Photo: Kate Geraghty
As difficult as it is to keep ships afloat, sometimes they can be devilishly hard to sink as well. At least that has been the experience of a group trying to scuttle the decommissioned HMAS Adelaide as an artificial reef and recreational diving site off the central coast of Australia. After years of lawsuits, the project is over budget by several million dollars and is facing even further delays.
Actually, the legal case was only from March to September. Six months. The extra money was partly that, and partly the cost of removing the 20,000 square metres of fibreglass (yellow insulation bats covered by canvas) which the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) rightly ruled would have ended up floating around Avoca Bay after five years. This ship was not clean to sink in March. It also had PCBs on it – the State Gov has since taken off 750kg of wiring with PCBs in it. Just as well it is hard to sink a ‘dirty’ ship.