EVERETT — Chunk by chunk, an abandoned ship that has fouled the Snohomish River delta for years is being removed.
Steel sections up to 30 feet long, woodstove-size tanks, engine parts and other giant pieces of boat innards were being cut away with torches on Wednesday.
The 141-foot Heron, built in 1945, is being removed because it has been leaking oil into the river. Other boat owners are suspected of using the derelict vessel as a place to secretly dump oily bilge water.
“We believe that vessels were coming along and pumping their waste oil into it,” said Lt. Danielle Renoud, a member of the Coast Guard’s Incident Management Division.
It wasn’t immediately clear how long the ship has squatted on the south side of the river near the Highway 529 bridge. Officials said it looked like it had been there for a while.
Since 2003, tens of thousands of gallons of oily water have been pumped out of the Heron four times, Renoud said. That prompted the Coast Guard to spend $600,000 normally reserved for cleaning up oil spills to remove the Heron from the river bank. The work is halfway done and will take about six weeks.
The Heron “and a couple of other vessels that were tied up next to this have been responsible for numerous oil sheens over the years,” said Dick Walker, oil spill responder for the state Department of Ecology.
The other boats already have been removed, Walker said. He said a number of abandoned boats located just up the river, including one visible from the U.S. 2 trestle, don’t appear to be leaking oil. Removal of the Heron was delayed a year because an osprey nest perched on top of the ship’s mast had to be relocated. Before the birds arrived in the spring, the top of the mast was cut off and mounted on a nearby unused power pole. The nesting osprey pair successfully raised two chicks in the relocated nest.
“They got the nest structure mounted up there and the birds moved over right away, no problem,” said Ed Schulz, an osprey researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey. He said the birds are willing to move to a new nest location as long as it’s within a few hundred feet of the original nest site.
Before the Heron could be dismantled, asbestos and other hazardous material had to be removed. “Now it’s down to cutting the steel structure into pieces,” said Aaron Harrington, manager of the ship removal project for Global Diving and Salvage, Inc., of Seattle.
On Wednesday, the ship was buzzing with workers cutting into the deck of the ship. Once a chunk of the vessel was cut free, a crane pulled it aloft and set on shore. There, more workers used front-end loaders to smash and break the steel into pieces small enough to haul away.
By mid-October, the boat will be gone.
“It’s going to be recycled,” Harrington said.
Nearby, the mast of the Heron stands tall, with the sticks of a just-used osprey nest serving as a crown.
“A little piece of the Heron will always be here,” Renoud said.
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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