Admiralty Lawyer

An admiralty lawsuit was filed by Environmentalist to impose action on the federal government to clean up toxic material in its decaying fleet of ships near Benicia and produce a cleanup plan for the U.S. Maritime Administration’s ships here and in Texas and Virginia. Specifically, the lawsuit seeks to force the Maritime Administration to safely dispose of the metals, PCBs, oil, asbestos and other toxic materials on the ships. The Maritime administration was considering bringing the ships for cleaning in to Alameda, but that plan was nixed, due to opposition by the Regional Water Quality Control Board, deputy city manager Lisa Goldman said. Further, even when one ship was cleaned in Richmond, Goldman said there were problems with paint scrapings that peeled off the ships and were not collected and disposed of properly.

“We want them to stop polluting Suisun Bay by addressing the (peeling) paint first and then finding an environmentally responsible way to dispose of the ships, preferably in the Bay Area,” said Saul Bloom of the San Francisco environmental group Arc Ecology, which monitors pollution at federal facilities.

The Maritime Administration is responsible for the mothballed ships of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, the bulk of which are in Suisun Bay, in the James River in Virginia, and in the Gulf of Mexico near Beaumont, Texas. The ships are decaying. The state’s top water quality regulator for San Francisco Bay said in an e-mail to the Times that he welcomed the lawsuit because state regulators have been unable to get the federal agency to obey environmental laws.