(By GREG ROURKE) – Most of us who regularly read BangShift don’t live in gated communities. As such, we all have someone in the neighborhood with junk in the back yard. Or maybe it’s you. Anyway, we often see old boats laying in a yard, probably going to fix it up someday. Imagine how annoyed the neighbors would be if the boat is 800 feet long. In this case, the neighbor is Canada.

The lakes freighter M/V Canadian Miner was built in 1966. She was nearly 800 feet long, and 75 feet wide, and 17,800 tons. She was a bulk freighter, designed to carry ore, grain and aggregate. She was powered by four 2000 horsepower 2 stroke diesel engines. Trivia: Freighters that stay on the Great Lakes are traditionally called boats, not ships. The Miner had served several owners well, under a few different names, until 2010 when she was taken out of service. She was sold for scrap metal, and was destined to be towed to Turkey to a ship scrapyard. Some of you may recall the education we got from Brian about the Turkish scrap industry, where they seem to not care about lead paint, asbestos, or any sort of safety equipment for the workers. The video had a doomed ferry run aground at full tilt.

The towing was to be done by a Greek owned ocean going tug. How can you drag a boat half way around the world and cut it up and still make a few shekels? Weight. The ship weighs 17,800 tons. Scrap steel is currently going for about $200 a ton. So that’s 17,800 times 200…so let’s see…um, carry the three…well it’s probably a lot of money. TheN of course the non ferrous metal such as copper wiring, brass fixtures and portholes and such sell for much more. I imagine some components can be salvaged whole and resold. So they hooked up ONE cable and off they went.

Things were going well for about the first one sixteenth of the trip. They barely made it out of Canada when they encountered a storm and the tow line broke. The boat drifted for a few hours before running aground on Scaterie Island, a protected wildlife refuge. Apparently the owners of the tug have walked away from the problem. The province said it’s a federal problem, and the feds say it isn’t a hazard to navigation and they won’t do anything. Someone finally the government coughed up to pay for the removal of any floatable debris from the boat. The contractor they hired decided instead to steal all the non ferrous metal and leave all the mattresses and desks. This was discovered when they hired a contractor to cut up the now non-floatable hulk on site. They bid the job based on scrap value, and they were expecting the claimed half million dollars worth of non ferrous metals. So they walked away from the job as it was now unprofitable for them.

Meanwhile, the ship is being torn to pieces by waves. They found 1,000 gallons of “oily waste” on board, and hired a contractor to pump it out. When they hired an asbestos abatement contractor to remove the expected 6 tons of asbestos, they instead found 30 tons of the stuff, plus about 4000 gallons of diesel fuel. Now the bill to scrap the remains is up to $24 million. The current plan is to use excavators equipped with plasma cutters, which is something I’d really like to see. They want to cut it into manageable sized pieces and transport them elsewhere for final scrapping. Of course there are no roads anywhere near the rocky coastline where the boat rests, making matters worse.

So here we are, three years after this debacle started. Looking at the current photos it appears if they just wait a little while and the problem will work itself out. Sorta like the guy down the street with the sixteen foot bass boat slowly sinking into the sod.