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Hudson River Shipwrecks Secretly Mapped
jonerik writes "According to this article in the New York Times (registration required) more than 200 shipwreck sites lying beneath New York's Hudson River have been mapped by sonar. In fact, scientists feel confident that the location of every Hudson shipwreck between Manhattan and Troy has now been pinpointed, adding that the nearly oxygen-free mud of the Hudson nearly guarantees that many of the wrecks and their contents are almost perfectly preserved. The hitch? For the time being the maps - paid for as part of the $186 million Hudson River Estuary Plan - are not being published since state officials are nervous about the prospect of so many shipwrecks suddenly being opened up to salvagers on one of the U.S.'s busiest rivers. 'We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly,' says Mark L. Peckham, a historic preservation coordinator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. In the meantime, state officials are now attempting to determine the historical significance of the wrecks and how they might be protected, which should hopefully lead to the publication of the Hudson River maps at some future date."
Lets search for treasure!
no
How old are these ships? Ships haven't been in the Hudson for all that long I would imagine.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
they don't want to publish the areas of the shipwrecks, but anyone with the money or power to go dig up ships has some ethics in them.
also, who is to say these ships now 'belong' to the state of NY ? i never understood that, it should be finders keepers.
Runnin' On Empty
Why don't the salvagers get their own sonar rigs? Then they could find the wrecks themselves...
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
The government should make the bottom of the river a national park. This would ensure that the ships are preserved as long as our country. Imagine if the Greeks or Egyptians had done this.
i remember some time last year, a couple driving across the george washington bridge (spans the hudson between new jersey and manhattan) reported that a small plane flew right between the supports of the bridge over the deck and crashed into the water.. the police looked into it and sent divers into the water, but it didnt seem like anything came out of it. the couple was supposedly "reliable", according to the Port Authority police (they control all nj/ny bridge and tunnel crossings). i haven't heard anything about it since.
I wonder how many pairs of shoes will be found encased in concrete when the salvage gold rush begins.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
I guess they have the right since they did all the mapping... but I still think it's funny that they are keeping stuff a secret so the "Indiana Jones" types can plunder the wreaks first. "...That belongs in a museum!!!" -Indiana Jones
Are the artifacts down there worth all the shots you'd have to get to swim in the Hudson?
Surely they reserve these to themselves. Lots of budget deficit to patch.
Sch.
I'm selling rights to the Hudson River bottom on ebay, any takers? Also up for sale is a bridge in Brooklyn, good condition, barely used!
It's a serious disappointment that society has arrived (not recently) at a state where truly worthwhile information is rightfully withheld because we, as humans, can't treat things with respect.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
. . . are not being published since state officials are nervous about the prospect of so many shipwrecks suddenly being opened up to salvagers on one of the U.S.'s busiest rivers. 'We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly,' says Mark L. Peckham . . .
Could someone with some knowledge of major salvage work give some words on wether or not a permit is required?
I'd be more interested to hear how many people are swimming with the fishes in the Hudson River. I'm sure the NY mafia have fitted many people with concrete galoshes over the years. Maybe the'll find Jimmy Hoffa...
I dropped a hackey sack into the Hudson last summer. Maybe some ethical salvage operation will get it for me!
I think i recall how US Navy technology found the wrecked of the Titanic. Despite that US funds were used to find the wreckage a French company brought up a small peice of it and therefore claimed rights to salvage. This left many people angry, especially relatives of passengers on that wreck who want their loved ones remains to be left alone. This bears similarity to this case here as responsible salvage companies need to be selected and given scrict guidelines on recovery procedure on a busy waterway.
-Foxxz
The Hudson (according to some) is loaded with PCB's from old General Electric dumping in the river. While they continue to fight the legal and environmental battle to decide how that's going to be handled...
The last thing they need is a bunch of yahoo's with treasure maps digging around in the sediment and silt looking for treasure while dredging up 80 years worth of PCB's.
The biggest opponents to cleaning the PCB's out of the river point to the environmental impact of disturbing all of this sediment. Imagine the nightmare when Joe Adventurer goes out and starts digging up the River.
Any sort of technology that is available to the upper echelon eventually trickles its way down to the common person wishing to use it for "ulterior motives."
I should think that a more prudent way of handling this project would have been to map all of the ships, catalogue them, survey them individually (with divers, remote subs, or the like), and only then proclaim a successful project. At the same time, you could publish the maps without a problem.
