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Politics & Government

USS Radford Ready For Final Mission

The 583-foot former Navy destroyer is tentatively scheduled to be sunk off the coasts of New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware this week, becoming the largest ship reefed off the Atlantic Coast.

For more than 25 years, the USS Arthur W. Radford and her crew served the United States, providing support to other Navy vessels at sea and to U.S. troops in other parts of the globe.

This week, eight years after she was decommissioned, the former USS Radford will begin her newest and last deployment, becoming a 583-foot haven for divers, anglers and marine life 26 miles southeast of the New Jersey coast.

The Radford may mark the end of an era, as it may become the last Navy ship turned into an artificial reef. Due to rising prices for scrap metal, the Navy has shelved the reefing program in favor of recycling and selling the various metals, which often include brass and expensive alloys.

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It’s taken 14 months to prepare the ship for this week’s final voyage, which the contractor preparing the ship, American Marine Group, has tentatively set for Wednesday. If the weather is uncooperative, the sinking will be on Thursday on the Del-Jersey-Land Inshore Reef, a site 26 miles equidistant from the inlets of Cape May, NJ, Indian River, Del., and Ocean City, Md., as part of a cooperative regional effort to enhance fishing and diving opportunities for New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

Because the ocean bottom off the Atlantic Coast is a generally flat, sandy bottom, artificial reefs have become a popular way to create structure that draws marine life – and improves fishing.

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Del-Jersey-Land Reefs

New Jersey’s artificial reef program, the largest in the nation, began in 1984. It was the brainchild of Bill Figley, who was a fisheries biologist for the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Fish and Wildlife until he retired in December 2005.

It was Figley, one of the top artificial reef experts in the nation, who helped choose the sites for the Del-Jersey-Land reefs (there’s an offshore regional reef, as well), in conjunction with officials from Delaware and Maryland. In 2006, the site was approved and received the permits needed to be used for sinking large ships and other materials to create artificial reefs.

Especially ships the size of the ex-USS Radford.

The Radford isn’t the largest Navy ship to be sunk. In May 2006, the former USS Oriskany was sunk off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico, the first Navy ship to be reefed. The 888-foot vessel is now nicknamed the Great Carrier Reef, and within two years of its sinking was heavily colonized by all sorts of marine life, from plants and mussels to bottom-dwelling, structure-loving fish. It is considered one of the top 10 sites in the world for recreational divers.

That is the fate and the future that is hoped for the Radford, according to Hugh Carberry, who succeeded Bill Figley as New Jersey’s artificial reef program coordinator. Extensive work has been done to turn the Radford into what Carberry believes will be a world-class diving and fishing destination.

For starters, miles and miles of wiring, thousands of pieces of electronics and hundreds of other items – from sailors’ bunks and lockers to the stoves in the kitchen and the dryers in the laundry room to the turbines that powered the vessel through the water – had to be removed.

Watertight doors – dozens of them – had to be taken off their hinges. Openings the size of a garage door had to be cut into the decks and through the walls of the ship, and edges rounded off as a protection to divers.

And anything that could possibly be considered a contaminant had to be removed.

Fortunately, because the Radford was built significantly later than the Oriskany – which was loaded with toxic substances including wires covered with PCB-laden sheaths – the challenges of cleaning the Radford were reduced, according to Tim Mullane, head of the American Marine Group.

'Cleanest Ship' to be Reefed

The process of preparing the Radford began in June 2010, when the state of Delaware took title to the Radford from the Navy. Delaware is the lead state on the project, but all three states paid a share of the $945,000 that it’s costing to prepare the ship. New Jersey’s share was paid by a grant from the Ann E. Clark Foundation. The Navy is paying a portion of the project’s costs, as well.

Once the states took possession, the ship was then brought to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where Mullane and his employees set to work. In addition to cleaning out the interior, they had to remove several feet of superstructure from the top of the ship to ensure there is a minimum clearance of 65 feet of water. Carberry said struts have been welded onto the ship to ensure she rests upright on the bottom, creating maximum surface area. Once deployed, the ship should last 100 years on the ocean floor, he said.

The cleanup work was completed in the late spring, leaving certification and approvals from the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard to move forward with the sinking.

The approvals from the EPA, which is headed by Lisa P. Jackson, have taken the longest, Mullane said, because the EPA continued to request the same data repeatedly. Jackson was head of New Jersey’s DEP and gave the approval for New Jersey to pursue more New York subway cars to add to those already deposited on the state’s 15 artificial reef sites.

“This is the cleanest ship that’s ever been reefed,” Mullane said.

The final approvals were received in the first week of August, and the sinking date hastily arranged to take advantage of a projected window of calm seas that will enable a large crowd to watch the sinking – both from private vessels and from a ferry chartered from the Cape May-Lewes fleet specifically for the event.

Among the dignitaries invited to the event are hundreds of former crewmen who served on the Radford during her 25 years of military service. They will be there to say farewell to an old friend, one beginning a new mission that will continue long after those who watch her sink have passed on.

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