Maritime Administration

The federal Maritime Administration has suspended a plan to send its old ships overseas for disposal amid increasing criticism that scrapping the vessels abroad would exploit Third World workers and harm the environment.The maritime agency said it was suspending the controversial export plan while a high-level Defense Department panel reviews how government ships are scrapped. The panel, scheduled to meet for the first time next week, is to recommend within 60 days how to ensure that workers and the environment are protected during scrapping.

The Savannah, the world's first nuclear-powered commercial vessel, will be docked at Canton Marine Terminals in Baltimore for at least the next year as crews scrub the ship of remaining radioactive materials. The sleek 596-foot cargo and passenger vessel arrived at Vane Brothers Co.'s berth Thursday, after the company won a $588,380 annual contract from the U.S. Maritime Administration to secure the vessel for up to three years. Constructed in the 1950s under President Dwight D.

THE FEDERAL Maritime Administration has wisely joined the Navy in suspending shipbreaking until it has had time to think the problem through. Until a high-level Defense Department panel reports in two months on health and environmental problems and other issues, neither agency will send its decommissioned ships to be broken up for scrap by untrained, ill-equipped, slave-wage labor polluting the waters and beaches of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There must be a better way.A series of articles in The Sun detailed the illegal and unsafe ways these great old ships are dismantled in fly-by-night yards.

A retired Navy hospital ship, abandoned by its previous owner and ostensibly bound for Greece under a new buyer, must remain in Baltimore's harbor after the Environmental Protection Agency obtained a warrant this week to search it for toxic chemicals and secured an injunction barring it from being exported. The multiweek delay will cost new owner Potomac Navigation Inc. hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The company bought the vessel Sanctuary for $50,000 through a court-ordered auction in August.

The Savannah, the world's first nuclear-powered commercial vessel, will be docked at Canton Marine Terminals in Baltimore for at least the next year as crews scrub the ship of remaining radioactive materials. The sleek 596-foot cargo and passenger vessel arrived at Vane Brothers Co.'s berth Thursday, after the company won a $588,380 annual contract from the U.S. Maritime Administration to secure the vessel for up to three years. Constructed in the 1950s under President Dwight D.

North American Ship Recycling Inc., which just a few years ago was heralded as the key to revitalizing the Sparrows Point shipyard, has disappeared, leaving behind in Maryland waters two rotting and possibly toxic government ships, according to federal officials. NASR was supposed to dismantle the ships - the Sphinx and the Hoist - under agreements made this year with the U.S. Maritime Administration. A security guard said yesterday that NASR was no longer at the shipyard, and that he didn't know where the company had gone.

Vincent F. Barletta, the Massachusetts owner of Sparrows Point shipyard, and certain affiliates have two weeks to answer racketeering claims filed against them last week in Baltimore's U.S. District Court. If they don't, the defendants face a default judgment of up to $2.25 million, according to court documents. The civil lawsuit, filed by Clean Venture Inc. on Nov. 13, claims that at least some of the defendants took up to $750,000 that was owed to the New Jersey ship-breaking company.

A retired Navy hospital ship, abandoned by its previous owner and ostensibly bound for Greece under a new buyer, must remain in Baltimore's harbor after the Environmental Protection Agency obtained a warrant this week to search it for toxic chemicals and secured an injunction barring it from being exported. The multiweek delay will cost new owner Potomac Navigation Inc. hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The company bought the vessel Sanctuary for $50,000 through a court-ordered auction in August.

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Al Gore banned the federal government yesterday from scrapping vessels overseas, a move intended to ensure that hazardous American ships will not be dumped on the Third World.The prohibition on exporting Navy and Maritime Administration ships for disposal is effective immediately and will remain in force through Oct. 1, 1999."This step reflects the serious concerns that have been raised about potential threats to the environment, worker safety and public health posed by overseas scrapping operations," the vice president said.

WASHINGTON - Provoked by the sluggish pace of dismantling decrepit American ships, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are clashing on how best to prod the U.S. Maritime Administration to rid the country's waterways of these spectral, contaminated vessels. As part of a much larger bill setting spending limits for the Defense Department, the House voted yesterday to require that all such ships be sold overseas for scrap, a controversial practice that has caused deaths, serious injuries and environmental hazards.

