12ozProphet

Retired Subway Cars Used for Artificial Reefs
Source: NY Times

Sixteen nautical miles from the Indian River Inlet and about 80 feet underwater,a building boom is under way at the
Red Bird Reef. One by one, a backhoe operator has been shoving hundreds of retired New York subway cars off a
barge, continuing the transformation of a barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses,
walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog.

“They’re basically luxury condominiums for fish,” Jeff Tinsman, the artificial reef program manager for the Delaware
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said as one of 48 of the 19-ton retirees from New York
sank toward the 666 already on the ocean floor.But now, Delaware is struggling with the misfortune of its own
success.Having planted a thriving community in what was once an underwater desert, state marine officials are
faced with the sort of overcrowding, crime and traffic problems more common to terrestrial cities.

The summer flounder and bass have snuggled so tightly on top and in the nooks of the subway cars that Tinsman
is trying to expand the housing capacity. He is having trouble, however, because other states, seeing Delaware’s
successes, have started competing for the subway cars, which New York provides free. Crisscrossing over the reef,
commercial pot fishermen keep getting their lines tangled with those of smaller hook-and-reel anglers, and the rising
tension has led the state to ask federal marine officials to declare the area off limits to large commercial fishermen.
As the reef has become more popular, theft and sabotage of fishing traps and pots has more than doubled in the last
several years, said Captain David Lewis of the Delaware Bay Launch Service.

“People now don’t just steal the fish inside the pots out here, they’ve started stealing the pots, too,” he said. The
reef, named after the famous Redbird subway cars of New York, supports more than 10,000 angler trips annually,
up from fewer than 300 in 1997. It has seen a 400-fold increase in the amount of marine food per square foot in the
last seven years, according to state data.

Tinsman said his department was doing everything it could to expand capacity, noting that last year, when subway
cars were unavailable, he sank a 92-year-old tugboat and the YOG-93, a decommissioned Navy tanker built in 1945
for the planned invasion of Japan. Fifty subway cars are due this month, he said. “The secret is out, I guess,” said
Michael Zacchea, the Metropolitan Transit Authority official in charge of getting rid of old New York subway cars.
Delaware’s prospects for expanding the reef look grim, Zacchea added, because the state of New York has said it wants
all of the city’s retired subway cars once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers updates the state’s reef permit this summer.
Zacchea said he would soon stop shipments out of state, saving perhaps $2 million in transport costs. As a good-faith
gesture, the city probably will provide about 100 cars to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey before out-of-state
deliveries are halted. While New York works to get its permit in place, other states are pushing hard to get what they can
from the city, Zacchea said. Last month, for example, New Jersey, which stopped taking the cars in 2003 because of
environmental concerns, asked the city for 600 of them.

Tim Dillingham, the executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group based in Sandy Hook,
New Jersey, said that natural rock and concrete balls are far safer and more durable materials for artificial reefs. “Those
materials also cost more, and we’re sensitive to the realities of budget crunches in many states,” Dillingham said.

The American Littoral Society and other environmental groups opposed the use of the Redbird cars because they have small
levels of asbestos in the glue used to secure the floor panels and in the insulation material in the walls. State and federal
environmental officials approved the use of the Redbirds and other cars for artificial reefs in Delaware and elsewhere because
they said the asbestos was not a risk for marine life and has to be airborne to pose a threat to humans. Dillingham said his
group had pushed New Jersey to use only New York’s stainless steel cars, which are more durable and have less asbestos.
Delaware, which oversees nine artificial reef sites in state waters and five, including Red Bird Reef, in federal waters, was
the first state to get subway cars from New York, in August 2001.

In the last several years, the reefs have drawn swift, open- ocean fish, such as tuna and mackerel, that use the reefs as hunting
grounds for smaller prey. Sea bass like to live inside the cars, while large flounder lie in the silt that settles on top of the cars,
Tinsman, the Delaware official, said. States have experimented with other types of artificial reef materials, including abandoned
automobiles, tanks, refrigerators, shopping carts and washing machines. Tinsman particularly favors the newer stainless steel
subway cars to create reefs. “We call these the DeLoreans of the deep,” he said.

Subway cars in general, he said, are roomy enough to invite certain fish, too heavy to shift easily in storms, and durable enough
to avoid throwing off debris for decades.“The one problem I see with them,” Tinsman said, “is that just like the DeLoreans, there
are only a limited number.”