History
The river mouth and Falmouth harbour served as an anchorage in the immediate years after the Second World War for scores of laid-up Royal Navy vessels (including battleships, carriers, and cruisers) awaiting sale for scrap. Its size and depth of water made it ideal for this use.
The River Fal suffered a severe, high profile pollution accident in February 1992, when a nearby tin mine was flooded. The river turned red and an extensive cleaning-up operation was needed to decontaminate the water. During times of reduced global trade, ships are mothballed in the upper parts of the estuary of the River Fal. The ships, using the Fal estuary due to its depth and protection from the elements, keep a skeleton crew for ship maintenance. A large number of ships were moored in the estuary during the late-2000s financial crisis, as falling global trade meant a smaller demand for trade ships. Falmouth Harbour authority charges companies for usage of the river, until the ships are either reactivated, scrapped or sold.
Read more about this topic: River Fal
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)