Exxon Valdez Dismantled for Scrap

August 15, 2012

Last month, reports Shanta Barley in Nature, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the ore carrier Oriental Nicety could be beached and dismantled for scrap in the Indian port of Alang, the world's largest scrap metal yard.

Nothing inherently unusual in that, perhaps. But the story is notable given that before it was the Oriental Nicety, the vessel in question was known as the Dong Fang Ocean, and before that had been dubbed, in reverse order, the Mediterranean, the S/R Mediterranean and the Sea River Mediterranean. The second name it had carried in its life was the Exxon Mediterranean; and before that, for four years from its launch in 1986, it was an oil tanker known as the Exxon Valdez.

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