Navy Ships

THE WORST WAY the Navy could react to the scandal of unsafe work and pollution in the breaking up of its old ships would be to move the work offshore to even worse facilities with more vile records of contempt for human life. Yet as it chases shady operators run out of one state by the Environmental Protection Administration to another, that is what the Navy is tempted to do.The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- to its eternal shame -- this summer exempted the Navy from rules banning the export of ships containing PCBs.

When the U.S. Navy began its great sell-off of surplus ships in 1991, Richard Jaross was among the first to see an opportunity.He began dismantling Navy ships at a California scrapyard, where workers were exposed to lead and asbestos. He came to Baltimore to help put together the ill-fated Coral Sea project. He then set up a scrapyard in Wilmington, N.C., but the state shut it down for mishandling asbestos, polluting a river and contaminating the soil with oil and lead.Troubled histories, it turns out, are not uncommon among the shipbreakers to whom the Navy has entrusted its ships.

THE USS CORAL SEA -- the "Ageless Warrior" -- steamed at 33 knots to Cold War trouble spots for 42 years, carrying planes, nuclear capability, 4,000 crewmen and the hopes, pride and fears of the superpower whose security it maintained.Now it's junk at the former Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock yard in Fairfield, dying in ignominy and scandal. The Seawitch Salvage company chief who took on the largest shipbreaking and salvage project in American history now stands convicted of forcing his men to breathe asbestos and dumping oil and filth in the Patapsco.

Fifty years ago today, a group of more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors aboard the Exodus 1947, a converted Chesapeake Bay steamer that had sailed from Baltimore, engaged in a showdown with the British navy in international waters off Egypt.The refugees were hoping to slip by a blockade to enter British-controlled Palestine. The furor after they were rebuffed and sent to detention camps in Germany eventually resulted in the creation of the state of Israel.Today at noon, members of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and the Baltimore Zionist District will unveil a historical marker commemorating the event at the Waterfront Arcade of the World Trade Center in the Inner Harbor.

An Ohio-class nuclear submarine is a veiled threat -- a boxer's biceps, a martial artist's black belt.For 15 years, the subs have loomed huge and unseen. Each one four stories tall, almost two football fields long, containing the lethal force of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, the Ohio-class vessels helped frighten the world into peace during the Cold War.And they have helped make the world safe for their own demise. Russian-American arms-control agreements call for four of the 18 Ohio-class subs, each carrying 24 Trident nuclear missiles, to be disarmed within a decade.

The former Navy hospital ship Sanctuary, a relic of World War II and the Vietnam War, began another voyage of rescue yesterday -- this time to help treat casualties of the 1990s drug culture.The short, tug-powered trip will allow the vessel to be refitted for its new mission of helping recovering substance abusers.At 4: 16 p.m., two tugboats nudged the 14,000-ton vessel from a berth at Pier 5 in Fairfield and into the Patapsco River. The voyage around Fort McHenry to North Locust Point lasted a hour.

At least five Maryland defense contractors, including two industry giants, have been selected for the early development work on a new Navy ship that could revolutionize the future of maritime combat, the Pentagon announced yesterday.Lockheed Martin Corp. in Bethesda and the Oceanic Systems division of Northrop Grumman Corp. in Sykesville head two of five industry teams who will compete for up to $3 billion in work toward a remote-controlled ship armed with more than 500 missiles."Essentially, it is a floating missile pad," Dick Paquette, Lockheed Martin's arsenal ship program manager, said of the high-priority vessel the Navy is developing in conjunction with the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Denise Troutman hadn't seen a dentist for five years and had been in constant pain for the past eight months, which makes her typical of the hundreds of people who have found their way to an old Navy hospital ship to take advantage of a free medical and dental clinic.When the organizers of the clinic opened their two-week program -- which ends tomorrow evening -- they were expecting their biggest job would be to provide immunizations, maybe thousands of them. It didn't happen; only dozens of children in need of shots have turned up so far. But the dental clinic has been turning away 60 or more people every day."

Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason S. Winans participated in a commemoration of the end of World War II as part of New York City's Fleet Week celebration aboard the aircraft carrier USS America.Six Navy ships, five Coast Guard vessels and Navy ships from Canada, Denmark and Italy took part in the eighth annual event. The ships paraded by the Statue of Liberty, then docked in New York City to allow visitors to tour them.USS America then participated in a Composite Training Unit Exercise in the Western Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea with 17 other U.S. ships and a Dutch ship.

They didn't wave flags. And they didn't wave signs. In fact, supporters of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Annapolis almost went unnoticed amid the throngs of community activists lobbying yesterday to save their hometown military bases.They were there, though.About 50 people -- mostly civilian workers, scientists and engineers -- showed up to defend the center at yesterday's daylong regional hearing before the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission at the University of Maryland Baltimore County field house in Catonsville.