Welcome
to Brownsville, where a thriving shipbreaking business makes old steel new
again.
On a recent Friday
morning, workers in the Esco Marine shipbreaking yard in Brownsville, Texas,
were dismantling a 1944 U.S. Navy repair ship. This was the latest arrival in a
steady convoy of aging military vessels, Maritime Administration ships, and
merchant boats that have docked here, as a final stop, for years. Here in
Brownsville, off the southern tip of Texas near the Gulf of Mexico, these old
vessels get a kind of “decent retirement,” in the words of Esco's CEO, Richard
Jaross.
This means asbestos
and other hazardous materials will be cleaned out. Some of the salvaged
equipment will wind up on eBay. And then thousands of tons of steel will be
stripped and recycled and sent to smelt shops and steel mills a few hours away
by rail in Monterrey, Mexico. Much of it will eventually return to the U.S. as
remnants of old war cruisers and merchant marine ships reborn as auto parts and
appliances.
Brownsville’s role
in this process--shipbreaking, not to be confused with ship-building--has given
the border city of 200,000 with an Hispanic majority a unique economic niche.
Esco is one of five large shipbreaking operations clustered at the end of
Brownsville’s 17-mile shipping channel inland from the Gulf. And there are only
eight companies certified to dismantle Navy ships in the country. This fall,
the Navy is contracting three decommissioned Cold War-era super aircraft
carriers--the Saratoga, the Forrestal, and the Constellation--and they will
likely take their retirement here.
Those aircraft
carriers everyone has been waiting for could each contain 60,000 tons of scrap
metal (as well as the promise of hundreds more cutting and welding jobs). By
law, none of those Navy ships can be sent for scrapping overseas, which is why
this work continues in Brownsville when so much other recycling and salvaging
has gone abroad (just look at what happens to your discarded computer and cell
phone). The U.S. government, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want a Chinese
company dismantling the Navy’s fleet. After all, the same is true of ships and
circuit boards and game consoles: You can learn an awful lot about something by
taking it apart.
Brownsville would
represent a dramatically different destination from some of the Navy’s previous
retirement plans to “recycle” ships by sinking them at sea, in the hopes of
creating artificial reefs.
“Every warship I’ve
taken apart has had a story to it,” Jaross says. “They all have meaning because
the lives of many people were put into building that ship, maintaining it, and
fighting at sea with it.” Esco Marine has recycled the U.S.S. Des Moines, a
heavy cruiser built at the tail end of World War II, as well as a twin-hulled
submarine rescue ship, combat support ships, and troop transport vessels.
Brownsville has
become the country’s shipbreaking hub thanks to its port and the cheap land
around it, its proximity to steel-processing plants further down the food
chain, and its work force. Bay Bridge Texas, which relocated earlier this year
to Brownsville from Chesapeake, Virginia, cited the local labor pool among the
factors in its decision. “The rest of U.S. has a scarcity of welders,” says
Gilberto Salinas, executive vice president of the Brownsville Economic
Development Council. “For some reason, our welders don’t want to Jaross cites
one other reason why Brownsville dismantles what others construct. “You have a
community here that welcomes the business. A lot of places, if a scrap yard
comes in, they don’t want that there,” he says. “No one wants it in their
community. It’s like having a coal operation.”
Economic
development campaigns are more often meant to bring in gleaming biotech
campuses. Shipbreaking, however, has very little in common with the coal
industry. “This is a business,” Jaross says, “where we’re recycling things and
creating resources for the future.” In a sense, then, these are green jobs.
Salinas estimates
that, in all, the steel industry tied to the port makes up as much as a quarter
of the city’s economy. All of the steel coming to town in the form of hulking
Navy vessels (as well as oil rigs and other ships) has made the port of
Brownsville the third largest importer and exporter of steel in the country.
“San Francisco has
Silicon Valley, New York has everything, Austin has their little niche,”
Salinas says. “But here we are. Yeah, there’s Pittsburgh, but then there’s
Brownsville, Texas, where we have been and continue to mold our lives based on
steel."
Source: BY
EMILY BADGER. 24 October 2012
http://www.fastcompany.com/3002137/how-texas-town-owns-us-naval-ship-recycling-industry
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