Pave: The Flying Frenchman, Coda

Le jour 650 de Sarko

Clemenceau (R 98), "le Clem", was the eighth aircraft carrier commissioned by the French navy and the lead ship of her class (Clemenceau class aircraft carriers ). It was laid down November 1955 and served from 1961 to 1997. It was decommissioned October 1, 1997.

The French government entered into several controversial contracts to outsource the toxic shipbreaking elsewhere -- on the cheap and dodging tough EU environmental regulations. The Clemenceau sailed to several ports only to be turned away as the arrangements came into dispute. France was eventually shamed into paying to have a proper job done. In England.

See here and here for background.

'POISON? WE LOVE IT!'
How One British Town Welcomed
An Asbestos-Riddled Toxic French Ship
With Open Arms

February 23, 2009 (Daily Mail) - Hundreds turned out to welcome this rusty warhorse as it was towed in to [Hartlepool, England]. Now, the locals are queuing up for 200 badly needed jobs as they prepare to recycle these redundant battleships - weighing more than 10,000 African elephants - into a pile of scrap metal equivalent to a billion tin cans.

... The 27,000-ton Clemenceau is so full of killer asbestos and toxic waste that this 52-year-old former aircraft carrier has been comprehensively ostracised by the rest of the world. During a 12-year, round-the-world quest for a scrap yard, it has been shunned by the authorities in Turkey, Egypt and India, among others.

French firms were willing to do the job - at a price - but the French government, usually so keen to protect its own industries, did not want this cauldron of contamination taken apart in France.

... Officialdom merely refers to it as Hull Q790. And within a year, there will be nothing left of the old girl. Between now and the summer, a team of workers (locals, we are assured) will carry out 'remediation' work - stripping out the nasty stuff.

More than 700 tons of asbestos* - originally designed to stop fires but lethal in its old age - must be sealed off and removed in double-wrapped bags. These will then be locked inside steel drums and dumped, for ever, in that rubbish mountain up the road.

All the toxic slime must then be flushed from the ship's bowels into tanks and only then can the demolition crews can move in. They will chop off the control tower above the flight deck, before removing the deck so that a huge cutting machine can be lowered inside the hull.

'The ship will then eat itself from the inside,' explains Glyn Wheeler, the managing director of Able UK, the firm with the £9 million contract to make the corrosive Clem disappear.

Each chunk of the ship will be sawn into lumps no bigger than an office desk - the maximum size for the blast furnace just across the River Tees. And from there, within a year, it will begin life again as a girder, a car part - or a tin can.

[Hat tip: Valerie in Hawaii]

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* The original abestos estimate for trans-boundary shipment released by the French Ministry of Defense was 45 tons.

PFFT (What is this?): La fin 4 | Rayonnement français 1½