Vincent F. Barletta, the Massachusetts owner of Sparrows Point shipyard, and certain affiliates have two weeks to answer racketeering claims filed against them last week in Baltimore's U.S. District Court. If they don't, the defendants face a default judgment of up to $2.25 million, according to court documents. The civil lawsuit, filed by Clean Venture Inc. on Nov. 13, claims that at least some of the defendants took up to $750,000 that was owed to the New Jersey ship-breaking company.

A former World War II hospital ship that has spent much of its retirement languishing in Baltimore will soon be towed to Greece, under a plan that's raising legal questions and pollution concerns from a Seattle environmental group. In a statement set to be released today, the Basel Action Network said it has contacted the U.S. Coast Guard, the Maryland Port Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency with allegations that the Sanctuary contains polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, thought to cause cancer.

North American Ship Recycling Inc., which just a few years ago was heralded as the key to revitalizing the Sparrows Point shipyard, has disappeared, leaving behind in Maryland waters two rotting and possibly toxic government ships, according to federal officials. NASR was supposed to dismantle the ships - the Sphinx and the Hoist - under agreements made this year with the U.S. Maritime Administration. A security guard said yesterday that NASR was no longer at the shipyard, and that he didn't know where the company had gone.

JESUS FLORES was born in Villagran, Mexico, in 1951, and he, like so many others, came north - to the choking metal scrapyards of Brownsville, Texas, where he worked as a cutter for 25 years. This spring, he became acquainted with the remains of the Santa Isabel, a 10,200-ton freighter that had been built when he was 16, at the now defunct Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. in Chester, Pa., and that first saw service under the flag of a company called the Grace Lines. For the past 21 years, the Santa Isabel has been the property not of Grace but of the U.S. government, rotting at a mooring on the James River in Virginia; last summer, the Maritime Administration contracted with ESCO Marine, in Brownsville, to break the old vessel into scrap.

The investment partnership trying to revitalize the defunct Sparrows Point shipyard has won a $2.3 million federal contract to break two retired Navy reserve cargo ships into scrap in what the new owners hope is just the initial installment of an ambitious plan to bring hundreds of workers back to a historic waterfront industrial site in Baltimore County. North American Ship Recycling, a subsidiary of Boston-based Barletta Willis LLC, won the contract as part of the U.S. Maritime Administration's efforts to scrap dozens of rusting ships mothballed on the James River in Virginia.

TWO MOTHBALLED American ships moored in Virginia's James River are about to begin a trans-Atlantic voyage to a scrapper's yard in northeastern England as a sort of test run for what is a shockingly irresponsible idea - the renewed dumping of toxic U.S. government ships overseas. The Maritime Administration owns these old vessels, and about 100 others, and wants to get rid of them - they're leaky rustbuckets that pose a considerable environmental and safety risk to the waterways that now hold them.

The LNG Aquarius was built in the United States because it is one of the most technically sophisticated cargo ships afloat. And American shipyards are the best in the world. The 936-foot tanker was registered, or "flagged," in the United States because it hauls liquefied natural gas chilled to 260 degrees below zero and requires meticulous care. And American sailors are the best-trained in the world. But the LNG Aquarius doesn't fly the American flag anymore, and its crew of American mariners is gone.

The work force at Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s Sparrows Point shipyard could soon be boosted to more than 1,000 from 565, thanks to a $27 million government contract the yard is about to receive to renovate two cargo vessels.The contract, announced late Wednesday by U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, is for upgrading two 10-year-old, Polish-built ships. The vessels are to become part of the U.S. Ready Reserve fleet of cargo ships used for military operations.The contract would come from the U.S. Maritime Administration but has not been formally awarded, according to Maritime Administration spokesman John Swank, who said he expected an announcement in the "near future."

Breaking ships without hurting the environment The Sun's editorial "Shipbreakers, revisited" (April 13) depicted the Maritime Administration (MARAD) as attempting to circumvent environmental regulations. The facts do not support that view. MARAD has included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its investigation of the best possible disposal options to satisfy our congressional mandate to dispose of all ships by 2006. And MARAD is not focusing on Asian shipbreaking facilities, as the editorial claimed.

FIVE YEARS AGO, the U.S. government belatedly realized that its program for disposing of old ships was a financial mess, an environmental disaster and a worker-safety nightmare. It instituted major reforms and began a pilot project - in Baltimore and three other ports - which proved that Navy vessels could be scrapped prudently and responsibly. Now that project has run nearly to its conclusion, and the government's response has been shockingly wrong-headed. Most of the government's mothballed ships are owned by either the Navy or the Maritime Administration.