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Post subject: Navy dives in to save coastlines
 Posted: Oct 23, 2006 - 07:36 PM
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Puffer
Joined: Dec 31, 1969
Posts: 73
Status: Offline
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Navy dives in to save coastlines
By Traci Watson
USA Today October 12, 2006
Environmental problems plaguing America’s coastal waters are being tackled
by an unlikely group: Navy divers.
In the past two years, sailors who normally spend their time doing
underwater demolitions or salvaging ships have started cleaning up coastal
messes that are so expensive or so vast that they overwhelm civilian
governments. The work also gives the divers experience that sharpens their
skills.
Navy divers plan to start whittling away next spring at a 37-acre pile of
old tires smothering the coral reefs off Fort Lauderdale. In August, a Navy
team did underwater reconnaissance to assess the best way of removing the
pile, the remains of an unsuccessful artificial reef created in the 1970s.
This summer, divers from the Army and Navy helped collect some of the
thousands of tons of old fishing nets draped over the bottom of Puget Sound
in Washington state. It was the second summer that Navy divers have helped
rid the sound of the nets, some of them decades old.
Federal officials also hope to enlist military divers to help clean up a
new national marine preserve in the Hawaiian Islands, says William Nuckols
of Coastal America, a coalition of federal agencies that works on ocean
issues.
By outward appearances, military divers don’t fit the stereotype of
“tree-hugging” environmentalists, but the divers say they are committed to
the cause.
”We’re big, bad, hairy-chested deep-sea divers,” jokes Navy Chief Warrant
Officer Dan Mikulski, among those who inspected the tire pile. “When you
actually see the magnitude of the tires, it doesn’t take an
environmentalist to know ... we need to get the tires out of there for the
good of our country.”
Adds Chief Warrant Officer Mark Thomas, who helped remove nets from Puget
Sound this summer: ”I have three little girls who are one day going to be
diving in these waters, and I want it to be clean and safe for them, too.”
The two projects are under way to both help the environment and give
sailors needed training, Mikulski and Thomas say.
Commercial divers know how to collect trash from the ocean, but they’re
expensive and lack some of the cutting-edge technology and abilities Navy
and Army divers take for granted.
Military aid “is going to open to natural-resource agencies a whole world
of possibilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have,” Nuckols says.
For instance, military divers routinely descend to below 100 feet. That
allows them to snag debris that’s out of reach of commercial divers, who
can’t go that deep unless a costly decompression chamber is on hand, says
Jeff June, a marine biologist whose company, Natural Resources, is helping
clean up Puget Sound.
Just as helpful is the cost of the divers’ labor: nothing. Without the
military’s involvement, picking up these tires off the Florida coast would
cost roughly $20 a tire, says Kenneth Banks of the Broward County
Department of Environmental Protection in Florida.
The expense of picking up the 1 million to 2 million tires would be
”overwhelming,” without the military divers, he says. “The value of their
effort is huge.”
The tires were dumped three decades ago in the hopes they would attract
fish and encourage coral growth. Instead, little if any marine life has
taken root on the smooth rubber, which remains so intact that divers can
read the names of the tire manufacturers.
Even worse, the ties that once held the piles of tires together have
broken. The tires, pushed by storms, have pulverized real coral reefs and
kept new coral from growing.
Military divers aren’t willing to pick up any ocean trash. Instead, they
choose cleanups that allow them to gain new expertise or to practice past
lessons.
In Puget Sound, divers from both the Navy and the Army have learned how to
handle fishing nets that can ensnare a diver. The nets are expanses of
nearly invisible filament, often as long as a football field and littered
with hooks.
Nets also can be used to block harbors during hostilities, so learning how
to safely remove them is ”a perfect opportunity for us to go out and
perform a real-world operation that actually ties into what we really do,”
Thomas says.
Picking up tires isn’t as risky but still presents challenges. The work
takes place at depths of 70 feet, “a long way down,” Mikulski says, so
divers must limit their work sessions to 50 minutes. Even the logistics of
packing for the mission helps, he says.
Environmentalists have often clashed with the Navy over dumping old ships
in the ocean and sonar tests that may harm whales, but they say the
military deserves credit for the cleanups.
”The Navy, like any large bureaucracy, is a mixture of good and bad,” says
Joel Reynolds of the Natural Resources Defense Council. But “combining
training with environmental remediation ... seems to me a good idea.”
http://www.navytimes.com/story.php?f=1- ... 171033.php |
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