To announce to the world that you have maps simply invites people to use whatever means at their disposal to procure them--social engineering, hacking at computers storing the maps, or good old-fashioned information leaks.
...in a Cessna 172 and the ceiling of the NYC airspace down south of the GWBridge is 1000 ft, so we'd fly down the NYC side at 600 ft and down and around the statue of Liberty, then up the NJ side to Alpine tower. I haven't flown in years, but Im sure the regulations are MUCH stricter since 9/11.
On a second note, how many PCBs are in the riverbed and would be disturbed and brought downstream. Dont know if they'd "stir up" the environmentalists by suggesting going down for the wrecks/moving them.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
The insurance companies may have standing to intercept any salvage operation of the wrecks.
Once the insurance company pays out the claim they own the ship and cargo. If a salver raises the ship or cargo then the insurance company can collect on the find.
I think that from a historical significance perspective, this is not a Bad Thing(tm). Allow the museums etc first shot at those wrecks of historical interest before the vultures descend.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
All other things aside, I find that declaring the contents of a publicly-funded project to be secret is food for thought. As big as I am on openess, I can understand the decision to hold off for now.
.
My take is that the information is public knowledge, but releasing it would destroy public safety and public history. What needs to be done is a massive, organized effort to salvage and record the vast wealth of finds. Maybe private companies could be involved.
Interesting to think of - I wonder what other cases of withheld public information may be justifiable . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
(troll)
/troll )
Oh yeah, because
money + power = ethics...
I'm going to support the ethical RIAA, McDonalds, Hitler....
heh...
(
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
They sank, for whatever reason, unless they have REAL treasure, let them remain on the bottom. Who givs a shit? Ohhhh, we found the Monitor, let's raise it? Stupidity. No we CANNOT learn squat about old shipwrecks. Let them die and rest in peace. Remember the Maine? All it told us was the excuse for the Spanish American War was a lie! Who did not know that in advance? Sheesh!
Kartchner Caverns is a perfect example of a case when a state government spent a lot of money and effort researching and protecting a site of significant (in this case) natural importance without disclosing any of the information to the public until the "right" time. In this case, even the fact that the money was being spent, and what it was being spent on was, from my understanding, kept completely secret.
I'm sure there will be people on here screaming that the government has no right to keep the fruits of labor paid for by taxpayers money a secret, but it sounds like NY, just like Arizona, is doing it to protect the sites they have invested a lot of time and energy in.
Judging from the picture at Hudson River, the river seems to be quite small compared to the people on the bicycles, soldiers, and horses.
What's the big deal about mapping such a tiny thing?
And check out the miniture bridge, what's that about...
come on fhqwhgads
wow, for once pollution is a good thing, if you're a historian.
speaking as a former resident of Troy, i think the O2 free hudson should be more of a concern than mapping the shipwrecks. not to get all partison, but the next time an anti-environmentalist raves that pollution isn't a problem, have him/her go for a dip in the hudson and see how many simultaneous illnesses they come down with. eeew.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
for the link of actual map or the map itself.
1) Map Bottom of Hudson River Don't release information to the Public
2) Give "rights to salvage" to political contributors
3) Profit
I give a darwin award to anyone who is stupid enough to even TOUCH the Hudson river. Let alone swim to the bottom of it for extended periods of time! That water is so filthy and disgusting full of poison I would sooner eat my own shit than drink it. I highly doubt that any of the sunken ships have pirate treasure on them anyway.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Dredging the river will decimate the shipwrecks
or salvaging the shipwrecks will spread PCBs back into the river, which is one of the big problems with dredging
More info is at the EPA. The article doesn't really mention this, which seems odd, since the PCB/Dredging issue has been a hell of a hot topic in the Upper Hudson Valley for the past year or two.
_sig_ is away
Someone had mentioned a plane flying through the spans and crashing there, does someone have a link to that in the news? Im sure there are a few planes down there, too.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
Sorry buddy, if yer gonna troll, troll. If yer gonna make lame Soviet Russia jokes, make em. But this, this is just pathetic. Take it back to the drawing board and come back to Slashdot when you have a better idea.
I mean really, what Soviet sun skipper could resist hanging out on the bottom next to a wreck?
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
i am sad that but this, this is just pathetic :*(.
Having said that in my subject header, let me just say that I have mixed feelings about that in this case.
While it may be true in the strictest sense there are those out there who will pillage these wrecks and some history could be lost.
