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 What do you do with 1,300 obsolete subway cars? Dump them in the ocean and call them artificial reefs, of course. April 2001
New York City Transit casts it as a win-win proposal, a way to shelter wayward flounder while saving $11 million to $13 million at the scrap yard. If the plan is approved, 1,300 cars will soon be shorn of trucks, doors, seats, motors, and ads for Dr. Zizmor's acne-scar treatment and left some 60 to 125 feet below sea level. The journey from underground to underwater follows a well-worn track into the mid-Atlantic. Anglers and divers have long cherished shipwrecks and cargo spills as fish magnets. Artificial reef programs that reproduce the effect began in 1962--the same year that the first Redbirds arrived from the St. Louis Car Company by barge, drawing fireboat escorts and ceremonial honking from a docked Queen Elizabeth. Random relics--sawed-up roadbed from Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Bridge and 550 U.S. Army tanks, among others--dot the seabed as reefs. After reading about the tank program, subway officials thought of the moribund Redbirds, says New York City Transit spokesman Al O'Leary. "After 40 years of service carrying hundreds of millions or even billions of passengers, these cars will help the environment by creating fish habitats," he says. "We think that's great." But some observers are scrutinizing what has become an increasingly varied diet of reef material. "It's a slippery slope from building reefs to what is just convenient dumping of unwanted objects," says Stan Gorski, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. "Once we have subway cars, are auto bodies next?" Critics also wonder whether the reefs increase fish populations or simply attract marine life from elsewhere--an ichthyological variant of the induced versus diverted traffic debates of highway planners. Dery Bennett, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group, asks: "Are we managing fisheries or just making fish easier to catch? The jury's out on this." Weekend anglers and scuba divers are big boosters of the program, and a group of party boat captains in New Jersey has even formed an Artificial Reef Association to sponsor future sinkings. Commercial boats are banned from trawling over the reefs, however, and the issue is divisive. "The program reallocates the fish to a different user group. That's the standpoint of a commercial fisherman," argues Jim Lovgren, who sails out of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and is on the board of the Garden State Seafood Association. Beyond the territorial spats is a philosophical question: Is it necessary to "improve" nature--in this case a consistently flat, sandy bottom? O'Leary likens before and after photographs of other fake reefs to the difference between a desert and tropical splendor. "It was like Bermuda down there," he reports. Nils Stolpe, also with the Garden State Seafood Association, wonders whether "Redbird caves" in protected forests would be as well received by the public. The reef zones are all within an easy day's sail of major recreational boat docks, says New York State Department of Environmental Conservation biologist Steve Heins, a supporter of the subway proposal. He concludes that the program is as much about fish habitat as human access and that the final ecological impact is neutral: "There is no evidence to show the reefs either expand or damage the fisheries. About all we can demonstrate is that the reefs help people to catch fish." |
