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USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg To Be Sunk For a Reef
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."
It's interesting. Plus, we all like arguing over the environment and this is a perfect article for that. just wait for "how come the government is allowed to dump its old stuff in the sea and the rest of us have to pay for disposal?"
Got me, but... Imagine a beowulf cluster of them! :P
...
...because it's information on a very historic ship. Sure, I'd imagine the number of geek divers might is pretty limited, but I do know a few.
The wreck will likely be stable for 50+ years, despite the recent photographs.
(It's also of interest to me, because I work on USNS vessels, and live near the reserve fleet where it spent the past few years)
It is.. Being there.
As if there isn't enough heavy metals in the water supply, the US drops 9550 tons of iron in the ocean. You don't do *anything* by halves, do you ?
(Let's wait for the first lemon to point out that iron is not a heavy metal, then we can all go "whoosh" at his expense).
Welcome to meta-slashdot :D
Iron Maiden is not heavy metal.
I am the lawn!
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.
"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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Otherwise you got me.
I figure it this way, the interesting point of the story was the ship itself. I really never knew they existed before this announcement and it is very interesting to see in this time and age of being friendly to the environment that the final use of this ship is a reef.
Consider it has been in service from 1943 to 1993 and has had multiple roles. The last of which makes one of the coolest looking ships I can recall. It is part of our technological history. How we got a better understanding of what we doing today. Besides, from the environmental angle, it has been used for over fifty years. Far better than building new ships for each mission and its final resting will give it future use beyond our lifetimes.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Too bad at 140 feet it's beyond the limits for sports/recreational diving.
Wiki articles says nothing about whether it runs on Leenoox
Soon it will become one of the world's most awesome diving spots.
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.
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.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Technically you are the 'first lemon' as you pointed it out yourself ;)
signature is pants
Is that you L. Bob Rife?
Have you ever been on such a ship? I would guess not. The costs involved would probably make building completely new houses much more economic. Unless you want to share your 'house' with 4 strangers.
Isn't it too hot for the Penguins?
signature is pants
Some time ago, shunk a ship was dispose waste, now is eco fiendly build low cost homes for poor fishes.. same thing diferent name :)
here ends what some neis
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
Okay, so we can all go "whoosh" at MY expense then.
You know, a +1 Whoosh moderation would cut down on an awful lot of misunderstandings (and also misplaced IRONy)
Assuming the wikipedia article on the ship is true, then the ship is currently owned by bankers and not the government.
I can't help thinking though the ancient tradition of the captain going down with the ship should be applied here, since the captains will be bankers. There's no better place for bankers than Davy Jones Locker.
How silly. :S What's the joy in that? "Oh, here I'm swimming through something that people recently deposited in the ocean, this is awesome". :S
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Would it make sense to turn the ship into housing?
Yes that idea was proposed and the ships name changed to... ..The Vagrantburg.
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....
Steel is quite good to recycle.
It takes about 25 gigajoules of energy per tonne to make steel, but if you recycle it you can get back 18 gigajoules per tonne.
In carbon emissions it takes 2 tonnes of CO2 to a tonne and you get back about 1.5 tonnes.
If most of the boat is steel that makes 9,000 tonnes of steel wasted , 163 petajoules of energy wasted or 13500 tonnes of CO2 emitted for an artificial reef.
The energy is around the same required to run a 1 GW power station for almost a day.
According to some sources, dumping iron in the ocean actually stimulates plankton growth.
Not sure if iron administered in ship form will have the same effect though.
It is swimable though and it's not an unimpressive sight, but I hope the waters of the Key are less violent than that of Wellington, New Zealand.
Any swabbies out there want to run through the USS, USNS, USAFS, etc. designation scheme for us landlubbers?
Sure, I'd imagine the number of geek divers might is pretty limited, but I do know a few.
It's actually quite a geeky activity. Although being unfit makes decompression sickness more likely, it's not an activity that requires much in the way of physical prowess. There's maths in those dive tables, or if you prefer gadgets there's dive computers. Not that there's not plenty of gadgetry involved in the breathing apparatus side of things.
Then there's the geekery of exploring a different world - it's amazing what's there underwater. And (as PADI put it) "floating weightless like an astronaut" (which you don't really, but there you go).
The thing that scares me more is geeks who think they can second guess the tolerances in the dive tables. I'd rather turn my brain off and obey them to the letter.
The ship I served on from 1989-1992, the USS Guadalcanal (LPH-7) was sunk as a target. She was 18,000 tons and 602 feet long. Not sure if she was to become a reef, just know it now has new inhabitants. They originally talked of turning her into a museum.
