8 ms·

Sinking 1K NYC subway cars in the Atlantic to create a reef didn’t go as planned

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Overtonwindow 5y ago
"Brightliners were made of stainless steel....but this worked against them underwater." "the project failed for two reasons: first, because the trains’ envelopes were spot-welded, which formed a thin layer between the two metals that led to corrosion. Second, because the corrugated pattern made it easier for undercurrent waves to “grab on to” and further pull the stainless skin apart"
burneracc 5y ago
flipbrad 5y ago
It strikes me as extraordinary that we dump so much metal - isn't it easier to reprocess, than to extract new iron ore?
- blamazon 5y ago
  Related cool table: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-of-materials.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-... Various industrial metals are recycled all the time at scrapyards across the world. For example, school buses in USA are commonly reprocessed at end of life. The problem is that it's a low-margin business in most places and it quickly can become economically unfeasible. 1,000 subway cars is a tall order for any scrap yard with a lot of 'overhead' involving specialized disassembly that would eat that margin real quick, I presume.
- rr808 5y ago
  Exactly, the other part is it should be easy to transport by rail too!
Stevvo 5y ago
Really obnoxious web design there; why would I want an auto playing video of unrelated celebrity dribble that you can't close and sticks in place as you scroll covering 1/3rd of the screen?
blamazon 5y ago
It went exactly as planned for MTA. They got rid of their problem dirt cheap!
- mbg721 5y ago
  Not only that, but presumably they can now also sink replacement buses, since the subway cars aren't working.
- dgrin91 5y ago
  It wasn't cheap. They didn't 'just' dump it in the ocean. They had to clean & strip out the cars first so that it wouldn't be toxic to the fish.
tartoran 5y ago
Wouldn’t it have been easier to test this with a few cars in different places rather than dump 1000?
taubek 5y ago
If those were meant to also serve as spots for scuba divers I guess that they are not safe? A thousand cars seems like a large number so I just went to check how many subway cars does NYC has in operation. Here is what Wikipedia says "As of November 2016, the New York City Subway has 6418 cars on the roster."[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway
specialist 5y ago
Phew. I assumed this was gonna be another catastrophe. Like Osborne Reef, where some yahoos dumped TWO MILLION car tires into the ocean and just hoped for the best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef First try a little, see what happens, then maybe do more. Someone should have dropped 5 subway cars in. Then checked back in a few years. Worse than scream-and-leap policy making is the utter refusal to do any kind of follow up assessment. (Perhaps you've heard of the opioid crisis? Best intentions leading straight to Hell.) -- Tangent, from the OC: > ...artificial reefs were designed to boost recreational fishing, which in 2011 generated a whopping $15 billion in state and federal taxes. We should ban commercial fisheries. In my state, every salmon caught by a commercial fisherman costs the taxpayers $1. Whereas anglers make the state money. If this doesn't make sense to you, you simply don't understand Freedom Markets™.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Could you clarify what it means by "commercial fisherman costs the taxpayers $1"? The point of government is not to extract maximum rent from the tenant/citizens, so if your complaint is that fisherman are not paying the government enough to use common resources which the federal government is managing... you're thinking about the government wrong. (That salmon, fwiw, produces more than $1 in utility to the downstream consumers, which is the whole point of farming or fishing, or any economic exchange at all.)
  - specialist 5y ago
    > ...you're thinking about the government wrong. Am I? A fraction of the revenue from anglers are reinvested in the fisheries. My state earns > $6bn year from the outdoors (fishing, hunting, birding, ecotourism). In my ledger, that's just smart business. > ...That salmon, fwiw, produces more than $1 in utility to the downstream consumers. Or you could pay $1 more for that delicious salmon yourself. Why am I bankrolling someone else's decadence? Let the Invisible Hand work it's magic. Without market distorting subsidies. Said another way, if BLM, Fish & Wildlife, Mining, etc agencies were run like "businesses", vs cash giveaways to campaign donors, then everyone would benefit, vs just some select corporations.
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
TLDR; Hindsight is a bitch
savoytruffle 5y ago
It did not damage the environment much because they were already stripped. They just didn't last as long as thought!
lnyng 5y ago
This reminds me of Splatoon 2’s deep sea metro. Can’t help laughing lol
specialp 5y ago
This is still not bad for the ocean or environment. Yes, they seemed to have decayed faster than thought but things on the bottom of the ocean even if they are a pile of rubble are good for fish havens. The whole area on the continental shelf south of Long Island is mostly featureless sand. Small fish need places to hide out and that brings bigger fish to the area. I fish in the area. So perhaps they might not be as good as hoped but it is still good.
Aardwolf 5y ago
