groups in the lawsuit against MARAD.

Standing on a small vessel motoring around the old fleet, Muller’s agency pushed for the removal, but he felt it was important to take a final up close look at much of the history that would be going to the scrap yard.

The U.S. Department of Transportation said it could not estimate how much the removal of 52 ships would cost, but so far, taking out the Santa Ynez and four other ships has cost an average of $1.7 million each, including costs of dry-docking, towing and dismantling.

Under terms of the settlement, which still needs final approval from a judge, MARAD also agreed to clean up within 120 days piles of hazardous paint chips from the rotting old decks. Each ship will be inspected every 90 days, Matsuda said, and paint chips removed from the deck before being blown into the water.

“The San Francisco Bay should never have been a dumping ground for toxic waste. Getting these ships cleaned up and removed is a huge victory for our environment and the people of California,” said Michael Wall, lead attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the environmental groups who sued to get the site cleaned up.

Congress had previously ordered MARAD to dismantle the ships classified as no longer useful by 2006, but that never happened. Maritime officials blamed funding and a shortage of facilities for the failure to act on the Congressional mandate.

Still, cleaning up the damage that has already been done is impossible, as Suisun Bay is a tidal environment, so the paint that has peeled off the ships is now mixed in with sediments throughout the bay.

However, environmental groups said removing the ships would keep an estimated 50 tons of pollutants from entering the bay. Current cleanup efforts had already removed 120 tons of debris from the old warships, Matsuda said.

Suisun Bay was chosen by the military as one of several sites for ships withdrawn from active military service. MARAD continues to manage two other ghost fleets in U.S. waters in James River, Va. and Beaumont, Texas.

Over the years, the ships became unusable and too expensive to repair, so they were allowed to rot and pollute nearby waters and wildlife while officials debated what to do about the vessels.

Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen contributed to this report.