Yes, it seems to make sense to melt these ships down and turn them into razor blades (many end up that way). But, the Navy also needs to test their weapons - so they get to kill two birds with one stone.
As for all the contaminants dropping one of these in the water - they strip the ship of all the electronics and mechanical equipment. I would think they return the reduction gears to the owner in prep for these as well. The ships are cleaned as well as possible. And, they provide good habitat for the undersea life.
...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.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
It would be like a floating YMCA!
In the navy...
Diving geek reporting in.
As for the floating weightless... When you get everything just right and you can move up or down at will, just by breathing... I think *that* is even cooler than space style weightlessness.
Yeah, my upstairs neighbor dives, which is why I said the number might be limited. I'd go, but, as you mentioned...not in the best of shape, and already have ear/sinus problems, so I'm nervous about it.
And it's not really a cheap hobby. :-/
But, yeah, I'd like to see the Vandenberg up close. Looks like it'd be a neat dive. While I'd much prefer to live on one of the newer ships, there is something special and different about being on the vintage vessels.
This means that it was sold off as private property. The people that bought it decided that a reef would be a good idea and went through the approval process with the state to get permission to sink the ship. So they basically did what they wanted to do with the property that they bought.
Unless you're not into private property, they're pretty much allowed to do this.
Our diving center wanted to sink a 70m long, 40+y old trading ship. The reason was that with it we could have more tourism in the town, more sea life, and the shipyard (which was the owner of the ship, located only 300m from the purposed sinking location) didn't have to pay for towing and scrapping the ship (net loss). But we soon come to an impassable obstacle in the form of a treaty which my country (Croatia) signed barring intentional sinking of any ship (for whatever purpose).
This is what you get when you have boneheads in the government signing everything they got on the table.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Don't sink those antennas! I want!
Antenna Envy is a terrible thing.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I got my PADI certification in Hawaii and for the "deep" dive, we went out to where the U of H had sunk a research vessel that had once been a minesweeper. It was sitting upright at 100ft and that was an experience nothing to date had prepared me for: we descended down and down and suddenly this enormous black shape appeared right below me, and there was this ship, in all its sunken glory.
Standing on the ocean floor, looking up at the ship from "ground" level, was wild. I'm not certified to do the kind of diving you'd need for the Vandenberg, but if I thought swimming over a minesweeper was a mind-blowing experience, I can't imagine what something like that Vandenberg would be.
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.
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?
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Try the Seasteading Institute.
Iron is pretty much the most important fertiliser for aquatic plants.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
People who are anemic are suggested to cook with Cast Iron (the iron leeches into the food). Iron also has a tiny role in helping you carry O2 in blood.
Iron's not exactly uranium either, although it is heavy and a metal.
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
Good points, but I have a critique. There was a Japanese sub that sank off the coast of Hawaii that people dove. It was in about 140 feet of water, but the top deck was at 110 feet. Remember, unless your suicidal or stupid (or working for the Discovery Channel), you don't actually go under or into the wreck; you just go near it and around it. For PADI, wreck dives are one of their advanced courses.
That said, too many untrained divers went to the Japanese sub and went all the way to the floor and had decompression issues. The sub was eventually raised, towed out deeper (way outside of recreation diving range), and sank again. I hope either 1) this ship is bigger (taller) or 2) they have better precautions in place.
>Do you really want a bunch of inexperienced divers with no bouyancy control
>slamming into natural reefs & kicking up silt?
Who suggested that?
>Aside from being something different to see, wrecks make good training sites for all
>sorts of skills.
My point was, and continues to be, that it is funny that you take a nasty, dilapidated stripped chunk of industrial machinery that no one would want to walk aboard if it were tied to a pier, sink it in 100 feet of water and suddenly it's a cool place to visit.
>As an added bonus they have a commercial/tourist value that helps
>make providing and improving marine habitat more affordable.
No doubt. Again, it's just funny that a nasty, dilapidated, stripped chunk of industrial machinery makes a valuable commercial/tourist attraction.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"'s full of iron, 's good for you"
"Oh great, why don't we just boil the anchor".
Was anyone else disoriented by the designation "USAFS" and the very concept of a *ship* owned and operated (however briefly) by the Air Force? The mind boggles at the concept of a USAF-staffed ship; did they somehow contract the Navy to do it?
You don't have to go all the way to 140 ft to see the wreck. The Spiegal grove is in 140 ft of water and the structure starts around 60 feet. you have plenty to see around 80 feet.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
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.
"how come the government is allowed to dump its old stuff in the sea and the rest of us have to pay for disposal?"