I think the sites should be surveyed by archeologists prior to opening the floodgates to the public
Then designate them as part of the park system and treat them as historical sites.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
And as to getting ill from taking a dip, give me a break. Maybe down around Manhattan (especially the East River), but not for us upstaters. I've been swimming in that river since I was a kid, and let me tell you, when I was a kid (mid 70s)the toxins were flowing fresh daily. Yeah, there were limits, anytime a bunch of fish or clams etc washed up on the beach dead we couldn't go swimming (and usually wound up bagging some samples to see what killed them this time around). So taking a dip won't kill you, eating the local fish will.
i am sad that you are sad. It's all so sad.
How does Jimmy Hoffa look on a sonar scan?
Jason.
To paraphrase the statute's text, all New York State government agencies must disclose to the public all info/data/documents they possess unless doing so will violate someone's privacy or would endanger someone's safety, plus a few more exceptions that don't apply to these shipwreck locations.
I think it's extremely cool that they found 200 year old perishable goods like leather and potatos preserved by the mud.
In think it would be even cooler if there was a similar project in europe or the middle east - places that have way more history than the US.
The oldest ships you'll find in the Hudson are going to be ~2 hundred years old. Imagine finding a shipwreck in the mediteranean, red sea, black sea, or caspian sea thats ~2 thousand years old!!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
goverment sure does act irresponsobly if it withholds important information.
It's the law. If the people paid for it (ie. taxes), then the people have to have access to it. I used to work as a consultant to NOAA. Everything we produced which NOAA paid for is available for cost of duplication and materials (this is usually a lot of money for simple things because the cost involves the wages of a government employee burning a dozen CDRs and the wages of his/her CTO, etc, etc).
There are exceptions (like secret defense projects and stuff), but that's the exception. They can't simply say "we choose to keep this info out of the hands of the public", it requires working through a legal process to gain that kind of status.
...salvage rights are guranteed to the person who can haul it in. At least that is the case for oceans, seas, etc. it might be different for rivers in the CONUS. In some cases injuctions have been granted to the government for cases of historical preservation. It unfortunately becoms a case of who ever is first to the site, or first to the judge. In short anything that sinks belongs to whomever is willing to bring it up. Maybe an interesting idea would be to an underwater national park/museum. It would preserve any artifacts and generate some revenue for the Parks and Wildlife Service, while allowing the public to see their history.
----- "It's all fun and games 'til somebody puts an eye out, then it's just funny."
or at least they have jurisdiction over them.
So if you think you can block off a busy route just to search for treasure, I'll tell you about the gold bar I saw someone drop into the concrete being poured for the New York Thruway.
only a dopey shiteating dumbfuck would associate 'pirate treasure' with ALL invocations of the word 'shipwreck'.
There are other things down there that could be considered treasure. Consider the suitcase they brought up from the Titanic site. Historical information. Not pirate gold.
i was a tour guide on the hudson for new york waterway for awhile.
;-P
there is supposedly pirates treasure.
it would be nice to find one of these, called "General Washington's Watch Chain."
maybe a german u-boat?
or relics from the age of steamboats.
the hudson is also pretty deep in places. off of west point, for example (206 feet), or near bear mountain bridge (165 feet). it is an ancient river, as old as the appalachians. some of it was carved during the last ice age, and is similar to a norwegian fjord. plenty of room down there.
check this gem out, bannerman's island. an old arms dealer from the spanish american war blew up the castle he built with his business profits by locating his arsenal right next to his castle on his private island. oops. i've kayaked around it and can make out weird shapes in the shallow muck between the island and the shore. wonder what you would find near there!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to US maritime law, all the state has to do is see a judge with the documented location of each shipwreck and file a warrent to "arrest" the wreck. That's how a salvager gains legal custody of the wreck in US waters. Unless there's something specific about New York's own state constitution and state laws that would prohibit them from doing such, that's the mechanism they need to employ to keep all other potential salvagers out of the deal.
I am an amateur treasure hunter. I have been called a looter by archeology types at times. My proposal is this:
How many historical sites/wrecks can be researched in 100 years? Take this number and double it. Now make a list of these sites. These sites would be "off limits" to looters, er treasure hunters.
Now if a "new" site is found, in order to add it to the list you must drop an existing site from the list.
My point is that there are so many sites there is no way they can all be researched, and without "looters" many existing museum pieces would not have been found and available for the public to see and researchers to study.
Thank goodness for maritime law and the law of salvage....
