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Bangladeshi buys asbestos laden ship !!!
Hi Everyone,
My informants at Yahoo news have provided the following........ http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060215...nceenvironment ship_060215114633 Protests as Bangladeshi buys asbestos laden ship Wed Feb 15, 6:46 AM ET A Bangladeshi scrap merchant said he had bought a famed ocean liner crammed with asbestos for 12 million dollars, sparking protests from environmentalists and a warning from the government it will not allow the vessel to be broken up here. "I have finalised the deal (for the SS Norway) but I have not yet made the payment because of a dollar crisis in the local market," Haji Lokman Hossain, owner of a scrapyard near Chittagong in southern Bangladesh, said Wednesday. "If I can buy the ship, I will take measures to destroy all hazardous materials and toxic gas," he added. News of the deal prompted dozens of environmentalists to form a human chain in Chittagong to protest the move to dismantle the ship at Hossain's Giri Subedar Ship Breaking Yard at nearby Sitakundu. Global environmental group Greenpeace has included the SS Norway on a watchlist of 50 vessels, which it fears will not be decontaminated before being scrapped. It says the French workers who built the ship claim it contains 1,250 tonnes of material that contains asbestos. The Bangladesh Environment Lawyers Association Wednesday served legal notices in the capital Dhaka on relevant government agencies in a bid to halt the ship being brought into Bangladesh's territorial waters. "We served the legal notice after the documents that we've collected indicate that the the Giri Ship Breaking company has bought the ship and it is now on its way to the company's scrap yard," lawyer Rizwana Hasan said. The government has already said it will not allow the ship to be broken up in Bangladesh as it might cause loss of life and environmental damage. "We've told Haji Lokman who has reportedly bought the asbestos-laden ship not to bring it into Bangladesh waters as it can kill workers," the government's environment director, Mosharraf Hossain, told AFP on Tuesday. "He has to dispose of the hazardous waste elsewhere first and only then will we allow the ship to be dismantled in the ship breaking yards," Hossain said. An inter-ministerial meeting was to be held Wednesday to discuss ways to keep the ship away from Bangladeshi waters, an environment ministry official said. Greenpeace late last month warned the ship breakers here about the move by a Bangladeshi scrap merchant to buy the huge asbestos-laden ship, the president of the Bangladesh Ship Breaking Association, Jafor Alam, said. "We will resist its entry and dismantling in our yards at any cost. Otherwise the whole industry would be badly affected," he added. Ship breaking yards in Bangladesh dismantle up to 80 ships, mostly oil tankers, a year. Operating on beaches at Sitakundu, they indirectly employ some 300,000 people. The fate of the SS Norway, once the most glamorous ship on the seas, has been the subject of much speculation since May when it was towed from a German port where it was consigned after a 2003 boiler explosion. Launched in 1960 as the SS France, the 11-storey ocean liner is now docked in open waters off the Malaysian coast. When the France was launched by the wife of then-president Charles De Gaulle on May 11 1960, it was, at 313 metres (1,027 feet) long, the biggest liner in the world. The Queen Mary 2 currently holds the record at 345 metres (1,132 feet) long. The vessel was sold in 1979 to Norwegian Cruise Line and renamed. It was kept at the German port of Bremerhaven at a cost of around 500,000 dollars a month after the 2003 explosion in Miami, Florida, which killed eight crew. |
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