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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?"
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).
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."
Too bad at 140 feet it's beyond the limits for sports/recreational diving.
Yeah, like almost a whole *gasp* year.
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.
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.
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.
...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
Well not everybody enjoys the same things, granted. However military vessels usually attract a lot of interest when they are opened to the public while visiting a harbour. It stands to reason that people are still interested when the ship is below water, but accessible with suba gear. Personally I think it's cool.
> The ship I served on from 1989-1992, the USS Guadalcanal (LPH-7) was sunk as a target.
Bloody hell... I hope they gave you a bit of warning
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?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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.
I wouldn't say it's that straightforward to be fair.
It was public property, bought entirely by the tax payers yet no one asked the tax payers if they'd like it auctioned off or recycled, it's also being sunk in a public place.
If they owned the area they were sinking it in it'd be a little more straightforward of course but I believe it's dubious to simply say it's theirs so they can do what they want.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I get your cynicism, it's a pretty fair argument that everything is more interesting under water. Boulders on land are generally boring. But if you drop it into a warm part of the ocean, it suddenly attracts colorful and often unique wildlife. Within a short period of time, it's unrecognizable.
While you might be unimpressed by wreck diving, there are many out there, myself included, who are awestruck by the manner in which the sea reclaims otherwise uninteresting objects.
Sigs are for losers
USS, or United States Ship is a designation that is specific to a warship. Being a warship implies active service under the United States Navy.
USNS, or United States Naval Ship is a designation that is specific to a non-warship. Naval hospitals, certain research vessels, some surveillance ships, and other ships not appropriate for combat are included. These are not under direct command of the United States Navy, but are under the command of the Military Sealift Command. Often these ships are crewed by civilians and merchant marines, sometimes with armed forces personnel on board.
USAFS is an United States Air Force Ship. Apparently the Air Force thought it important enough to designate their ships differently to prevent confusion over whether the ship is Navy controlled or Air Force controlled.
While in the NAVY, I worked about USNS Mercy (TAH-19), so take the Air Force notes with a grain of salt. We had a civilian crew, Marines for small arms / internal defence, and USN military for the entire embedded hospital. I say embedded hospital because the USN personnel couldn't direct the crew, and the hospital was practically self contained and administered.
And now that the banks are largely owned by the feds ... who really owns it?