I was just about to elaborate on my question. It's a skimpy on the reason why I was asking it.
I understand that salvage belongs to whomever brings it up. If I had the necessary equipment and personel to anchor in the Hudson and start bringing up salvage, would I need to go to the state or county/city and buy a permit before starting operations?
Considering that you often need a permit to stop traffic on roads or do major construction work on land, a permit to salvage would make sense. But then, naval law is much different.
A follow up question: Can a permit be refused for historical or environmental reasons?
I like you suggestion of making it into an underwater park. I believe some ship wreckage have been made into underwater parks or marine sanctuaries in order to control access and preserve the area. Unfortunately, on a good day in the Hundson you can only see an arm's length.
...that'll keep the show "Relic hunter" going for a while...
Actually there's a whole set of rules in admiralty for salvage rights over wrecks. This has come up more and more often as folks like Ballard locate old wrecks like Spanish galleons loaded with gold more easily. The disputes can get a little complicated.
Think of the ship at the bottom as not lost but in long-term storage. Just because someone can get to it before you can doesn't make it theirs. Access is not ownership. But if someone finds the wreck, they should be able to sell that information to the owner.
No, I can't justify these ancient rules. Changes may be in the wind.
I thought Shaftoe had this under wraps.
Oh, I get it... troll / bridge joke.
I work for the outfit that is doing this survey and a couple others here in the keys plus one each in Portugal and Morocco (RPM, not Mel Fisher's). Putting aside the overseas projects, since that involves several more layers of bureaucracy, and not knowing the laws covering the Hudson, I can only give you an idea of what happens here.
Just about anything inside the reef is within the Floida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS), so we have to pull a permit from them as well as from NOAA. FKNMS is a joint state / federal authority and NOAA of course is federal. In some areas we are allowed to do non-invasive surveys, such as towing magnetometers, a sidescan sonar or a sub-bottom profiler. Any excavation, which is done scientifically and with respect for the site, requires a separate permit. All data collected, whether from towed surveys or excavation must be shared with the permitting agency but is otherwise proprietary.
Hey, it's expensive to do this kind of work and there are plenty of treasure hunters that would love to get a hold of some of our "numbers". But as the article points out, those wrecks are mostly the workaday variety and probably of little commercial value. I think they are doing the right thing by holding back until the historically significant sites can be identified and protected even if the Hudson is not exactly a diving hot spot.
I don't know much about salvage rights and admiralty law, but maybe there's a relevant portion of some state statute regulating shipping and commerce on the Hudson and what happens to sunken ships? *shrug
More interestingly - what about GE and the whole PCB issue? I see a few problems with anybody digging anything up on a large scale:
a.) Scenic Hudson (or maybe it was another group, I forget) doesn't want anybody stirring up silt in the Hudson for the purposes of GE dredging the PCB-filled mud, so I can't think that they'd think lightly of lots of treasure hunters doing ths same thing.
b.) GE argued from the start that the biggest harm in removing the silt would be that it stirred up all of the PCBs which, over time, have become more benign (or at least less latent on the surface of the mud). Stirring them up, they said, would put them back into the fish, etc... this might relieve GE from its primary argument against dredging, so I've got to think they'd be considering it carefully.
c.) No matter what Scenic Hudson and GE think today about the Hudson, it is well-established that the silt is still chock full of PCBs, and as such, would qualify for treatment as a "hazardous material" upon its removal from the Hudson. Part of the dredging issue was figuring out what lucky Upstate NY town was going to host the geomembrane-protected "silt dump" for disposal of the stuff so it wouldn't leach into the ground and contaminate groundwater, etc. The rule of NIMBY has applied thus far, as far as I know... It would therefore follow that anybody trying to dig up ships would run into a big problem of what to do with the dirt they dug through. (Granted, it's not the whole Hudson, but it still creates an issue if you do anything but leave it there.)
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
Hey we spent 200mil on a project, why not go down and get some ROI on it? IS the gov't that stupid to just let all that loot lie at the bottom of the river and let someone else take it? Why not go down, get the goodies from the river and sell it and MAKE MONEY!
wait i forgot this was gov't e-commerce thinking
1. spend money to map hudson river.
2. ?????
3. Make money!
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Well, in any controversial endeavor, there are competing forces:
1) State does not want Joe Sixpack tearing into PCB laden mud or though historically interesting artificats to "go for the gold".
