State begins removing abandoned and derelict vessels from Oregon waterways with new funds

For the first time, the Oregon Department of State Lands has millions of dollars to remove abandoned and derelict vessels from state waterways. The department previously had to request money from the Common School Fund for cleanups, but the state Legislature granted it $18.8 million in June to address the growing number of hazardous vessels. The funding will also be used to develop a statewide program to identify, prioritize and oversee vessel removals.

Crews recently removed the Tiffany from the Columbia River near Rainier, Oregon. The 86-foot former fishing vessel is the first to be removed and deconstructed using the new funds.

Chris Castelli is acting deputy director of operations at the Department of State Lands. Bob Dorn is the CEO of Hyak Maritime, which is housing the Tiffany as it’s deconstructed. They join us to talk about the new funding and what it takes to remove potentially hazardous vehicles from state waterways.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For the first time, the Oregon Department of State Lands has millions of dedicated dollars to remove abandoned or derelict vessels from state waterways. In the past, the department had to request money for clean ups from the Common School Fund. Now, it has a two-year budget of nearly $19 million. The first vessel to be removed and deconstructed using these new funds is the 86-foot Tiffany. Crews recently removed it from the Columbia River near Rainier. Bob Dorn is the CEO of Hyak Maritime which is housing the Tiffany right now. Chris Castelli is acting deputy director of operations for the Department of State Land. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Chris Castelli: Great. Thanks for having us, Dave.

Bob Dorn: Thank you Dave. Pleasure to be here.

Miller: Bob Dorn first, can you give us a sense for the scale of this problem? If you go down the Columbia or the Willamette, how many derelict or seriously problematic boats might you see?

Dorn: There’s all kinds of various numbers. Chris can probably come up with a more accurate number. I’ve heard between 250 and 350 vessels over 32 feet between Bonneville Dam and the mouth of the river. Chris would have a more accurate count, I expect.

Miller: And Chris, those are over 32 feet. Folks may be used to seeing much smaller boats that can be people’s homes these days. How big a problem is this?

Castelli: Well, Dave, it’s a huge problem, statewide too. We just talked a little bit about the Columbia and the Willamette. But it impacts waterways across the state, all of our coastal bays and estuaries, and our publicly owned lakes as well. You see issues above Bonneville Dam too, on the Columbia, the Klamath Lake, and certainly other waterways too. Hazardous boats and ships and other vessels seriously threaten the health and safety and use of our public waterways for sure.

Miller: What are the problems that these vessels present?

Castelli: Well, there are hundreds of them. And Bob gave just a number for the Willamette and the Columbia there. But hundreds of hazardous vessels have accumulated in these waterways ‒ the public-owned waterways ‒ the ocean, the bays, the rivers and the lakes. These vessels contaminate water, they damage habitat, they damage the property, which is the public’s property, they impede navigation, and also impact use and enjoyment of our waterways for the people of Oregon.

Miller: With so many derelict vessels out there, how do you triage this? How do you decide which ones to focus on?

Castelli: That is a great question. And hopefully coming up with inventorying and prioritization is something that our abandoned and derelict vessel working group will help us come up with the framework for the state moving forward. That’s one of the endeavors we’re doing this year at the request of the state land board and the legislature. But basically, we look at the ones that are the biggest threat to health and safety and navigation and try to address those. When we can partner with our partners, whether it be other state agencies like the marine board, or in the case of a couple of large boats that are off West Hayden Island, with that case we partnered with Metro and the U.S. Coast Guard, that’s what we try to do. But without dedicated funding and without a consolidated ADV program statewide, it has definitely been a triaging effort.

Miller: What did prompt this new allocation of money from the legislature?

Castelli: I would say there’s been a lot of momentum and awareness to the issue of abandoned and derelict vessels over the past several years. And this was a very exciting year because it did come to a head here in 2023. Both our board, which is the land board, which is the governor and secretary of state and the treasurer, had taken extra interest in this as we’ve been coming to them with reports that we’re spending Common School Fund monies on the removal and disposal of these abandoned vessels off publicly owned waterways.

And also in the Oregon legislature, with coastal legislators in particular and legislators in the metro area, it had become an issue that they decided they wanted to tackle, and they did tackle this session with the establishment of the abandoned derelict vessel program and the fund, and then, of course, with the allocation of the money for us to get that program up and running and hopefully make a dent on abandoned derelict vessels.

Miller: Bob Dorn, what are the challenges of disposing of one of these vessels as opposed to a plane or a big truck or some other land-based thing?

Dorn: Well Dave, you hit the nail on the head there. All other forms of transportation can be parked on land and dismantled. Vessels, generally during the course of their life ‒ and every vessel has an age and ages out ‒ they’re in the water [and] difficult to transport onto land. So, as a vessel loses value and the owners get less and less able to maintain the vessel, vessels generally tend to sink at the dock or alongside a riverbank or on the coast. The issue is trying to get them removed from the water. And that’s an expensive, risky proposition. So this ADV funding is gonna be very good to get rid of most of these vessels.

We’re in Astoria located on an old U.S. Navy seaplane base from World War II. And we’ve developed this into a commercial maritime business park. We planned on just working on marine vessels, workboats, fish boats. But the way we’ve set this up here probably provides the state of Oregon ‒ and corollary the state of Washington ‒ with the best possible place to soundly, environmentally, safely dispose of these vessels that have oil, oily water waste, lead based paint, asbestos, bring them up on land and put the waste streams in their proper place. That’s what we can do here.