> Back then, artificial reefs were designed to boost recreational fishing, which in 2011 generated a whopping $15 billion in state and federal taxes. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but in Europe I sometimes see people recreational fishing on the piers at the beach for example and I can't imagine how this activity could generate 15 billion in taxes. If the 3 mentioned states together have 20.4 million people, then every inhabitant on average is paying $700 in taxes for recreational fishing. What's going on there, how many people have this hobby and how much are they paying for it?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  The 15 Billion is a clickable link to the full breakdown. They give retail sales of recreational fishing gear as nearly 50 billion per year which all has sales tax as well as the fishing licenses themselves. They also make some assumptions about taxes from related jobs. They also have a "ripple effect" number which gets really deep into the "make it look good for what we want to say" territory and are an organization for fishing/conservation so take it all with a grain of salt. I don't quite buy the full $15 billion/year amount but quite a few billion per year seems immediately reasonable.
  - posterboy 5y ago
    Fishing gear, + boats, travel, accomodations, sporting events, etc.
- nkurz 5y ago
  It's certainly possible that the number is simply wrong, but it seems to be sourced from this publication: https://asafishing.org/uploads/2011_ASASportfishing_in_America_Report_January_2013.pdf https://asafishing.org/uploads/2011_ASASportfishing_in_Ameri... (adding State and Federal totals at the bottom of Page 8). $15 Billion of taxes on $50 Billion of total expenditures does seem high, but not totally implausible. The right doubt might be whether there are really $50 Billion of annual expenditures on Recreational Fishing in the US. I suspect they are double counting a lot of things: if one goes fishing once on a vacation, they might be counting the entire travel cost of the vacation as a fishing expenditure. Edit: I said "seemed to be" because I was proud to have found that page on my own. But as another poster pointed out, that page is directly linked from the article so there is no doubt it is the source.
rolleiflex 5y ago
I'm very confused, the article says: 'The MTA had good reason to believe the program would succeed. Just a few years prior, it had dropped more than 1,000 Redbird trains in the ocean. They remain on the ocean floor to this day, in part because they were made of carbon steel, which helps prevent corrosion. By comparison, Brightliners were made of stainless steel. When the subway cars debuted in 1964, they were a mechanical and aesthetic innovation. The stainless steel made the train cars lighter on the tracks, but this worked against them underwater.' Few questions here. First, isn't carbon steel ... steel? Steel is primarily iron and carbon, so my understanding is that carbon steel is mostly just a marketing term to have at least an adjective of some sort, just like 'aircraft grade aluminium', which is in fact one of the cheapest, bulk types of aluminium (hence use in bulk in aircraft) Second, how does regular steel fare better than stainless steel in a corrosive environment? The article says the stainless steel started to corrode from the welds, which is fair enough, but wouldn't regular steel just corrode wholesale?
- cardiffspaceman 5y ago
  I think the basis could be that the newer trains were too light to stay sunk, being made of a material that is lighter yet stronger. Also it so happens that construction details matter. The article cites corrugation, which allows panels to be lighter yet just as strong. The article also cites spot welding. You can weld together steel panels in many ways, and the article doesn't say how the Redbird cars were constructed, except there's an implication that there's no spot welding. The Titanic was made of "iron" as the dramatized architect said in the movie, but he seems to speak poetically [1][2]. The ship hasn't quite dissolved like an aspirin. [1] https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/titanic/quote_23821.html https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/titanic/quote_23821.html [2] "The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel plate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Building_and_preparing_the_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Building_and_preparing...
- skateboardCat 5y ago
  Carbon Steel is the name of "regular", non-alloy steel. And w.r.t. the SS thing, i think the carbon steel got to be thicker because of expected corrosion while the SS (that still can oxidize, albeit at a much slower rate) is significantly thinner, therefore getting disintegrated more easily. It really isn't worded very well in TFA tho, i may be misunderstanding.
lillecarl 5y ago
If the site didn't change layouts and font size 5 times while I was scrolling it might have been a pleasant read.
herbst 5y ago
This is literally the most stupid thing I've read this week. Not even believable a modern society allows something like this, and the even in recent history. I hope every single person involved is deeply ashamed > It is important that we learn from these mistakes and improve the process What process? For dumping trash in the ocean?
- oxfeed65261 5y ago
  So you have avoided reading about Web 3.0 this week? ;)
  - herbst 5y ago
    I even setup some NFTs yet nobody is buying them. Web3 is old news and Web3.js actually a cool tec :)
aluminum96 5y ago
"Artificial reefs" are typically an excuse by the tire industry to dump their toxic junk in the ocean, sometimes with public money. It's not surprising at all that other actors with large pieces of junk have caught on. What a scam.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

