Beleve it or not, there are 180 steamships ALONE that make up our nation's "ghost fleet". (There are also several diesel powered vessels, and barges as well.) They are mostly concentrated in three locations: Suisan Bay in California, the James River in Virginia, and in the Neches River here in Beaumont. The James River Reserve Fleet alone has 73 steamships in it.
The fleet contains several warships that are awaiting transfer to a museum, resale to another government, or scrapping. It contains several cargo ships, ranging from the hulks of Victory Ships (as Ted mentioned) up to more modern container ships that could and have been activated for use in transporting military equipment overseas. It also contains several passenger steamers that were retained as training vessels or for transporting troops; the ARTSHIP and the S.S. Independance will both go back to Suisan Bay. As mentioned previously, the N.S.S. Savannah is also in the James River Fleet.
All of the above are listed in "Surviving World Steamships". I have also had the good fortune of making a contact who went through the James River Fleet, and took dozens of photographs for my "Surviving World Steamships" CD-ROM. Roughly a dozen of these photographs are currently included on the CD-ROM; the cover picture below is one of them; a Victory Ship hulk and a picture of the N.S.S. Savannah are two others.
As I mentioned before, there was an article in the Beaumont Enterprise about the reserve fleet a year or two ago. The article stated that the United States would no longer sell ships to overseas breakers for scrapping because they do not protect their workers from hazardous chemicals including asbestos, lead paint, and PCBs. This has had the effect of slowing down the scrapping rate; since the price of scrap metal here in the States is not that great.
If it costs that much just to scrap three or four; I think they should use that money across the fleet to stabilize them all instead. Some are slowly being sold for scrap; others are being stripped for sinking as artifical reefs. (The training ship "Texas Clipper", aboard which I had the pleasure of an engine room tour back in the 1980s, will have that fate.) Others will hopefully become floating museums one day.
In the meantime, as I mentioned before, they are the largest "private" museum in the world, all being preserved with US government dollars. They are not assessible to the public; you can only barely see the top of some the Beaumont fleet from public property.
-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a
> Today's Washington Post (which I had to
> "buy" by leaving an IOU in the
> bundle that's STILL sitting in front of the
> shuttered drug store as 2 feet of snow piles
> up!) had a story on the "ghost
> fleet" anchored in Newport News, Va.
> Some interesting facts and ships, including
> the fact that it costs ca. $25,000 a year
> just to keep each ship afloat and at anchor!
Surviving World Steamships
james1@pernet.net