2) Joe Sixpack claims he has "the right" to this information; it should be public, and it's no ones business what he does with his tools and diving suit.
Sounds like a case for a Judge and some expert witnesses to me.
Hey Hemos, which yellow journal do you work for?
Secretly Mapped? I don't know how you can hide that much equipment and be secret. Not releasing the information, OTOH, warrants a different title, n'est pas?
I'm surprised they aren't trying to pull them off immediately. When the Yacht Club (I know I know, buncha dorks) here at Stevens Tech lost a boat (dinky little thing), the school was planning to leave it at the bottom because it the cost of bringing it up would be too much. Then the Army's Engineer Corp found out and went crazy about all the rules we were violating.
It's too bad our seniors are too incompetent to get a winning entry in the underwater autonomous submersible competition... It'd be cool to explore the wrecks ourselves...
[o]_O
Sorry, you're too late. The people with ulterior motives who don't behave responsibly have already been elected, and were the ones that directed the study to be done. They now have the information, and aren't giving it to the rest of us.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Shiver me timbers - Bring out the booty!
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I've been swimming in the Hudson (mid-hudson valley area) for years. It is quite clean.
Those of you claiming it is dirty and filthy and you'd rather eat your own shit could not find the Hudson on a fucking map. Please, eat your own shit.
Many people swim, water ski, and jet ski. Hell, there are even beaches, which are packed during the summer.
The only drawback to the hudson is that the salt line comes up in the summer and you have to wash the salt off after swimming. The horror!
Yup. I was there too, until '71. We'd spend summers sailing and canoing along the river, camping along deserted banks. It was generally felt that the Hudson below Albany was a dead river at the time, but the monster carp we found in the coves along the banks were a strong refutation of that lie. And this was just a couple of miles downriver of Albany's Niagra Mohawk and the (then) Sears and Esso tank farms. It did get nasty on occassion though, until they stopped the oil barges from flushing into the river.
The hitch? For the time being the maps - paid for as part of the $186 million Hudson River Estuary Plan - are not being published since state officials are nervous about the prospect of so many shipwrecks suddenly being opened up to salvagers on one of the U.S.'s busiest rivers. 'We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly'....
Geez, with over 200 wrecks, couldn't you just drag an anchor down the river and disturb at least a few? Or would suggesting that make this post a ``troll''?
moto411.com
Yeah, I was going to mention NY law but decided to keep it generic just to discount "finders keepers." Besides, I don't want to look it up any more than you do.
:).
On obscure references, for anyone who wonders, NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard
*
Funny you should attach this mud Q here -- it was the first thing that crossed my mind because of the GE debate. I thought GE's anti-dredging argument sounded plausible, and I'm an environmentalist, which means that of course if dredging caused more problems I would not be knee-jerk against GE (stereotypes of environmentalist are so ugly
They dredged in Boston Harbor, which has similar issues, to make way for the 3rd harbor tunnel, and put the material called mud on the bottom but toxic waste on the surface into barges. Then the Army Corps of Engineers forbade them from dumping it in Mass Bay as planned. So they had to stop digging with this incredibly expensive rented scoop until they found somewhere to put the muck. Oh yeah, then one of the barges sank at its berth. I think it went to the airport and, ultimately, I don't know. Illustrates how messy this stuff can be.
Anyway, I assume salvage would not involve that much disturbance of the river bed. Don't worry, if it is an issue someone will raise it.
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"Hold on to the dynamite outside the boat before lighting it, yarrr sliimmy swaabbb!"
ii thhinnk itts aaa liee abbouut thiiiiinkking we aare nnot saafee trreassree hunnterrrrs. ii saaayy ooppen thhe shhippinng lannnes whiille wee loook forr thee dabbbloons.
"Arg, keep the oil lamp next to the dynamite where I can reach it lad!"
Weeve nott fowndd anny golld yet. Blasted superrr-freightters allways honnkingg theiirrrr foggg hornnss att usss as wee searchhh inn thiss thickkk brittain fog att dusk.
"Yar, can't you see we're working here? Flabbergast you too! Move your heiniken around our excavation site! I don't worry if you go into water less than 10-midgetmen deep if you needs!"
