For Thom Dietmeyer, a retired naval officer, standing again on the bridge of his old ship was a dream come true, even if he was 70 feet below the surface of the ocean. “I knew exactly where I was going as soon as I got down there,” he said, recalling the dive, which took place on the wreck of an aircraft carrier called the Oriskany. The U.S.S. Oriskany, known as the Mighty-O, was commissioned in 1950 and served in Korea and Vietnam. The ship was sunk by the U.S. Navy in May 2006 under a pilot program to convert decommissioned vessels into artificial reefs. At 44,000 tons, it is by far the largest vessel ever sunk to make a reef. The Navy currently holds 59 ships in inactive status, a number it hopes to reduce by as many as 20 over the next decade. Most will be dismantled and turned into scrap, but several will most likely become artificial reefs along the nation's coastline, and the response to the Oriskany, the Navy says, has been encouraging. “There's definitely an enthusiasm for this,” said Glen Clark of the Navy's Inactive Ships Program. “There's actually more interest than we have ships.” The potential economic benefits of sinking ships for reefs are significant. A report from the University of West Florida says that the sinking of the Oriskany generated nearly $4 million for Pensacola and Escambia County in 2007. But making reefs of Navy ships comes with serious environmental challenges. The Navy spent $20 million to clean the Oriskany, but left an estimated 700 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, on the ship, mainly in wiring and bulkhead insulation. Some ecologists warned that the sinking of the Oriskany would unnecessarily risk introducing PCBs into the food chain. The Navy worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to create special guidelines allowing the PCBs to stay, and a State of Florida study is under way to determine whether the chemicals are entering the environment. Meanwhile, the wreck is being dived and fished nearly every day. Seventy feet down, the Oriskany's navigation tower is teeming with prickly sea urchins and crusty barnacles. Giant barracuda prowl the tower's empty windows. Thirty-eight species of fish have been seen at the wreck.
