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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."
but what is this doing on Slashdot?
that's cyber security. everybody knows that patty s. runs fuddles' major league tax dodge, & that they, & other illuminati billionerrors come swim in fuddles' fabulous puddles. fortunately, we do not need (never did) any more greed/fear/ego based glowbull warmongering execrable. plus, their bugware never worked to task.
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about a 1000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
boeing, boeing, gone.
this post is censored in the previous thread.
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.
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.
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Original post > ..... to become the world's second largest offshore junk yard.
There, fixed the original posting.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
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!
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.
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
I wonder if Dick Cheney is going to flip out and start foaming at the mouth about this too?
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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
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
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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.
Any swabbies out there want to run through the USS, USNS, USAFS, etc. designation scheme for us landlubbers?
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...
I'm thinking, big ship, used to house hundreds if not thousands of sailors. Why not turn it into some sort of affordable housing?
The U.S. has more than enough housing inventory. The best way to create 'affordable housing' is to shut down the socialist enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac whose charter was to create affordable housing but which instead, through counter-productive anti-capitalist anti-market forces, fed and bloated house prices far beyond reality and created the biggest economic bubble in history.
In order to fix the economic mess this government created, rather than turn aircraft carriers into houses, you'd have to turn about 8000 houses into artificial reefs each month for at least a year!
"And in the south he saw the golden oranges hanging on the trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the price was low."
-- John Steinbeck, the Grapes of Wrath. "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"- Ronald Reagan
This is the ship that appeared in the movie Virus. You can see all scenes with the ship here: http://www.keywesttravelguide.com/vandenberg-sinking-key-west.html
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.
>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.
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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?
Yet another boat or business sunk by Microsoft. When will they... wait, what, this sinking isn't caused by Microsoft? But it's posted to Slashdot, so there's gotta be a connection!
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.
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
thanks.
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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