Thhe moore pppeeeeoople to loook withhh us the bettttar, I allwayyys saayyy. Arrghh!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Clive Cussler, on top of writing the really good (to me, anyway) Dirk Pitt books, is an avid hunter/finder of wrecks. This book The Sea Hunters Goes into depth on what he had to go through to find and bring up some of the historic wrecks he was involved in, as well as some quasi-fictional accounts of the ships last hours before sinking. Kinda neat stuff. More interesting is the levels of beurocracy and government meddling and even downright seizure he had to deal with in some cases. I highly reccomend this book to anyone interested in learning what really goes on in finding/salvaging ships. Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Note: This is posted as AC because my employer is directly involved.
What I don't understand is why the City of New York is doing it this way.
I'm employed by my local city government and within the last several years we've been developing a Geographic Information System. GIS is basically digital photos of the entire city with various meta data attached (street names; water, sewer, & electric lines; zoning info; etc.).
Long story short - it required photographs taken during VERY expensive fly-overs. Not only is the city going to use the GIS information internally (police, fire, planning, and engineering departments), but in an effort to recoup some of the costs the city is planning on selling the information to local businesses. How do you sell information that is publicly owned? Simple - don't let the public own it.
What they're doing is leasing access to the GIS data, but allowing a 3rd party (the ones who did the fly-overs) to actually own it. The city is then under no legal obligation to allow the public to get to it for free.
Why couldn't New York do the same and allow whoever did the sonar scans to own the data?
I agree. Isn't there a freedom of information act? I want a boatload of wet bricks from the 1870s
Eat at Joe's.
I am surching for my bride to take back with me to Zemunda. I pick to look in Queens-NY. I am looking for stinky cheap apartment run by old black man, black awareness rally, and barber shop to find bride. I love you. I am royalty. I own all my base. I will be waiting at Mc'Doulds.
everyone has seen teh footage hell it was used in my highschool physics class to explain resonance.. famous == preservation, failure or not.. hell one of hte parents mentions pearl harbor as a national monument, was that a huge success for us? no but it should be preserved anyway, why? so it doesn't happen again.. maybe those shipwrecks are in hazardous waters and now that they have the locations marked they can keep others away from them, whose to say really but making the river/bottom a national park isn't a bad idea.. it's probably already got aspects of it protected under environmental legislation anyway..
The EPA forcing GE to pay to dredge up part of the hudson because of PCB's.
I think the decision weighed whether it was better to leave the PCBs there or to remove them. They decided in the long run it was better to remove them as PCBs don't break down naturally and have a nasty habit of moving up the food chain.
it's full of diapers, condomns, needles, bloody stool samples, aborted fetus, ejaculate, flu virus, bile, liver and onions, and elusive trolls the size of the endangered water-coot opposums.
I fish there everyday with J0n Katz and he and I boil the water verry well before we drink from it. Haven't caught any fish yet, maybe J0n should shit more than 2 yards away from where we drop our sinkers. Old Chinese tradition say, the more chum from your bum the better the wishin when your fishin.
The Hudson is VERY heavily polluted with PCBs dumped by GE over the years. It got to the point where the govt. (EPA) has told GE to dredge the river and clean it out. GE's response is that the PCBs are now 'safely' underneath the bottom of the river, and dredging will do more harm than good, as dredging will stir up all the crap and get it back into the river again.
On the one hand, you can't fault GE for this line of thinking, as much of the dumping was done before the harm in PCBs were realized. On the other, if you treat an area like a sewer, you should own up to doing some sort of cleanup.
All that being said, there will be a big ecological impact if you're digging up ships buried for 400 years, well below where the PCBs are.
What I personally would love to see, but know will never happen, is the recouperation of some of the cost by selling portions of map data to various salvaging companies. That money could then be used to put money -back- in taxpayers' pockets and make the project less wasteful.
Recovering costs from publicly funded projects is an interesting idea but it seems to be horribly implemented in practice. Time and time again, taxpayers pay for research, the fruits of that research are sold to private industry at bargain basement prices (in the name of recouping costs), private industry makes big profits, and meanwhile the 'recovered' money disappears into government overhead again. The US pharmaceuticals and technology sectors seem to be built on such practices.
I guess something can be said for the jobs and cash flow that sometimes result from companies formed out of public/private partnerships, but they really seem to be the exception to the rule. Besides, I'm not sure that the project is all that wasteful, anyway.
weren't insured in the first place, and of those that were most of them are of little or no actual salvage value.
We aren't talking huge Spanish Galleons loaded with Inca gold here, nor are we, as some other poster suggested, talking about anything worth salvaging for a barge full of steel. Albany is no "El Dorado." Trust me, I know. And Coxsackie is pretty dipshit NOW, let alone 200 years ago.
