There isn't anything in the industrial world that bears no risk.

Call it Jeff Bishop's philosophy or just a blunt statement of fact.

It's that fear of the unknown over shipbreaking in Oregon that has sent people clicking onto computer Web sites. Biologists all the way up to the governor are biting their nails over the swirling, uncharted potential economic and environmental impacts of ship recycling. People are calling lawmakers. Some outsiders have even dialed up Bishop, the executive director of the Oregon International Port of Coos Bay.

“None have been in support,” he said.

It's ironic, because the Port of Coos Bay hasn't spoken out in support or opposition to talk of a ship recycling plant here.

In an interview in his office a couple weeks ago, Bishop eased back and forth in his chair. It was prompted by his aching back, not angsting over the trade channel he's navigating to bring the port back into prosperity.

“When you get into issues like this where there is a lack of comprehensive information ... the only way to approach it is with an open mind,” Bishop said.

Local people seem to be approaching the statewide ship recycling debate that same way.

“They are open minded. They ask extremely tough questions,” he said.

While there is scattered opposition, few people are voicing it publicly. That's been the big surprise for Bishop, as the days have progressed since a company announced in February it might want to haul obsolete military vessels here.

“I've been in other communities where things are not handled as academically as they are here, for lack a of a better word,” he said.

Taking chances

Bishop spent years helping the bustling Port of Tacoma, Wash., lasso industrial business. He was used to groups that were absolutely unreasonable about new industry.

Here in job-depressed Coos Bay, there hasn't been any community uproar like there was in Newport late last year, when a ship dismantling company proposed a facility there. Hardly even a growl.

“Maybe it's because the economy was lackluster for so many years, and there have been a lot of frogs kissed. And a few princes - but not a lot,” Bishop said.

For Coos Bay, Bishop is heralded as quite a catch.

He believes the nation's big ports can't continue to handle the explosive trade growth. At some point, when the relief valve screams open, Coos Bay will be uniquely able to take advantage.

That's Bishop's opinion. That's why he came.

“If you are risk-averse, you are probably not going to be successful,” he said.

The current port commissioners are hands-off folks. Once they hired Bishop, they let him sail.

Slightly more than a year into the job, he's piloting the port's biggest deal ever, to finance the $25 million purchase of 1,300 acres of Weyerhaeuser's North Spit industrial land. It hinges on signing a contract on a $150 million liquidified natural gas import terminal proposed for 200 acres of the property.

Placement of a ship recycling facility might seem anticlimactic. It likely would be if it weren't for the hazardous wastes aboard and the plants and animals clinging to the ships' hulls.

Crisis with EPA

It was mid-1990s. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulators were knocking on the port's door.

There were five Coos Bay shipyards that the EPA labeled as contaminated. The tideflats around them and some other areas of the bay contained elevated concentrations of metals, including lead and copper; and dangerous organic compounds. There also was nasty tributyltin, used to keep hulls free of organisms, at levels considered dangerous. Tests showed the chemicals in the food chain - in the meats of oysters, clams and bass. High concentrations of TBT could damage people and animals' brains, and immune, reproductive and nervous systems.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued advisories throughout the bay, even in remote areas like North Slough.

“I got a lot of calls from elderly people who went down there all the time, dug clams and ate 'em,” Pam Blake, DEQ's local water quality specialist, said this week.

A decade ago, when she wasn't slogging around the bay taking samples, Blake sat down to author the Coos Bay Toxics Study. The study pointed to shipyards as the cause of the pollution. Oyster farmers feared dredging would stir up sediments and compound the problem.

All the while, the state came up with “best management practices” for shipyards. Officials weren't impressed with the response anywhere in Oregon.

EPA pushed for a Superfund listing at Coos Bay.

“Sometimes you have to twist people's arms to do stuff. I don't know that that's what happened,” Charleston Harbormaster Don Yost said.

All five shipyards were cleaned up with little fanfare, but some locals were fuming.

“We just inherited that stuff,” Yost said in hindsight.

When the port bought the Charleston Shipyard, sediments were piled up from the decades of paint scraping and sandblasting. No one worried in the old days about sending paint debris into the water around the bay.

Then came the feds. And the studies.

Working clean

The state took possession of a bankrupt shipyard and sucked away the contaminated mud. Dale Sause, of Sause Bros. Ocean Towing, cleaned up his company's shipyard and bought another shuttered facility in downtown Coos Bay, removing the nearby sediments.

“Why spend a horrendous amount of energy to study it, when you can just clean it up?” Sause asked in 1996.

The former Kelly Boat Works in Charleston was cleaned. The port spent $750,000 over the next five years scooping up silt in the Charleston Shipyard. It paved the main work area and installed water treatment systems to catch all ship wash and rainwater runoff. Now, there is a recycling station for chemicals.

“I am not aware of anybody else in the state that offers what we do,” Yost said.

These days, it costs more money up front to manage the shipyard. The port pays for water treatment, separating wastes and transporting some to a certified landfill and testing. All the activities have to be documented. And, staff have to keep watch over boat owners, making sure they follow the “clean” rules.

But, Yost said, the theory is that now that the tideflats are clean, they should stay that way.

That's DEQ's theory, too.