Miller: What needed to be done for the Tiffany, this 86-foot-long vessel, just to get it to your place?

Dorn: Well, it’s been a years-long process. It was part of a fleet ‒ almost a Waterworld fleet ‒ up in Rainier that was centerpieced by the River Queen, I think the name of the ferry boat was. That was a $12 million investment by the state of Oregon to cut that up and finally get rid of it. This particular boat ended up ‒ people were living on it ‒ it ended up sinking. The Coast Guard intervened several years ago. Engage the current salver, Global Diving out of Seattle. They pumped the boat out, patched all the holes, refloated it, and it’s been sitting in this precarious refloated state. I think Chris and DSL made an exactly good decision to get that first in this program because it was full of toxic chemicals. It was a meth lab.

WCT Marine went up there with a barge, crane, and with Global directing it, transferred all this horrible waste inside the boat off it into containers for proper disposal. And then they dove again on the boat, repatched all the failing holes in the hull, and then we brought it down alongside our crane barge down here to our seaplane ramp and used a boat trailer to haul it up into a giant tent. So we’ve got a clean room basically that we’re cutting this boat up by use of hydraulic shears. And that process is probably gonna be done maybe tomorrow.

Miller: This was a former Coast Guard vessel that became a fishing vessel that became eventually someone’s home and a meth lab?

Dorn: Yeah. It’s kind of the process of marine vessels. About 100 years old. And I think it was originally a federal vessel, then it became a fish processor, became less and less seaworthy, sold down and down in the market. And then at the end of that, that person with very little invested walks away, and then it becomes a problem for the rest of us.

Miller: Well, Chris Castelli, that gets to my next question. We’re talking about this because you now have this dedicated source of funds to take care of these problems for Oregonians. But what I’ve read is that the cleanup for this boat could be $1.4 million. Is it possible to get the owner of the boat to foot that bill as opposed to taxpayers?

Castelli: Well, Dave, that is a great question. And that is something we do always pursue when we are addressing abandoned and derelict vessels. We do work to hold the vessel owners accountable by taking legal action to recover the cleanup costs. That is a difficult task. I’m not gonna tell you that we’re overly successful with that. They’re abandoned and derelict for a reason, typically. That’s because the owner, if we can find an owner, doesn’t typically have many resources for addressing that.

So I think prevention is going to be a big part of the conversation that we have with regards to this abandoned derelict vessel working group that we are convening right now. Besides prioritizing the boats, talking about how we’re going to spend money, how are we going to turn off the spigot of abandoned vessels moving forward, hold owners accountable as they sell boats for a dollar to somebody if there’s these exchanges, or possible insurance requirements. I think there’s a lot of things we’re going to try to address with regards to ADVs moving forward, and really excited to have this great working group we’ve got to be looking at these difficult issues.

Miller: The phrase that you’ve used a lot is “derelict and abandoned” or “abandoned and derelict”. But what if it’s just one of those? What if it’s derelict but not abandoned? For example, when this boat was someone’s home and I guess a meth lab, it seems like at that point probably it was already a major problem in terms of leaking oil or PCBs or lead or whatever. But if it’s also someone’s home, how does the state or other authorities deal with it?

Castelli: Well, that is difficult. When vessels become abandoned or derelict, as you mentioned, they do sometimes become an option for people seeking shelter. And in those cases, with long- term camping on public waterways, whether be on the riverbanks or on the boats, there are difficult situations with no easy solutions. With regard to camping along the riverbanks ‒ so that’s another issue as our job as managing those publicly-owned waterways is managing the riverbanks ‒ we try to get folks connected to shelter when we can. And we work closely with our partners within the community to connect them with the resources to try to find the folks shelter. But addressing ADVs (abandoned and derelict vessels) when folks are living on them does complicate the seizure, removal, disposal of those vessels.

Miller: Bob Dorn, what’s going to happen with all of the parts and pieces that you are chopping up right now?

Dorn: All the medal, all the steel, is going to a steel recycling facility in Portland and will be reconstituted as everyday steel products for you and me. The toxic materials are being separated inside the tent, and they’ll be going to the proper facilities for the safe disposal of those wastes.

Miller: Chris Castelli, this nearly $90 million that we’re talking about is one-time funding from, as I understand it, a settlement with Monsanto. What happens when this money runs out?

Castelli: Well, we have the biennium to figure that out. So, yes, the legislature has given us money from that ‒ biphenyls is PCB, polychlorinated biphenyl settlement ‒ the Monsanto settlement. And that does provide us with some momentum for removing vessels now and working towards the long-term solutions for the ADV program. So we are collaborating with our partners and coming up with a sustainable funding source for addressing ADVs. [That] is going to be one of the tasks that they’re going to be looking at with an ADV program framework.

So prevention, response, enforcement, education, outreach, and then potential long-term funding needs and sources. We assume that there will be some recommendations for legislative action in the 2025 session. The department will present our program framework to the land board for their consideration in the spring of 2024. And then we also owe the legislature a report back in February 2024 as well. So there is definitely more to come. But I think we have a great group, a diverse group that is working on this through the ADV work group. [We] have our third meeting next Tuesday, and I’m excited to see what we come up with for tackling this problem long-term.

Miller: Chris and Bob, thanks very much.

Both: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Chris Castelli is acting deputy director of operations at the Oregon Department of State Lands. Bob Dorn is the CEO of Hyak Maritime.

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