: This caption was changed after posting to reflect a clarification.</i>)
BEACHED; The cargo ship Rosso ran aground near Amantea, Italy, in December 1990. It carried radioactive waste likely meant to be dumped at sea. The bright red hull is the result of a repainting job after stranding, perhaps done to hide markings.*
*Note (2/1/10): This caption was changed after posting to reflect a clarification.
Image: Courtesy of Legambiente
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In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania, a passenger vessel sunk during World War I—and not the Cunski, a cargo ship loaded with radioactive waste, as alleged by district authorities from nearby Calabria. Few locals are reassured, says Michael Leonardi of the University of Calabria. He and others maintain that the putative Cunski is still out there and is just one of numerous ships full of poisonous garbage that a crime syndicate has scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea. Such a startling allegation, if true, would not only damage the tourism and fishing industries along this idyllic coast but also compromise the health of Mediterranean residents.
Processing and safely storing waste from the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries can cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per ton—which makes illegal disposal highly profitable. According to the Italian environmental organization Legambiente, some waste shippers that have operational bases in southern Italy have been using the Mediterranean as a dump. While acknowledging that “no wreck has yet been found that contains toxic or radioactive waste,” physicist Massimo Scalia of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, who has chaired two parliamentary commissions on illegal waste disposal, argues that other vidence makes their existence “beyond reasonable doubt.”
Scalia contends that 39 ships were wrecked under questionable circumstances between 1979 and 1995 alone; in every case, he adds, the crew abandoned the ship long before it sank. An average of two ships per year suspiciously disappeared in the Mediterranean during the 1980s and early 1990s, according to Legambiente—and the number has increased to nine wrecks per year since 1995. Paolo Gerbaudo of the Italian daily il Manifesto, who is assisting investigations, has identified 74 suspect wrecks of which he regards 20 as being extremely suspicious. (The record extends until 2001.)
One notable example of a dubious wrecking is the Rosso, which washed up in December 1990 near the town of Amantea, after what investigators believe was a botched attempt to scuttle it.* The cargo was offloaded and allegedly buried on land. In October 2009 an environmental ministry report noted that district authorities detected dangerous substances in a nearby river valley, including a buried concrete block containing mercury, cobalt, selenium and thallium at very high concentrations—and displaying substantial radioactivity indicative of synthetic radionuclides. Authorities also found marble granules mixed in with thousands of cubic meters of earth, which was contaminated with heavy metals and cesium 137, typically a waste product of nuclear reactors. The assemblage suggests that the Rosso’s cargo included radioactive waste, sealed in concrete and shielded from detection by marble dust (which absorbs radioactivity).*
Significantly, the increase in the frequency of wrecking correlates with the progressive tightening of international dumping regulations. The first suspect sinking, in 1979, occurred the year after the Barcelona Convention, which restricts the disposal of pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea, came into force. Over the following decades other treaties expanded the regulations, culminating in a 1993 amendment to the London Dumping Convention that halted the ocean disposal of all radioactive waste and in a 1995 amendment to the Basel Convention that banned the deposition of the industrial world’s lethal excreta in developing countries. The laws ruined the ambitious plans of one firm, Oceanic Disposal Management, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, to drop tens of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste into the seabed off the African coast. Andreas Bernstorff, who formerly headed a Greenpeace campaign against the trade in toxic waste, reports that the number of schemes to ship such garbage to Africa fell steeply at this time, to at most one attempt per year. The drop coincides with a sudden and ominous rise in the frequency with which ships in the Mediterranean perished.
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10 Comments
Add CommentWhen the profit of a struggling company is involved, the environmental impact of illegal activities matters little.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis reads like the plot from the 1993 Ben Elton TV-movie Stark - scary that it is true
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe world's oceans make far too tempting a location to put dangerous wastes "out of sight and out of mind" as it were.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe most obvious and logical solution should be for nuclear-capable countries to ban the transportation of dangerous wastes by water. This would help to prevent these governments and companies from taking the easy way out, and - because transportation by land would be prohibitive in its costs - would cause these individuals to more closely consider where these facilities and their waste disposal sites are being built.
BUT, wherever you see the words "prohibitive in its cost" you will find that most reasonable people become unwilling to effect said change.
I met a candid captain in Murmansk in 1992, who told of crews drilling holes in large cubes of stainless steel floating off the coast. Purpose? To sink them. Content (unknown to the workers) Radioactive waste. This dumping ground is common knowledge, but the methods, for not-heavy-enough cubes, are Franz Kafka stuff. We humans are very wise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe humans deserve what is comming. We did it to ourselves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInvite the Somali pirates to police the ships. They seem pretty civilised as far as pirates go - better than, say, the Australian government anyway. And their activity partly started in order to regulate similar illegal waste dumping off their own coast. See http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/791/40758
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLamentably, we're doing it to the rest of what used to be called "all creation," as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHello everybody. I have collaborated with Paolo Gerbaudo designing and publishing an information-visualization website where you can browse further data regarding the "lost ships" in the Mediterranean Sea. If you are interested to know more, please go to:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.infondoalmar.info
Read Revelations if you want to find out what happens next /
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRevelations chapter 16, verse 3 ...
Nostradamus predicts an unusual disaster in this area :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this[from Century II, quatrain 4 ]/
"From Monaco to near Sicily
the entire coast will be desolated
There will remain there no suburb, city, or town...///"