USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg To Be Sunk For a Reef 169
caffiend666 writes "On Wednesday the USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg is to be sunk in 140 feet of water off of Key West to become the world's second largest artificial reef. (The largest was created by sinking the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off of Pensacola, Florida, in 2006.) The Vandenberg was built in 1943 (chronology) and commissioned the USS Gen. Harry Taylor. In 1963 the Air Force took it over and recommissioned it, naming it after the Air Force general. For decades the ship served as a missile tracker and space relay. It was used in NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects and the Shuttle program. The Vandenberg was the set for some of the scenes in the '90s movie Virus as the Russian MIR relay station. Soon it will become one of the world's most awesome diving spots."
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Interesting)
It's being paid for by people who want to use it. Most of the preparations required for turning it into a diving target/reef are also required to drag it somewhere to be scrapped.
It was a reserve fleet ship; there's been a big push to dispose of most of them in the past five years or so. Remember those ships floating about through New Orleans during Hurricane Gustav? Yep, at a shipyard being prepped for scrapping.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Interesting)
"Plus, we all like arguing over the environment and this is a perfect article for that."
Not really, considering that dumping a cleaned and purged hull as a home for marine life isn't the same as sinking a dirty ship or dumping pollutants.
Would it make sense to turn the ship into housing? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm thinking, big ship, used to house hundreds if not thousands of sailors. Why not turn it into some sort of affordable housing?
Maybe not. Ships need constant repainting to protect them from the elements, so the cost of keeping it afloat could be prohibitive.
You could also argue that it would have to clog up a harbor somewhere.
Those are the drawbacks I see. But having large quantities of housing that could be moved between coastal cities has to have some upsides. If you could keep the engines running, turn them into portable generators, that would make it all the better.
The Wilkes-Barr is longer! (Score:1, Interesting)
and was sunk in 1971 off Key West, while I was stationed there. 608 feet long, while the Vandenberg is only 522 feet long.
Sorry, Charlie!
JR
17000 tons of steel gone to waste (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I'm sure it'll be nice for the fish and a few extreme divers , but wouldn't it have been more use (and possibly be even more envirometally friendly than a new reef) to recycle all that steel? I wonder how much energy it takes to mine and extract 17000 tons of iron from its ore....
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excuse me, (Score:5, Interesting)
It is swimable though [divewreck.co.nz] and it's not an unimpressive sight, but I hope the waters of the Key are less violent than that of Wellington, New Zealand.
Good for fishes... (Score:5, Interesting)
...not so much for fishermen.
Where I'm at we try to sink ships like these (steel ships) on or near fish breeding grounds. This will accomplish two things. First it'll provide refuge for fish and second it'll discourage fishing there. Trawlers can't fish if there's a big ship there. The trawls will break if they try so most stay well clear of sites like this.
Experts say that about 90% of all "large fish" are now gone so we need to do something about overfishing. This is "something" although not nearly enough.
140 to the Bottom, not the top (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is 100 feet tall, so the top of the structure will start at 40ft. There will be plenty to see without deco stops and tri-mix.
Oh the fun of diving on garbage. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a scuba diver myself, I've never been terribly impressed with wreck diving. Oh, I suppose it would be interesting to dive on a historical wreck, as you are experiencing a part of history.
But when they take an old ship, strip it to dilapidated wreckage you wouldn't take money to set foot on while it was floating, and sink it, suddenly I'm supposed to be all excited about seeing it underwater.
I guess you could say that all the wildlife it attracts is what is really interesting to dive on, but then, why not dive on a natural reef?
Re:soon it will be... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm no reef expert, but these things take a really long time to have coral start growing on these to the point where you'd want to go diving down to see them.
For some time, this will be a recognisable ship - that's a cool thing to dive around in itself. Wreck diving is a fairly popular specialisation.
In addition, while coral takes a long time to grow, other plant life takes hold much more quickly, and fish will seek refuge anywhere there's shelter. Go snorkeling somewhere sandy - if you want to see fish, you'll need to find a boulder.
Finally, coral does take hold in human timescales. When Bali started attracting tourists, they quarried coral reefs to build hotels, with diasterous results - not only were the reefs lost, but it resulted in serious beach erosion. The practice was banned but the damage was done. Where I stayed, they had dumped huge concrete blocks where the reef used to be. Already coral was recolonising, anenomes and tropical fish were everywhere. It'll take years before it fully recovers - but not thousands of years, or even hundreds.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:3, Interesting)
Iron is pretty much the most important fertiliser for aquatic plants.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting that you'd mention PADI, though.... the deepest they certify recreational divers is 40m. 130 feet. And they recommend that you never go over 100 feet. If you want to dive a wreck that's in 140 feet of water, it requires specialized training... Also, according to PADI's dive tables, the no-decomp limit in the dive table at 40m is 2 minutes. Not a lot of bottom time to explore a sunken warship.
I'll probably make my way down there to explore it at some point... but there's much more accessible shipwrecks that can be dived without special training... there's one in the St. Lawrence, for example, the SS Conestoga, that's so shallow that one of the smoke stacks is above water. It being in fresh water with a decent current, they tend to last longer, too. Despite being mostly wood, the Conestoga is still there after sinking almost 100 years ago. You just need to wear a thicker wetsuit (I had 7mm main suit, and a 7mm tunic two weeks ago, the water was under 50' F).
Another that I've dived, the Tugboat, in Curacao, was scuttled in about 5m of water... it's fully under water, but is a regular stop for skin divers. Only place I've seen octopi during the day.
And I'm with you there on listening to the tables. That's the advantage a shallow wreck has over a deep wreck... while you've only got 2 minutes at 40m depth, you've got 240 minutes at 10m. That's plenty of time to explore a wreck, and your likely to be limited not by the tables, but by your air tank. Even with the biggest tank I've ever seen (one of my instructors on my Adv. O/W had a 159 cu. ft. steel tank), you're not likely to have 4h of breathable air.
Re:Too deep... (Score:3, Interesting)
I did a 30m dive a few months ago for my PADI Advance Open Water. I got pretty narced - I don't particularly want to do it again unless I'm with an experienced buddy. That doesn't sound like too much fun. Also, the more limited time at that depth (you go through your air faster) makes this worse.
So who is this targetted at? And why does the person who submitted the story think this will shortly be one of the most awesome dive sites? It's either going to be very expensive, or there's some contradictions in the story:
Re:Oh the fun of diving on garbage. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you really want a bunch of inexperienced divers with no bouyancy control
slamming into natural reefs & kicking up silt?
Aside from being something different to see, wrecks make good training sites for all
sorts of skills.
As an added bonus they have a commercial/tourist value that helps
make providing and improving marine habitat more affordable.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:3, Interesting)
it's not an activity that requires much in the way of physical prowess.
In 2005 I took my PADI open-water certification. It wasn't that hard and I'm not overly fit, however IIRC the unfit in the class had trouble with four things -
- A swimming test whereby you have to swim 200 meters
- A treading water test whereby you have to tread water for 10 minutes
- A "Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent" (CESA) test whereby you have to steadly swim to the surface exhaling continously in a low/out of air situation from a depth of around 15 meters (need good lung capacity).
- Shore dives whereby with all your gear on you've got to walk out and then swim to a dive buoy.
Re:It's wild (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Excuse me, (Score:3, Interesting)
And now that the banks are largely owned by the feds ... who really owns it?