The U.S. government pays dearly for disposal, it's just that reefing old ships after many millions of dollars in preparation is more cost effective than scrapping under the current U.S. government environmental rules. Read this if you want to know more: http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB391/
The Keys are pretty calm. Except during storms, there are rarely any large waves which ensures crystal clear water and perfect diving. The shallow reef is beautiful, and the vicinity has a number of shipwrecks to explore (just google for GPS locations).
I just got my diving certification at Key Largo a few weeks ago, and it's probably the most fun I've ever had. The visibility is usually 50+ feet in most areas.
Sigs are for losers
You know, a +1 Whoosh moderation would cut down on an awful lot of misunderstandings (and also misplaced IRONy)
That's actually a feature of language itself. Most people write like they would speak, and they forget that all the other information their voice carries is lost.
I went to Hawaii as a young guy, and had the misfortune of visiting Pearl Harbor.
Walking out onto a pier, I see oil bubbling out of the Ocean.
I said "Why is there oil bubbling out of the water?"
The guide said "This is the oil from ships sunk under the ocean from WWII"
I said "Why can't they clean this crap up?"
He said "Its to honor the men who died here"
I said "Fucking awful... so to remember them we need to let the ocean be polluted continuously. What an honor."
Looks like the military always has the special honor of destroying the world on a massive scale.... for my freedom I "enjoy" so much.
Dj fuQ [url="http://djfuq.org"]djfuq urges you to listen to the beats[/url] [url="http://djfuq.org"]http://djfuq.org[
Artificial reefs help with tourism and help minimize beach erosion. Believe it or not, there is a lot of public support here for adding artificial reefs. Besides, a rusty old ship at a drydock is much more of an eyesore than a coral-covered divespot.
As a Florida [fiscally-conservative] taxpayer, I say this is a smart investment.
Sigs are for losers
Think of how much effort,energy it takes to make steel.
Think of how much money that steel is worth.
Just dumb.
- A swimming test whereby you have to swim 200 meters
- A treading water test whereby you have to tread water for 10 minutes
- Shore dives whereby with all your gear on you've got to walk out and then swim to a dive buoy.
Fair play, these are moderately challenging.
- 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).
In fact (and this will appeal to geeks) you can do a CESA starting with near-empty lungs, because as you ascend pressure decreases and the air expands. There are definite psychological barriers that make it a challenge. Geeks who can put faith in what they know about Newtonian physics might do better than most!
This boat was owned by venture capitalists. If that steel was really worth more money than they got for this venture, believe me they'd have done that.
Off topic? Really? "What would you do with a free battle cruiser?" seemed perfectly on-topic to me.
I think the off topic mod is just a code for "I don't like this comment, but there's no -1 Disagree to be found."
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
And now that the banks are largely owned by the feds ... who really owns it?
We'll be out there on one of the press boats tomorrow, only 1500 ft away, instead of 1 mi for other spectators. Should be AWSOME! Hope to be able to post pix or vid by afternoon.
It's actually quite a geeky activity. Although being unfit makes decompression sickness more likely, it's not an activity that requires much in the way of physical prowess. There's maths in those dive tables, or if you prefer gadgets there's dive computers. Not that there's not plenty of gadgetry involved in the breathing apparatus side of things.
Then you have such fun things like Open Source dive computers, deco planning software such as V-planner and some maths & physics involved in gas mix calculations, partial pressures and surface-air-consumption rates.
The technology side of diving is amazing. OLED touch-screen computers, integrated HUD masks, wireless gauges, closed-circuit rebreathers, underwater electric vehicles and all sorts of cool gadgetry. If you still want more, there's also underwater photography and video gear.
It's really an ideal sport for geeks. There's not much physical activity needed, a massive amount of shiny tech toys to play with and you don't need to bother with pointless small-talk underwater.
Another geek diver here,
I mix my own nitrox (Vance Harlow's OXYGEN HACKER'S COMPANION)
I have also built electronic circuits for downloading info from my dive computer, and written small programs to manipulate the data.
I've also built a nitrox analyzer to verify the amount of oxygen in a scuba tank.
also the technical aspect of ship wreck diving is cool.
so yea diving is for geeks
No officer, I'm not dumping a billion tons of military waste in the ocean to avoid the costs of disposing of it and recycling it properly. I'm making an artificial reef!
There's an idea that started in marketing if ever I heard of one.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
You do realize that breaking up most ships for scrap costs more than the value of the materials, unless you do it someplace like India where you can ignore all kinds of environmental and safety rules and pay your workers almost nothing?
