Great Lakes ship tugged out of Green Bay to be scrapped

GREEN BAY, Wis. - It is one of the oldest ships on the Great Lakes. But on Friday, Sept. 23, it was tugged out of Green Bay on its way to be scrapped. 

FOX11 in Green Bay reports the S.T. Crapo has been docked at Lafarge on the west bank of the Fox River in Green Bay for 25 years, where it was used as a cement storage barge.

To make room for Lafarge's storage expansion on land, the vessel was sold to a Canadian company, Marine Recycling Corp., to be scrapped in Port Colborne, Ontario – just west of Buffalo, on Lake Erie.

"All the metals recovered from the ship will be made into new metal, using industrial furnaces with energy savings of approximately 80%, as compared to making metal from virgin ores and, metal is infinitely recyclable. She may next appear as vehicle components!" according to Wayne Elliott, co-founder of MRC.

PHOTO GALLERY

Built in River Rouge, Mich., the S.T. Crapo was launched July 7, 1927 as a self-unloading cement carrier operating on the Great Lakes, primarily carrying cement from Alpena, Mich. By the mid-1990s, it was the last coal-fired freighter on the Great Lakes. In 1995, her boilers were converted to oil-firing by Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay.

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Since September 1997, the ship has been docked for cement storage at the LafargeHolcim terminal except for one trip to Alpena, Mich. in 2005 to carry a load of cement.