Old age is a shipwreck. Also for ships. Thus the agony of the one who was a flagship of the Royal, the aircraft carrier Fochrenamed Sao Paulo after its resale to the Brazilian Navy in 2000. Its 24,000 tons of metal and history have made it a pariah of the seas. According to the latest news, the boat was making circles in the water in the Atlantic, around the Mediterranean and off the coast of Morocco, in search of a destruction site that would deign to accept him and his cumbersome package of asbestos, PCB, cadmium, lead or mercury. Several environmental organizations consider that the vessel should be classified as a “hazardous waste”, according to the terms of the Basel international convention. Sad public degradation.
Almost twenty years ago, his twin brother, the Clemenceau, had met the same dishonorable end. After a prestigious career, the plague-stricken had been driven out of all the ports like a scrap, between 2003 and 2006, from Spain to India, returning to rust three years in Brest to finish, the following year, cut by torches English, in Hartlepool. In 2022, the formerFoch similarly finds himself looking for a last stopover.
Duettist number with the “Clemenceau”
the Sao Paulo had been auctioned by the Brazilian government and, last year, bought for a pittance – 1.6 million dollars (the equivalent in euros) – by the Turkish company SÖK Denizcilik, which planned to carve it up in a construction site in Aliağa, near Izmir, hoping to profit from its steel. The aircraft carrier had therefore left the port of Rio de Janeiro on August 4, dragged like a helpless by a tug under the Dutch flag, theALP Center. He had crossed the Atlantic at the speed of a boat, he who, in the good old days, was spinning his 32 knots (60 km / h), pushed by the 126,000 horsepower of his diesel engines.
“France has a moral responsibility for reselling a breathless boat to a foreign navy at the cost of scrapping. » Jacky Bonnemains, manager of Robin Hood
But, blow of tobacco, Friday August 26: the Turkish Minister for the environment canceled the import permit, whereas the convoy approached the Strait of Gibraltar. “The ship will not be allowed to enter Turkish territorial waters, said Murat Kurum. The government of Ankara reconsidered its decision under the pressure of the local associations of defense of the environment, which argued the danger for the workers and the harmfulness for the nature of the one they described, in a new blasphemy , of “boat of death”. Turkey doesn’t want it, Brazil doesn’t want it anymore. And France washes its hands of it. “France has a moral responsibility for having resold a breathless boat to a foreign navy at the cost of scrapping,” yet judge Jacky Bonnemains, head of the environmental association Robin Hood.
You have 64.23% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.