"Brightliners were made of stainless steel....but this worked against them underwater." "the project failed for two reasons: first, because the trains’ envelopes were spot-welded, which formed a thin layer between the two metals that led to corrosion. Second, because the corrugated pattern made it easier for undercurrent waves to “grab on to” and further pull the stainless skin apart"

burneracc 5y ago

flipbrad 5y ago

It strikes me as extraordinary that we dump so much metal - isn't it easier to reprocess, than to extract new iron ore?

blamazon 5y ago
Related cool table: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-of-materials.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-... Various industrial metals are recycled all the time at scrapyards across the world. For example, school buses in USA are commonly reprocessed at end of life. The problem is that it's a low-margin business in most places and it quickly can become economically unfeasible. 1,000 subway cars is a tall order for any scrap yard with a lot of 'overhead' involving specialized disassembly that would eat that margin real quick, I presume.
rr808 5y ago
Exactly, the other part is it should be easy to transport by rail too!

Stevvo 5y ago

Really obnoxious web design there; why would I want an auto playing video of unrelated celebrity dribble that you can't close and sticks in place as you scroll covering 1/3rd of the screen?

blamazon 5y ago

It went exactly as planned for MTA. They got rid of their problem dirt cheap!

mbg721 5y ago
Not only that, but presumably they can now also sink replacement buses, since the subway cars aren't working.
dgrin91 5y ago
It wasn't cheap. They didn't 'just' dump it in the ocean. They had to clean & strip out the cars first so that it wouldn't be toxic to the fish.

tartoran 5y ago

Wouldn’t it have been easier to test this with a few cars in different places rather than dump 1000?

taubek 5y ago

If those were meant to also serve as spots for scuba divers I guess that they are not safe? A thousand cars seems like a large number so I just went to check how many subway cars does NYC has in operation. Here is what Wikipedia says "As of November 2016, the New York City Subway has 6418 cars on the roster."[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway

specialist 5y ago

Phew. I assumed this was gonna be another catastrophe. Like Osborne Reef, where some yahoos dumped TWO MILLION car tires into the ocean and just hoped for the best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef First try a little, see what happens, then maybe do more. Someone should have dropped 5 subway cars in. Then checked back in a few years. Worse than scream-and-leap policy making is the utter refusal to do any kind of follow up assessment. (Perhaps you've heard of the opioid crisis? Best intentions leading straight to Hell.) -- Tangent, from the OC: > ...artificial reefs were designed to boost recreational fishing, which in 2011 generated a whopping $15 billion in state and federal taxes. We should ban commercial fisheries. In my state, every salmon caught by a commercial fisherman costs the taxpayers $1. Whereas anglers make the state money. If this doesn't make sense to you, you simply don't understand Freedom Markets™.

bpodgursky 5y ago
Could you clarify what it means by "commercial fisherman costs the taxpayers $1"? The point of government is not to extract maximum rent from the tenant/citizens, so if your complaint is that fisherman are not paying the government enough to use common resources which the federal government is managing... you're thinking about the government wrong. (That salmon, fwiw, produces more than $1 in utility to the downstream consumers, which is the whole point of farming or fishing, or any economic exchange at all.)
- specialist 5y ago
  > ...you're thinking about the government wrong. Am I? A fraction of the revenue from anglers are reinvested in the fisheries. My state earns > $6bn year from the outdoors (fishing, hunting, birding, ecotourism). In my ledger, that's just smart business. > ...That salmon, fwiw, produces more than $1 in utility to the downstream consumers. Or you could pay $1 more for that delicious salmon yourself. Why am I bankrolling someone else's decadence? Let the Invisible Hand work it's magic. Without market distorting subsidies. Said another way, if BLM, Fish & Wildlife, Mining, etc agencies were run like "businesses", vs cash giveaways to campaign donors, then everyone would benefit, vs just some select corporations.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

TLDR; Hindsight is a bitch

savoytruffle 5y ago

It did not damage the environment much because they were already stripped. They just didn't last as long as thought!

lnyng 5y ago

This reminds me of Splatoon 2’s deep sea metro. Can’t help laughing lol

specialp 5y ago

This is still not bad for the ocean or environment. Yes, they seemed to have decayed faster than thought but things on the bottom of the ocean even if they are a pile of rubble are good for fish havens. The whole area on the continental shelf south of Long Island is mostly featureless sand. Small fish need places to hide out and that brings bigger fish to the area. I fish in the area. So perhaps they might not be as good as hoped but it is still good.

