Shipping News

She was built in 1950, at Bethlehem Steel in Quincy, Mass., a shining 682-foot steamship big enough to carry 1,000 passengers at 23 knots down the "sun lane" from New York to the Mediterranean. She carried President and Mrs. Truman across the Atlantic in 1958. Advertisers boasted her as the first air-conditioned liner, with "American designs, American fabrics, even an American soda fountain, and true American hospitality." They called her the SS Independence.

Now, 58 years later, airplanes have made her transatlantic voyages redundant and her years as a cruise ship in Hawaii are over. Grass is growing between the teak planks of her sun decks and the flowers painted on her stacks are fading. She has been renamed the SS Oceanic, and the asbestos and chemicals she was built with have environmental groups like the Basel Action Network calling her a floating "toxic time bomb." Today the Oceanic is a rogue ship on the high seas—last seen near Dubai—and is the center of a lawsuit between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the shipbrokers who own her.

But even as she deteriorates, the Oceanic remains a valuable property. Ships like these are in demand for their steel, yielding high profits for the brokers who send them to yards to be dismantled. This is one type of recycling, though, that's not always eco-friendly. Old vessels are filled with contaminants, making them dangerous to tear apart. Few governments want this kind of waste on their doorsteps, so the ship graveyards have concentrated in developing countries where regulations are spotty and migrant labor is cheap. That means places like Alang, the Indian scrapyard that took apart as many as 400 ships annually during its peak years of operation.

Alang is less busy now, due to competition from several even less regulated yards in Bangladesh and Pakistan; only 129 ships were dismantled there in 2007. But experts on the industry believe that when the Oceanic left her San Francisco berth under tow on the foggy morning of Feb. 8, Alang was her most likely destination. Her journey was disrupted when the EPA issued a complaint against her owners, Maryland-based Global Shipping LLC, seeking fines of $32,500 per day of transport for violating the Toxic Substances Control Act by exporting a ship for scrap with polychlorinated biphenyl chemicals (PCBs) onboard. "Federal law prohibits companies from exporting PCBs, including those in ships that are sent overseas to be scrapped," Rich Vaille, an associate director for the EPA's waste program enforcement, said in a statement. "When companies illegally export PCB waste, they are circumventing U.S. requirements for proper disposal," he said.

The Oceanic was owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines until she was sold to Global Shipping shortly before setting sail four months ago. According to the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), Global Shipping originally submitted an application to MARAD for approval to transfer the Oceanic for scrapping in India, but that application was withdrawn before the ship was towed. MARAD has legal authority to seize a vessel for violation of foreign transfer laws, but MARAD spokeswoman Susan Clark says that in the case of the Oceanic, "We are not aware of any such violation."

Global Shipping denies knowledge of any toxic material on board the ship and says that it does not intend to scrap the Oceanic but is looking for buyers to restore her. "Vessels of this size, build and history can be put to use in several trades, such as floating hotels, casinos or providing accommodations to laborers," says Shashank Agrawal, a spokesman for Global Shipping. "We must place on record that [the] owners are fully cooperating with the EPA in this exercise."