August 4, 2002
Section: Sports
Edition: Final
Page: 15C

Memo:OUTDOORS

ANOTHER SPIEGEL GROVE? KEY WEST EYES OWN SHIP REEF
SUSAN COCKING / Herald staff/scocking@herald.com

Despite the mishaps with the recent sinking of the Spiegel Grove off Key Largo, a Key West group is proceeding with plans to deploy an even larger Navy ship 61/2 miles off the island city. Artificial Reefs of the Keys, a nonprofit group headed by Joe Weatherby, proposes to sink the 520-foot warship Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg in 140 feet of water near a marker known as ``Toppino Buoy.''

Sitting upright on the bottom, the superstructure would rise to about 40 feet from the surface, with the hope it would be accessible to all levels of divers and visible to snorkelers and glass-bottom boat riders.

Weatherby estimates the deployment will cost about $2.2 million. But there's no timetable for the sinking, and Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary superintendent Billy Causey won't guarantee that it will be permitted.

``I'm not going to say it's not going to happen, and I'm not saying it is going to happen,'' Causey said. ``I owe it to everyone to assess this appropriately and make sure that everyone has input into what goes into their national marine sanctuary.''

The problematic sinking of the Spiegel Grove has brought intensive scrutiny to the Vandenberg project. The Spiegel Grove prematurely sank upside down with its bow sticking out of the water in May, forcing about 40 volunteers to abandon ship. The salvage firm Resolve Marine Group put the ship down on the bottom on its side in June.

``Finger-pointing is going down from every direction,'' Causey said. ``Our plan is to pull everyone together from the Spiegel Grove and talk about the lessons learned.''

Causey said before the Vandenberg can be sunk, a comprehensive environmental assessment must be conducted, with plenty of opportunity for public input. He wants the project run by a professional contractor who can be held responsible if things go wrong - in sharp contrast to the Spiegel Grove sinking, which was performed by a committee mostly of volunteers.

``We are looking to set an example for the rest of the world as the people who did it right,'' Weatherby said.

Weatherby's group has conducted fish counts and studied coral adjacent to the area where the ship would be sunk. It has enlisted a professor of ocean engineering and the head of the Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia as consultants.

Michael Bruno, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., plans to do extensive preparation using a scale model of the Vandenberg in a wave tank. The model would be subjected to varying currents and winds and be drilled with holes in various configurations to see how it would go down.

Jay Straith, who has sunk 12 large ships in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, will recommend which sections of the ship should be vented and where to place shaped charges - chemical cutters that are used to demolish skyscrapers.

The object is to sink the Vandenberg quickly, with no opportunity for wind and current to turn it over.

``I am so confident that our sink team will put it on the bottom on its keel that I'm willing to ride it down as it sinks,'' Weatherby said.

The Vandenberg sits on Virginia's James River, home of the Navy's ghost fleet. It is in the custody of the U.S. Maritime Administration, which has set it aside for Key West.

The Vandenberg was commissioned in 1944 as the troop ship Gen. Harry Taylor. It evacuated troops and refugees from the South Pacific at the conclusion of World War II. During the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, it was converted into a missile tracker and renamed the Vandenberg after the father of the U.S. Air Force.

Mothballed in 1984, it came out of retirement briefly in the mid 1990s to portray a Russian spy ship in the movie Virus. Then it went back to the ghost fleet.

Weatherby said the Vandenberg was selected as an artificial reef on the basis of size and structure.

``It had to be the world's biggest, and it had to be cool looking,'' he said. ``We wanted something with a lot of relief and cool stuff to dive around.''