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WILL HYSTERIA TRIUMPH ON GHOST FLEET?
Nov 24 2003

By Sue Wilson, The Journal

For any North-East shipyard, the winning of a £10m contract is great news, filling order books, securing jobs and building on the region's fine marine reputation. Normally the whole region celebrates too.

For these are real jobs, "men's work," appealing to a traditional culture not yet fully comfortable with male employment that involves a telephone and a computer screen.

For Able UK, the euphoria of a hard-won contract has been cut short by the media frenzy whipped up by Friends of the Earth over the so-called "ghost" or "toxic" ships. The first of the ships arriving in the Tees looked anything but ghostly, just great solid feats of engineering on their last dignified voyage to the breaker's yard. As for toxic, the ships have about the same content of dangerous substances as any others of that age and that is very little. The Friends of the Earth campaign seems far more toxic.

There will be about 50 tonnes of oil on each ship, which hardly merits comparisons with the stricken Prestige oil tanker which was carrying 50,000 tonnes, and about 30 tonnes of asbestos, which is a fraction of what would be in some old buildings.

And they are going to a specialist dismantling facility. Teesside is an experienced host to hazardous-material- embracing industries such as petro-chemicals, steelmaking and nuclear power. Able itself has a 37-year history of reclamation and at the eight year-old yard has already dismantled 50 oil platforms. The 25-acre dock is one of the largest and most professional dismantling facilities in the world.

They do know what they are doing. Do the Friends of the Earth?

The Environment Agency has lost credibility, first issuing a licence for the work and then withdrawing it after some heavy metal from Friends of the Earth. Hartlepool Council went wobbly when the pressure group's campaign scared the electorate and anti American feeling seemed to be the order of the day.

With the demise of shipbuilding on the Wear and Tees, much time, effort and money went into devising new economic strategies.

A key proposal was to create safe, world-class ship-breaking facilities. That has been achieved at Able UK and 200 high-quality jobs in an area of high unemployment depend on being allowed to proceed as planned. Or should we in the West go back to towing our old naval vessels to India to be inexpertly pulled apart on the beaches of Alang, where one in four people die of cancer and toxic waste washes into the sea?

Able is prevented from starting work on the contract until a High Court hearing next month. And if spin, politics and hysteria triumph over science, economics and common sense and the ships are returned to the US, it won't be ghost ships we will be worrying about. It will be ghost jobs.

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