2 World War II Liberty ships recycled in Tacoma
If Scott Sloan felt any regret as he watched the last of two remaining Liberty Ships cut into scrap, he concealed it well.
The expression on his face looked more like pure relief.
"These were war veterans, but they were almost 70 years old," Sloan said, watching as a gantry crane lifted one of the last chunks of the SS Woodbridge Ferris into the air and swung it toward a waiting barge.
"They weren't designed to withstand the ocean environment for this long."
Sloan is the regional environmental manager for Schnitzer Steel Industries, a metal recycler with a large collecting and shipping facility on the Tacoma Tideflats.
Schnitzer inherited Woodbridge Ferris and another rusty World War II relic, the SS Mahlon Pitney, when it took over the facility from General Metals of Tacoma in 1995.
It fell to Sloan to figure out what to do with the two former cargo ships, each longer than a football field.
World War II vets and shipyard workers viewed the old ships with nostalgia, but state environmental regulators tended to see them as floating toxic waste dumps.
The best thing seemed to be to get rid of them.
But an array of environmental regulations and a lack of suitable facilities in Puget Sound made traditional methods of disposal all but impossible, Sloan said. Simply sinking old ships is no longer allowed, nor is dismantling them on the water. Relics' hulls often are too fragile to withstand the ocean haul to ship-breakers in China or through the Panama Canal to a federally approved ship-breaking facility in Brownsville, Texas.
Schnitzer's solution was pulling the ships onto dry land and slicing them up like loaves of bread. Doing the work on the ground instead of on the water eliminated a lot of environmental problems....
Read entire article at Seattle Pi
The expression on his face looked more like pure relief.
"These were war veterans, but they were almost 70 years old," Sloan said, watching as a gantry crane lifted one of the last chunks of the SS Woodbridge Ferris into the air and swung it toward a waiting barge.
"They weren't designed to withstand the ocean environment for this long."
Sloan is the regional environmental manager for Schnitzer Steel Industries, a metal recycler with a large collecting and shipping facility on the Tacoma Tideflats.
Schnitzer inherited Woodbridge Ferris and another rusty World War II relic, the SS Mahlon Pitney, when it took over the facility from General Metals of Tacoma in 1995.
It fell to Sloan to figure out what to do with the two former cargo ships, each longer than a football field.
World War II vets and shipyard workers viewed the old ships with nostalgia, but state environmental regulators tended to see them as floating toxic waste dumps.
The best thing seemed to be to get rid of them.
But an array of environmental regulations and a lack of suitable facilities in Puget Sound made traditional methods of disposal all but impossible, Sloan said. Simply sinking old ships is no longer allowed, nor is dismantling them on the water. Relics' hulls often are too fragile to withstand the ocean haul to ship-breakers in China or through the Panama Canal to a federally approved ship-breaking facility in Brownsville, Texas.
Schnitzer's solution was pulling the ships onto dry land and slicing them up like loaves of bread. Doing the work on the ground instead of on the water eliminated a lot of environmental problems....