Free Republic

LONG BEACH - What's to be done with California's offshore oil rigs once they have outlived their usefulness? One option: Remove them entirely from the ocean floor and restore the marine environment to its original state, as is California's current policy. But marine biologists at Cal State Long Beach say it might make more environmental sense to actually leave at least some of each defunct oil rig intact. Although originally foreign to the marine environment, since their installation, the oil platforms have been co-opted by species of fish who have made the rigs their habitat, even preferring it in some...

FORT EUSTIS, Va. - Soldiers from the 97th Transportation Company recently returned from an unconventional mission - recovering thousands of tires from off the Florida coast in an effort to dismantle the world's largest man-made reef. The 15 Soldiers spent two and a half months off the Florida coast, conducting training operations for dive teams. They then traveled down coast to Fort Lauderdale, where they began a historic effort in environmental preservation. "In 1972, a number of organizations with good intentions dropped about two million tires in the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to build the world's largest man-made reef,"...

The Navy sent the retired USS America aircraft carrier to its final resting place at the bottom of the sea Saturday, in a closely guarded series of explosions that the Navy didn't announce until days later. The 84,000-ton, 1,048-foot warship, which served the Navy for 32 years, thus became the first U.S. carrier to be sunk since 1951, and the largest warship ever sunk. "Explosions were internal to the ship and allowed a controlled flooding," said Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman with the Naval Sea Systems Command. She declined to say where the ship now sits, except that it was 50...

Korean War-era ship to be sunk off coast of Florida. The USS Oriskany is scheduled to slip out of the Port of Corpus Christi at first light Monday, headed for Pensacola, Fla., where it will be sunk and made into an artificial reef. The Korean War-era aircraft carrier arrived in January at the port, where it was stripped of hazardous materials in preparation for its sinking. The ship had hundreds of compartments that were filled with oily substances, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and asbestos. The company that stripped the almost 900-foot long ship, Resolve Marine Services of Port Everglades, Fla., initially...