Oh I'm not arguing that either way - I was just pointing out that I think the parents argument was a little short-sighted, it isn't as simple as "they bought it so they can do what they want with it" because as I say there are other considerations!
I think you're probably right, I'm suprised that it's truly safe and that there aren't pollutants but they seem quite sure they've confirmed that it is and in that case you're right it's not a bad thing, particularly if it also prevents trawling which has had a devastating effect on the oceans.
are definite psychological barriers that make it a challenge
I think the hardest thing about this test is you're required to do the ascent with the regulator in your mouth - So you have to exhale while ascending, and supress every instinct you have to take a breath from that available regulator. It's very hard to supress that instinct...
Back when IBM first came out with the AT (1994?) Acompany whose name escapes me had an ad campaign involving building a reef from defunct IBM Hard Drives. IBM had a terrible time with the first round of hard drives and this company offered trade ins and had an add with the CEO tossing them off the back of his boat just off shore from the IBM PC Headquarters in Boca Raton - a very good laugh at the time since IBM was the M$ of the day.
There was a Japanese sub that sank off the coast of Hawaii that people dove. It was in about 140 feet of water, but the top deck was at 110 feet. Remember, unless your suicidal or stupid (or working for the Discovery Channel), you don't actually go under or into the wreck; you just go near it and around it. For PADI, wreck dives are one of their advanced courses.
Or unless you're simply certified to penetrate the wreck, and ideally this includes both courses taken on wreck penetration (and cave diving), along with more long-term mentoring with other experienced wreck divers.
It may be a little crazy, but I think that people who jump out of perfectly working airplanes for fun, or like to climb up sheer rock faces are absolutely nuts. Wreck diving (and cave diving) are far from suicidal if you just get the training, experience, mentoring and follow some basic rules.
Artificial reefs are also very useful for wreck diving n00bs. As a n00b, myself, so far I've only got 24 cave dives under my belt, and two wreck penetration dives on the Saskatchewan and Cape Breton up in Nanaimo, British Columbia (artificial wrecks). The newly sunk artificial reefs are somewhat safer for newbie wreck divers since they have been 'cleaned up' and have less crap that you're going to get caught on, so that less experienced wreck divers can get experience executing dives in an overhead environment with less crap inside the space, no wires hanging down waiting to grab ahold of scuba gear, etc. Although given the fatality on the Cape Breton and the triple-fatality on an artificial wreck in Florida fairly recently it is not without risks (both of those incidents involved violation of training standards).
I also don't believe the PADI wreck diver certification trains a diver to enter wrecks. It is about diving on wrecks rather than in them. You have to go to do a different (technical) dive training agency in order to get trained to dive inside wrecks.
It's actually quite a geeky activity. Although being unfit makes decompression sickness more likely, it's not an activity that requires much in the way of physical prowess. There's maths in those dive tables, or if you prefer gadgets there's dive computers. Not that there's not plenty of gadgetry involved in the breathing apparatus side of things.
It goes a lot beyond that as well, when you get into technical and cave diving.
I'm continually drawing parallels between my experiences at Amazon managing 30,000 servers, and cave diving in terms of the philosophies that are successful. You can't be successful managing that many servers if they are all unique, there has to be standards and there has to be uniform reactions among the operational staff for any emergencies to reduce MTTR. Underwater it takes on an additional urgency since your reactions to emergencies involve lack of breathing gas and your "MTTR" needs to be in seconds. There's also principles of failure analysis and single points of failure which cross over fairly easily. There's also more nebulous principles such as resisting the urge to solve problems in advance of actually encountering them -- which draws me towards Agile simply for the You Aint Gonna Need It - YAGNI principle - for reducing the complexity of designs. And the law of unintended consequences applies in both disciplines -- trying to fix a problem you don't actually have can cause problems elsewhere.
That's not even getting into the way that some people get geeky about being underwater. There's a whole different set of wildlife down there to get geeky about, and most divers love to find some new animal underwater and figure out what it was they saw online by consulting other geeks who can ID the critter. When cave diving there's a whole different set of geekery involved in the environment of the cave that I don't even know a tiny fraction of so far. And with wrecks, there's the whole history of the wrecks, as well as the geekery involved in going out and doing the historical research and side scanning and finding new wrecks.
Diving really has a nearly unlimited ceiling on how geeky you can get about it.
thanks.
Already ahead of you, what seasonings do you want?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Dude, cut down on the bold tags already, please?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
First of all, no I did not suggest that anyone should slam into natural reefs and kick up silt.
Second of all, since wreck diving is more advanced than simple open water diving, THE INEXPERIENCED DIVERS WILL BE DIVING ON NATURAL REEFS ANYWAY.
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