Update expected on efforts to remove toxic waste from USS Yorktown

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (WCBD) – An update is expected Tuesday morning on a multi-million-dollar effort to remove hundreds of thousands of gallons of hazardous materials from the USS Yorktown.

Governor Henry McMaster will be joined by S.C. Office of Resilience Chief Officer Ben Duncan, Department of Natural Resources Director Robert Boyles, and state and local leaders as they provide the latest on the USS Yorktown environmental remediation project.

The U.S. Navy donated the warship to South Carolina in 1975 so that it could become a museum. But when the ship was donated, toxic waste was left in the ship’s tanks. Nearly 50 years later, a new effort began to clear those tanks of the material.

Gov. McMaster issued an executive order in July 2022 that directed the South Carolina Office of Resilience to begin the process of removing hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic pollutants from the ship by commissioning a cost study.

“As the outer hull of the USS Yorktown continues to corrode, the chance of an environmental disaster only increases with each passing year,” said Governor Henry McMaster at the time. “This executive order protects Charleston Harbor and the entire Lowcountry from these hazardous materials leaking out of the USS Yorktown and into the harbor.”

Funding for the project comes from the American Rescue Act Plan.

In his 2022 Executive Budget, Gov. McMaster called on the General Assembly to authorize the Office of Resilience to expend a portion of ARPA funds to conduct a complete remediation of the hazardous materials remaining inside the USS Yorktown.

The governor signed the ARPA authorization bill into law on May 13, 2022.

“In 2013, the Patriots Point Authority commissioned a study by the Shaw group to access the environmental remediation of approximately 160,000 gallons of petroleum and 1.6 million gallons of impacted polluted waters and polychlorinated biphenyl compounds that were not removed from the ship’s 428 vessel tanks/compartments by the U.S. Navy,” Gov. McMaster said in 2022.

The project was considered a priority due to the sensitive nature of the materials and the harmful environmental impacts to the Lowcountry should the chemicals leak into the harbor.

A timeline for the project was not made available at the time; however, officials expected the cost study would take a few months to complete before the clean-up effort could begin.