Stripping 10,000-ton ships takes thousands of crowbars and blowtorches in South Asia. Or one high-speed chop shop in southern Virginia.
Moored along a 2-mile stretch of the James River in southern Virginia, the Maritime Administration's "ghost fleet" of 88 decrepit mega-military vessels floats sadly in various stages of ruin. Their rusting hulls, tethered in groups of a dozen or more, are riddled with PCBs and asbestos and harbor millions of gallons of oil. Forty-five more dying ships are on the way. Some call the fleet a terrorist target; to others, it's an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Congress recently mandated the fleet's removal by 2006 and allocated $31 million to make it happen. The only question is how.
Not long ago, the ships would have been dragged away by monster tugs, leaking toxins all the way to Bangladesh or India, where a thousand day workers with oxyacetylene torches would reduce them to pieces. This process poses danger to the oceans, not to mention the third world workers and coastal communities. It also creates an international perception that US ship manufacturers and operators can't clean up after themselves.
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Photos by Jonathan Manzo and Smit Salvage From left: Two of the nearly 100 ships from the "ghost fleet" await demolition near Chesapeake Bay; the engine room of the Tricolor, freshly sliced in half by a wire saw.
Now there's a new way. Advances in cleaning, cutting, and disposal technologies are taking much of the cost and danger out of ship-breaking. A silica-based biodegradable power wash created by chemical company Amstar EnviroChem disables the deadly chloride molecule in PCBs, leaving behind only briny water. The X-paK, a tool developed for Nu-Corp International Technologies, separates hull oil from water using a mix of heat (as high as 350 degrees) and moderate pressure (about 10 atmospheres), allowing a breaking company to refine the oil onsite and reuse it. When it comes to tearing down a ship, the wire saw and the mobile shear can do the work of hundreds of men, and much faster.
To Mario Mazza, the tough-as-nails owner of Bay Bridge Enterprises, a ship-breaking facility near Chesapeake Bay, such technologies are exactly what's needed to clean up the plague of toxic, crumbling ships dotting the US coastline. "We got the land. We got everything here," he says. "The better technology we have to do this faster, to get ships broken down and off to the scrap mill, the better it is for everyone."
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Wire Saw Think of the wire saw as a massive cheese cutter made up of a 15-inch-thick, 330-foot-long steel cable covered with spiked cylinders, or "bushes," that act as a serrated edge. Strung beneath the ship between two platforms, the cable cuts upward through the hull. Last year, SMIT Salvage, a Dutch ship-breaker and salvage company, used the new tool to carve up the Tricolor, a 625-foot vehicle carrier that collided with a container ship and sank in the English Channel with a load of BMWs. The wire saw sliced the Tricolor into nine pieces, one 30-hour cut at a time. "You couldn't get a better cut with a saw on wood," says SMIT spokesperson Lars Walder.
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Laser Scanning Laser scan techniques promise to transform ship demolition from an eyeballing art to a precise science. The Cyrax laser scan from Cullinan Engineering, now used for topographic surveys and highway construction, is being tested for ship-breaking. Capable of creating an image accurate to the millimeter, the large-format camera first scans a ship's exterior from a distance of up to 328 feet. Then come scans of all interior compartments. The result: a 3-D model telling breakers exactly where to cut.
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Mobile Shear Mounted on the arm of an excavator, the mobile shear descends on its target like a mean-ass bird of prey. With a hydraulic regeneration valve, also called a speed valve, the Genesis XP 1400R, shown here, generates 2,245 tons of force per square inch to rip through a 3-foot-thick slab of steel in just 10 seconds.The shear head – with eight blades packed into its jaw – is made of a proprietary alloy that's 30 percent stronger and more abrasive-resistant than steel, giving it more power and reducing maintenance. At about $250,000 each, the mobile shear doesn't come cheap – but it can cut $300,000 or more in labor costs from a single job.
