The scrapping of the historic Falls of Clyde is imminent, with six entities vying to remove the decrepit vessel from Honolulu Harbor.

The state Department of Transportation issued a request for proposals July 25 seeking bids for contractors to permanently remove the ship. A selection committee this week will review the six proposals submitted by Wednesday’s deadline, and a contract is expected to be awarded the first week of November, according to the agency.

The latest development could well signal an end to the long saga of the 145-year-old ship currently berthed at Pier 7, where it once served as a floating museum for the Hawaii Maritime Center.

DOT, which plans to redevelop Pier 7, said it has focused on removing inoperable vessels from its commercial ports over the past decade. The department said in a news release that this was necessary to protect maritime facilities, improve port efficiency and support commerce and the movement of more than 90% of the imported goods entering the state through Honolulu Harbor.

The Falls of Clyde, built in 1878 in Port Glasgow, Scotland, is the last remaining example of an iron-hulled, four-masted sailing oil tanker. It has an extensive history in Hawaii as a Matson transport ship and museum.

It is the first of eight sister ships named after waterfalls in Scotland, and the last one remaining.

Honolulu-based Friends of Falls of Clyde, the ship’s owner, has tried for years to save it as an irreplaceable historical and cultural resource. DOT, however, has maintained that the ship is at risk of sinking without intervention and points to a recently commissioned evaluation that said its structural integrity had deteriorated substantially over the years.

The difference between earlier requests for proposal and the latest one is that the Falls of Clyde, a national historic landmark, is no longer on the state or national registers of historic places. The ship was delisted from the state register in November and from the national register in February.

Friends President Bruce McEwan said the ship was neglected by Bishop Museum for nearly two decades before the nonprofit was formed in 2008 to preserve and restore it. Despite proposing detailed dry-dock and business plans in 2014, he said DOT undermined its mission and has made unsubstantiated statements about its safety.

McEwan said that after the state impounded the ship in 2016, members of the Friends group were still able to maintain it until 2019.

”Any deterioration from early 2019 to date is solely the responsibility and the fault of the Harbors Division,” he said in earlier interviews.

The ship’s plight galvanized support from Scotland, and a new group, Falls of Clyde International Ltd., launched a campaign to bring it back to its birthplace. The group said it did not submit a bid in response to DOT’s request for proposals due to the requirements set for this round of proposals.

“It is with great regret, that we have to announce that we shall not be offering a submission to the current RFP for the removal of the Falls of Clyde from Honolulu,” said the group’s founder, David O’Neill, in a Sept. 18 Facebook post. “After nearly nine years of offering solutions to DOT (Harbor), once again they have in their latest RFP document, made it impossible for a small heritage group like ours, to meet the crazy terms and conditions they have now imposed.”

In 2019, DOT put the Falls of Clyde up for auction but received no legitimate bids.

Two years later DOT issued a request for proposals for disposal of the ship, received two responses and issued a conditional award to Falls of Clyde International in Scotland. But the award was canceled after conditions were not met after five months, according to a DOT news release.

While the selected contractor will determine how the vessel will be removed, DOT said it evaluated various options in its final environmental assessment issued in August that included dismantlement in dry dock, scuttling at sea or transfer of ownership to a third party that will repair it and haul it away.