3A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2018
Recycling ghost ships could turn trash to treasure
Vessels a source
of pollution
By KNUTE BERGER
Crosscut
‘Future customers’
The Department of Natu-
ral Resources counts about 160
such vessels across the state —
not counting hundreds more
on private property or those
working their way toward der-
elict-hood — boats Wood jok-
ingly describes as “future cus-
tomers.” Removing derelicts
can be pricey. It can cost from
$20,000 to $2 million to raise
and dispose of a single boat
depending on where it is, how
big, and what kinds of haz-
ards it poses. If a dive team is
required, that alone can cost
$700 per hour. All that is in
addition to the costs to the state
Department of Ecology and the
Coast Guard who pump out the
fuel when the boat first goes
down in order to minimize
spills.
The Department of Natural
Resources gets involved when
boats are abandoned on public
lands. They have funds to help
pay for derelict removal to the
tune of about $2.5 million per
biennium. Sometimes the Leg-
islature will kick in an appro-
priation for more funds for an
urgent and expensive cleanup.
In 2013, some $4.5 million
was approved for removing
multiple large sunken ships
from Tacoma’s Hylebos water-
way. But such budgets are set
only every two years.
Wood tries to track down
the owners of derelicts, which
Troy Wood, derelict vessel removal program manager for the state Depart-
ment of Natural Resources, points out damage on an aging wooden-hulled
vessel that could be a ‘future customer’ of a boat recycling center in Ilwaco.
is sometimes impossible.
Some boats were never regis-
tered, or the ownership chain
is unclear. Sometimes identify-
ing marks have been removed.
Some people just won’t com-
municate or cooperate. Some
people dump boats on purpose
and run from responsibility.
Even where owners are
known and cooperative, the
task of removal can be tricky.
Boats can fall apart when
moved and release additional
pollutants.
Every boat has its story,
Wood says. There’s a concen-
tration of derelicts on Puget
Sound where the population
center is, but you can find them
across the state, even on east-
ern Washington’s lakes and
rivers. Sometimes, someone
buys a boat on its last legs
for a year or two of commer-
cial fishing, then lets it sink at
a marina. Sometimes owners
are amateur preservationists
intent on saving a chunk of his-
tory — think of the saga of the
old streamlined ferry Kalakala
which traveled from port-to-
port before being scrapped.
Once a sinking derelict is
raised, how do you dispose of
it?
It turns out that challenge is
well-illustrated in the complex
waterways along the Pacific
Ocean coast in places like
Hoquiam, Willapa Bay and
Ilwaco.
After visiting the Lady
Grace, we drove down to the
Palix River, which feeds into
Willapa Bay east of the Long
Beach Peninsula. Here is one
of the most interesting and
dangerous derelicts. Along the
riverbank, just above the Wil-
lapa Bay’s vast and productive
oyster beds, is the 125-foot,
300-ton Hero, its decks awash,
most of its valuables stripped
away. The Hero was built in
1968 as an Antarctic research
vessel — America’s last wood-
en-hulled icebreaker. Along
with diesel engines it was fitted
with sails for “silent running”
during wildlife research based
out of Palmer Station.
The Hero came to the
Northwest in the 1980s with
the hopes of turning it into a
museum. It was eventually
purchased for that purpose by
a man in Bay Center named
Sun Feather LightDancer, but
in 2017, it sank at its dock and
it’s there still, a kind of eco-
time bomb. Wood tells me
that the Department of Natural
Resources rates derelict boats
from 1 to 5, with 1 being the
worst in terms of immediate
potential damage. The Hero
is a serious hazard, one of two
vessels currently ranked as 1’s
in the state.
Besides being adjacent to a
U.S. Fish & Wildlife preserve,
it poses a threat to the oys-
ter beds and food chain in the
estuary.
The oyster beds of Washing-
ton are already under enough
threat and don’t need hydraulic
fluids or lead paint chips add-
ing to their challenges. Willapa
Bay provides 25 percent of the
country’s oysters and creates
over 1,800 jobs, according to
the state. They are a huge part
of Pacific County’s economy,
where unemployment is 6.4
percent, the highest west of the
Cascades.
Plus, the Hero’s position
is precarious. The Palix is a
“meandering river,” mean-
ing its course changes, which
could alter the position of the
vessel. It could break up, get
cut loose, block navigation.
Moving it without doing envi-
ronmental damage could take
$1 million or more.
When it is removed, dispos-
ing of it would be a problem.
Part of the expense is that the
nearest place it could be towed
and broken up would be a long
voyage to Portland, Port Ange-
les or even Seattle. Despite
the maritime and recreational
economy of southwest Wash-
ington and the Columbia
River, there are few options
to dismantle old vessels in the
area.
Recycling
The Port of Ilwaco, how-
ever, has a plan — one cen-
tered on recycling.
Ilwaco’s port has berths for
about 800 boats, permanent
and transient, and more than
100 are commercial fishing
boats that bring in tuna, ancho-
vies, bottomfish and other trea-
sures depending on the sea-
son. You can buy the fish right
at the dock. The Port has had
its share of abandoned vessels,
or ones that have sunk at their
moorings, and has worked
often with the Department of
Natural Resources to remove
them, says Port manager Guy
Glenn Jr. Ilwaco is the site of
a new pilot program to build
an indoor vessel dismantling
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Photos by Matt M. McKnight/Crosscut
USS Plainview AGH1 has been abandoned since 1996 on the Colum-
bia River one mile from Dismal Nitch.