For the most part we aren't even talking "ships" in the modern sense, but rather "boats," and wooden ones at that. A few odd "pleasure" vessels maybe, but mostly small trade "ships" ( such as the 90 foot wooden sloop Clearwater) and military vessels of the smaller kind such as might have patroled the river during the Revolutionary War period.
Most of the trade vessels were carrying cargo such as the average upstate NY farmer of over one hundred years ago might want if they were heading upriver, and food stores if they were heading down. Bolts of cloth, hoes and rakes, pumpkins, things of that nature.
For all practical purposes no part of these vessels or their cargos would be worth a damn to a salvager or insurer for financial gain, and the military vessels could already be claimed to be the property of the government.
No, what's valuable on these vessels is simply the information examining the vessels themselves might provide. Like how they were built. How people lived on them. What kind of farm tools and fabric went up the river when, and what kind of food came back down.
The only "salvage" here, for the most part, is historical knowledge. However, one guy rooting around in SCUBA gear ( and for the most part any of these wrecks would be accessable to an amatuer diver in SCUBA gear, no huge "recovery platform" needed. It's just a river bottom) looking for an 18th century button or something that he can put in a parts drawer and forget about could completely destroy an archeological site beyond recovery by the experts.
This is what they're worried about, not someone dragging up a 20 year old oil tanker's anchor and selling it for scrap.
KFG
There is a museum of a shipwreck from the 1880s or 1890s. They have all kinds of cool shit that was preserved perfectly in the mud. Really, these ship wrecks can be a historian's wet dream.
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Because nothing says non-fiction like a Dirk Pitt novel!
Benevolent scientists do something useful that ends up being worth a lot of money(maybe), announce that they have this valuable thing but aren't going to make it available because they realize it's value. Enter the evil foreign terrorist network boss, out to fund their evil terrorist plots. They commission a spy to penetrate the heat-sensoring, lazer beam-protected, ultra high security vault (because that's surely where they're keeping these maps, right?)and steal the maps. City mayor decries the burglary, gets on the $superhero."phone", and commissions the slightly sociopathic secret superhero to "get those maps back!"
antics ensue...
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
Soon, I hope that they make the whole sea bottom property of the federal government, so that any ship that sinks will be owned by my children forever on the bottom. That way, I know that I'll always be able to get great rewards from today's disasters. As it is, just anyone can go out and riun my heratige. Obviouly, only someone approved by the federal government should be alowed to pick up wrecks from the sea floor. The proceeds can be used to keep me from doing the same thing myself. I know that I'm not special and can't or won't learn how to do things right. It's not like you can simply make a law about how certian wrecks must be documented and share the information about state of the art preservation, now is it? No, I'm sure people will always get around the law if they can for filthy lucre, after all I'm greedy like that and so are so many other posters here who openly say this is such a good thing that New York is doing.
New York has always been so far advanced in the ways of correct government. Just look at Tamany Hall! Wow, New Yorkers sure know how to co-operate. Exclusive franchises rock, NDAs are wonderful. How else can we maintain such excellence?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The bottom of the Hudson is littered with wrecks containing priceless cargo from the Golden Age of industrialism in upstate New York.
Imagine the riches that await:
Hey Now...
As a resident of the Mid Hudson Valley, for once I actually agree with the policos. Leave the wrecks alone.
------------------- a man with a good car needs no justification '93 90S 150K
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Senior year of college I was sitting on a dock on the Hudson when some freshmen came down, stripped down to their undies, jumped in, then got right out, got dressed and left.
Raising the ships was difficult. Preserving the ships after they were raised has been a major effort (costing a small fortune) and requiring many thousands of man hours. It is wonderful that the wrecks were raised, but I don't think either the UK or Sweden could have coped with more than one every ten years or so.
Steel and iron ships are actually harder than wood to raise once they are over a certain page where the hull is substantially oxidised and what you end up with is almost impossible to treat (iron oxide crumbles).
See my journal, I write things there
"Hudson River Shipwrecks Secretly Mapped"
shouldn't that be:
"Hudson River Shipwrecks map kept secret"?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's a lot of messages going around here about the PCBs in the Hudson River.
First of all, the vast majority of the PCBs are located just above Troy, behind a dam/locks. The extent of this mapping was from Troy downriver to Manhattan. Therfore, the PCB contamination is not really relevant to any salvage operations.
