The ship was built in 1966, and therefore presumed be heavily contaminated with asbestos, lead, and PCBs. No ship breaker in the US would dare touch it. The last time one accepted a ship that old the ship and the company were banned and chased out of every port on the east coast. The ship was eventually sold at a loss to a ship breaker in Pakistan.

 

And don’t bother saying it can be decontaminated. The government and intervener lawyers insist on such unrealistic standards to tight that even if you can meet them the next rain storm will put you over the limit.

It's been how long since breakers yards in the west were profitable ventures?

 

Even with high scrap prices for certain grades of steel and other metals it's only by relying on a complete lack of third-world environmental/safety standards and fractional work/hour costs that owners can get paid for their unwanted hulls at all, and only on the order of a few million at most.

 

Far better to create a nice artificial reef, those rusting bulkheads sustain a surprisingly large ecosystem : )

 

R 

Having personally participated in three or four Rimpacs while stationed aboard the USS Indianapolis, I can tell you you it is invaluable training for ships crews. Hardly any training went to actual fighting a war, launching weapons, etc.

To me it seemed like we were having flooding drills, fire drills, nuclear reactor training all the time. Those were important but to me it was too much DC and not enough offensive training. The mindset of the upper management was ( and may still be) that all the attacking would be automatic, or something. Now I wasn't an officer or anything, I was enlisted, But I observed and learned a lot .

No, it is politics that allows those standards to be used as legal weapons by people who either;

or

They don’t even plan to win in the courts, just delay things until the sun goes out and hell freezes over.