Southwest Washington is
the site of four announced rural
initiatives, including Ilwaco’s
derelict recycling center, a for-
est management learning lab
for students in partnership with
the school district in Kalama; a
new research program to con-
trol burrowing shrimp, which
threaten the oyster beds of
Pacific and Grays Harbor
counties; and the revival of a
sawmill in Raymond to pro-
duce sustainably harvested
hardwoods, like alder.
“Our rural economies
are absolutely critical,” says
state Lands Commissioner
Hilary Franz, who oversees
the Department of Natural
Resources.
She likens the lack of boat
recycling centers for derelicts
to fighting wildfires “without
the right equipment to do it.”
Only the slow-moving disas-
ter of a sunken ship is harder
to see than a forest fire, slower
to “burn,” but the damage and
costs are real.
facility large enough to handle
big boats and control polluting
runoff from the process.
Instead of a tow to Port
Angeles, regional derelicts
would be brought there for
on-site recycling. Better yet,
abandoned boats that hav-
en’t sunk yet can be recycled
before they become a problem.
The Port has a fenced yard
containing boats that are await-
ing dismantling — a kind of
Boat Purgatory. They run the
gamut from wooden-hulled
vessels to steel, fiberglass,
even concrete.
Recycling can include strip-
ping fittings that can be sold
to restorers, valuable wood
that can be repurposed, even
fiberglass that can be chopped
up and reused in things like
highway jersey barriers. Last
spring, the state announced a
$950,000 grant to help build
the recycling facility, which
the Port will run with a private
partner.
That investment is part of
the “Rural Communities Part-
nership Initiative,” a program
coordinated by the Department
of Natural Resources to find
shovel-ready local projects that
boost rural economies, protect
state lands, and solve envi-
ronmental and land manage-
ment problems. The program
is driven by local requests.
J
US OIN
!!!
On the banks of the
Hoquiam River in southwest-
ern Washington, a mostly
sunken vessel lies along a bank
at an angle with only its mast
and the top of its pilot house
marking its resting place.
This stretch of river is a misty,
placid working patch of water
marked with boats, boatyards
and U.S. Highway 101 bridges.
The derelict we’re looking at is
a wooden fishing boat called
the Lady Grace, which turned
90 years old this year. Some-
one wanted to save it, but age
caught up.
This is an example of where
owning an old boat ends with
reality, a case of folks with
“great dreams and aspirations,
and no money,” says Troy
Wood, the man in charge of
dealing with derelict vessels in
Washington. The unenviable
job falls to the state Depart-
ment of Natural Resources,
which manages 2.4 million
acres of state-owned aquatic
lands.
There’s an old saying that
a boat is simply a hole in the
water into which you dump
your cash. They can be cheap
to buy, but are expensive to
maintain, insure, berth, repair
and operate. They age, they
weather, they often sink.
When they do, they create
another kind of money hole: a
maritime cleanup project often
leaves taxpayers with the bill
for removal. It’s a problem
around the state, but here in
southwest Washington there’s
a plan afoot to deal with der-
elicts like the Lady Grace. The
solution: recycling.
Vessels of all kinds, from
dinghies to cruisers, from
fishing boats to icebreakers,
are often abandoned on pub-
lic land — commonly on the
state-owned shorelines, river
and lake bottoms, and tide-
lands. These abandoned and
derelict vessels leak polluting
fuels, they scour the bottom
and degrade habitat, let loose
contaminants like lead paint
and asbestos, and they can
pose navigational hazards.
‘The ship that flew’
The Ilwaco project is slated
to open in 2020 and if it works,
other recycling centers could
follow.
South of Ilwaco, just down
the highway along the Colum-
bia River about a mile or so
beyond the Lewis and Clark
campsite known as Dismal
Nitch, is a very visible dere-
lict. It’s the hulk of the Plain-
view, a former Navy hydrofoil
that was built in the late 1960s
and was supposed to be the
next big thing in speedy naval
warfare. Described as “the ship
that flew,” the Plainview was
built at Lockheed Shipyards in
Seattle. After years of testing,
hydrofoils just didn’t work out
for the Navy and eventually
this cutting-edge vessel wound
up abandoned on the shore of
a river that has seen so many
wrecks that the area around its
mouth is known as “the grave-
yard of the Pacific.”
The Plainview is worth
pulling over to look at — der-
elicts aren’t always antiques.
This one has sleek modern
lines of a slim, fast boat. It
doesn’t fall under the state’s
purview because it’s on pri-
vate property with the owner’s
permission.
Still, it’s a reminder that
derelicts come from many
sources. Some are abandoned
due to neglect or junked by
unscrupulous owners. Others
reflect technologies that failed
to pan out. The dreams that
built boats sometime fizzle,
and the vessels might become
picturesque wrecks, but also
nightmares the rest of us will
have to contend with someday.
Clatsop Community College
presents the 5 th Annual
CONFERENCE ON
EXTRAORDINARY LIVING
for people ages 50+
WALK-INS
WELCOME!
LUNCH
Provided by
Local Food Carts
VITAL CONNECTIONS
Saturday, September 8, 2018
9:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Registration 9:00 - 9:30 AM
Clatsop Community College
Columbia Hall
$
10 Suggested Donation
Clatsop Post 12
Open Face
Roast Beef
Sandwhich
With Salad
Friday,
Aug. 31 st
4 pm until gone
$
8. 00
6PM
“Karaoke Dave”
ASTORIA
AMERICAN LEGION
Clatsop Post 12
1132 Exchange Street
325-5771
Keynote address from Jimmy Pearson
Astoria Library Director
Pre-register by Aug. 31. Call 503-338-2566 or
register online at www.clatsopcc.edu/cel
12 INFORMATIVE PRESENTATIONS
IN THREE BREAKOUT SESSIONS