Word: vessels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Somalia Dangerous Plunder Pirates patrolling Somalia's lawless waters hijacked a freighter carrying tanks and high-grade weaponry and demanded $20 million for its return. As U.S. warships surrounded the vessel--the 26th seized off the Somali coast this year--a pirate spokesman vowed the group would withstand the siege...
...dead watercraft foster the growth of new sea life that threatens the pre-existing local ecosystem. On Palmyra Atoll, 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, a population explosion of corallimorph, an aggressive creature similar to anemones and coral, killed almost all the coral growing around a long-line fishing vessel that sank in 1991, according to a report published in August in the journal PLoS One by Thierry Work, a wildlife-disease specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and his colleagues. The corallimorph were probably attracted to the leaching iron, a valuable nutrient in the sea, says Work. Since...
...course, there are governmental policies in place prohibiting ship abandonment: state laws fine and sometimes jail owners of derelict vessels. The problem is, there's a strong financial disincentive against retrieving and recycling sunken vessels. Dismantling a 40-ft. yacht costs an owner on average $5,000 to $10,000, but the costs can run to 100 times that amount. "You can't just crush it up into a cube," says Helton. Meanwhile, state fines for abandonment run a lot lower, as little as $100. Definitions of vessel, abandonment and ownership also vary among states, which means that ship owners...
Legislation is slowly beginning to change. Since 2003, Washington State's vessel-removal program has led a crackdown on derelict boats, using ramped-up boat-registration fees as funding for the program, which has so far cleared 188 boats. "It gave us financial capability, plus the legal hammer if we needed to use it," says Doug Sutherland, the state's commissioner of public lands. Other state officials have expressed interest in Washington's model. In September, the California legislature passed a bill to increase fines for owners of derelict vessels. And last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed...
...environmental impact of undersea wreckage can't always be seen easily from the shore. Helton says it would help if owners of small fishing boats and jet skis as well as giant ore ships and oceangoing freighters could keep in mind that "when a vessel is lost, it's not gone...