The James River Ghost Fleet, off the shore at Fort Eustis, Virginia, is providing the majority of the ship breaking work in the nation right now. Today, MARAD has less than 200 ships in their mothball fleets, still mostly WWII era cargo ships, cruisers, destroyers, and even aircraft carriers. Over the years, they were redeployed, converted to commercial use, scrapped, or sunk offshore. In 1950, there were over 2,000 surplus federal ships, tied together in slack water clusters around the nation. These reserve fleets started after WWII, the biggest ship-building boom in history. These mothball fleets are composed primarily of US Maritime Administration (MARAD) reserve ships, initially kept in case they needed to be activated again for war. In fact, ship breaking in the United States is booming at the moment, as congressional mandates to reduce the rotting hulks in the three Ghost Fleets of the nation are being implemented.

With hundreds of such ships floating around the country, and around the globe, the domestic ship breaking industry is likely to continue. The industry is subsidized by the fact that federal policy prevents government ships from being scrapped by other countries, for the most part. Though rules relating to the handling and disposal of the toxic materials that are built into old ships, including residual hydrocarbons, lead paint, asbestos, and PCBs, make the business run differently here then in the wild East ('ship breaking” is a term that is slowly being replaced by “ship recycling”). However, there are still are a few companies in the business in the United States. With aging fleets and increasing regulations in the West, the industry has moved to where labor is cheap, where environmental laws are still weak, and where the need for work, and steel, is high. The biggest yard in the world is in Alang, India, in the State of Gujarat, where high tides enable ships to beach themselves under their own power, along a seven mile stretch of the nation’s west coast, and where up to 30,000 people work to take them apart. Somewhere around 90% of the world’s ship breaking takes place in this way in Pakistan (Gaddani Beach), Bangladesh (Chittagong) and in India. These images show people taking oil tankers apart by hand, and in bare feet. PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS OF THE massive truncated hulks of scrapped ships beached on muddy Asian shores are among the most striking images of the contrasts of globalism. Brownsville shipbreaking, looking southward towards Mexico.

Ship construction term bay