Aardwolf 5y ago

> Back then, artificial reefs were designed to boost recreational fishing, which in 2011 generated a whopping $15 billion in state and federal taxes. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but in Europe I sometimes see people recreational fishing on the piers at the beach for example and I can't imagine how this activity could generate 15 billion in taxes. If the 3 mentioned states together have 20.4 million people, then every inhabitant on average is paying $700 in taxes for recreational fishing. What's going on there, how many people have this hobby and how much are they paying for it?

zamadatix 5y ago
The 15 Billion is a clickable link to the full breakdown. They give retail sales of recreational fishing gear as nearly 50 billion per year which all has sales tax as well as the fishing licenses themselves. They also make some assumptions about taxes from related jobs. They also have a "ripple effect" number which gets really deep into the "make it look good for what we want to say" territory and are an organization for fishing/conservation so take it all with a grain of salt. I don't quite buy the full $15 billion/year amount but quite a few billion per year seems immediately reasonable.
- posterboy 5y ago
  Fishing gear, + boats, travel, accomodations, sporting events, etc.
nkurz 5y ago
It's certainly possible that the number is simply wrong, but it seems to be sourced from this publication: https://asafishing.org/uploads/2011_ASASportfishing_in_America_Report_January_2013.pdf https://asafishing.org/uploads/2011_ASASportfishing_in_Ameri... (adding State and Federal totals at the bottom of Page 8). $15 Billion of taxes on $50 Billion of total expenditures does seem high, but not totally implausible. The right doubt might be whether there are really $50 Billion of annual expenditures on Recreational Fishing in the US. I suspect they are double counting a lot of things: if one goes fishing once on a vacation, they might be counting the entire travel cost of the vacation as a fishing expenditure. Edit: I said "seemed to be" because I was proud to have found that page on my own. But as another poster pointed out, that page is directly linked from the article so there is no doubt it is the source.

rolleiflex 5y ago

I'm very confused, the article says: 'The MTA had good reason to believe the program would succeed. Just a few years prior, it had dropped more than 1,000 Redbird trains in the ocean. They remain on the ocean floor to this day, in part because they were made of carbon steel, which helps prevent corrosion. By comparison, Brightliners were made of stainless steel. When the subway cars debuted in 1964, they were a mechanical and aesthetic innovation. The stainless steel made the train cars lighter on the tracks, but this worked against them underwater.' Few questions here. First, isn't carbon steel ... steel? Steel is primarily iron and carbon, so my understanding is that carbon steel is mostly just a marketing term to have at least an adjective of some sort, just like 'aircraft grade aluminium', which is in fact one of the cheapest, bulk types of aluminium (hence use in bulk in aircraft) Second, how does regular steel fare better than stainless steel in a corrosive environment? The article says the stainless steel started to corrode from the welds, which is fair enough, but wouldn't regular steel just corrode wholesale?

cardiffspaceman 5y ago
I think the basis could be that the newer trains were too light to stay sunk, being made of a material that is lighter yet stronger. Also it so happens that construction details matter. The article cites corrugation, which allows panels to be lighter yet just as strong. The article also cites spot welding. You can weld together steel panels in many ways, and the article doesn't say how the Redbird cars were constructed, except there's an implication that there's no spot welding. The Titanic was made of "iron" as the dramatized architect said in the movie, but he seems to speak poetically [1][2]. The ship hasn't quite dissolved like an aspirin. [1] https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/titanic/quote_23821.html https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/titanic/quote_23821.html [2] "The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel plate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Building_and_preparing_the_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Building_and_preparing...
skateboardCat 5y ago
Carbon Steel is the name of "regular", non-alloy steel. And w.r.t. the SS thing, i think the carbon steel got to be thicker because of expected corrosion while the SS (that still can oxidize, albeit at a much slower rate) is significantly thinner, therefore getting disintegrated more easily. It really isn't worded very well in TFA tho, i may be misunderstanding.

lillecarl 5y ago

If the site didn't change layouts and font size 5 times while I was scrolling it might have been a pleasant read.

herbst 5y ago

This is literally the most stupid thing I've read this week. Not even believable a modern society allows something like this, and the even in recent history. I hope every single person involved is deeply ashamed > It is important that we learn from these mistakes and improve the process What process? For dumping trash in the ocean?

oxfeed65261 5y ago
So you have avoided reading about Web 3.0 this week? ;)
- herbst 5y ago
  I even setup some NFTs yet nobody is buying them. Web3 is old news and Web3.js actually a cool tec :)

aluminum96 5y ago

"Artificial reefs" are typically an excuse by the tire industry to dump their toxic junk in the ocean, sometimes with public money. It's not surprising at all that other actors with large pieces of junk have caught on. What a scam.