Having said that, the PCB cleanup issue is very complicated. The fundamental question came down to whether the dredging (which is only aimed at "hot spots") will resuspend more PCBs than a significant storm event. Over the long-term (~50 years), it's likely that there won't be a significant difference in PCB concentrations for a dredged vs. non-dredged situation.
I suspect that while GE doesn't want to dredge because it costs them money, the EPA may want to force dredging to look like they're doing something and that little of the remediation action is actually based on concerns for long-term human/ecosystem welfare in the area.
As an environmental engineer and former part-time resident of Troy, I find the whole thing a little depressing.
-slackerboy
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
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Yeah, there were limits, anytime a bunch of fish or clams etc washed up on the beach dead we couldn't go swimming
Ha! You just made my point for me! Thanks. Anti-enviromentalists see no limit. That's what environmentalists are for. They ask the question: "When does it stop?"
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Yeah, a Cessna 172 could bring down what remains of NYC! Look Out! My plane, which is no heavier than a Yugo, is COMING FOR YOU!!!!!
Okay, you out-of-towners are starting to get on my nerves.
Let's get this out of the way once and for all.
First of all, the only extensively documented case of this kind of thing was with the Irish gangs over in Hell's Kitchen. They had a guy on their crew who was trained (in prison, yet) as a butcher, so when they killed somebody, they would have this guy come in and chop up the body. Then they would take the parts to Ward's Island (where the East River meets the Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan) and drop the body bits into the stream right by a water treatment plant. This would ensure that what littel was left got ripped up and washed way out to sea. Keep in mind that this would not work as well these days as now the population density of Roosevelt Island (in the middle of the East River at about Midtown) is much higher and people spend more time by the water.
Yes, people are killed and dumped in the river. This is frequent enough that every spring the NYPD divers prepare for the annual "crop" of bodies that have swollen up over the winter and pop to the surface as the weather warms up.
The primary variable is how well the large cavities like the lungs and intestines have been punctured. If you do the job "right" and make sure that those are open to the water (and the body weighted down), the gases will tend to bubble out and the body stay submerged. Of course, with DNA testing all bets are off as one floating bit of tissue can be enough; *if* spotted.
Keep in mind that, contrary to popular misconception, there is quite a lot of sealife around NYC (I used to collect seashells half a block from 23rd street) so if a body is down long enough, it will be GONE.
Why the East River and not the Hudson? The East has historically been closer to more nasty bits like the Lower East Side and the docks in Brooklyn and Queens. However, given the Mafia action along the old port facilities and institutional sites (Javits anybody?), each side has most likely seen its share of activity.
There. Now can we get back to arguing about salvage?
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Since when have we cared about Jersey? You people actually thought you could get Ellis Island back (after, btw, New York paid the bill for restoring it).
Jersey. Yeah, right.
Fourth generation New Yorker,
-Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Geeeeze amazing.... and there was me thinking it was just us Europeans who had history!
Now doubt next week Slashdot will featuring a story about all those great historical documentries that are produced in the US, let me see Perl Harbor, Enigma, Private Ryan.....
The shoes and socks are removed before the concrete is applied.
:-)
This is done to ensure that the feet don't slip out after the "dive".
You wouldn't want that after having gone through the trouble of obtaining the concrete.
Hey, I'm a NY Italian. I know what I'm talking about.
Huh?
How about Crime Scene? There should be enough bodies in there to get that inplace.
Cant wait to see another Titanic.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this information will only remain secret until somebody files a Freedom of Information Act request to get it. Unless they can come up with some National Security reason to make this data classified I don't see how they can prevent it's release if someone is willing to take them to court. My guess is that this is exactly what the salvage companies will do.
http://saveie6.com/
Suppose prowling around ships that lie in traffic lanes is more dangerous and hazardous than prowling around abandoned railway stations.
In any case, industrial archeology is an interesting study. Look, don't take.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I don't think the ships in the hudson river are that old (or there must be some viking ships?)
See also (but first disable unrequested pop-up windows):
http://members.tripod.com/caiman.cv/wreck.html
I live a block away from the hudson river where the east river meets the hudson and let me tell you - shipwreck or no shipwrecks YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE DIVING IN THIS RIVER! You are more likly to find Jimmy Hoffa and friends than a shipwreck! Let alone the radiation and other crap that seems to be floating there.
I:
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with a silk sow. The same is true of money.
II:
If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would
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III:
There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.
IV:
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Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average
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