Since 2001, Delaware has been sinking retired New York City subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean on purpose. It’s turned into one of the state’s most successful reef-building projects ever.
The subway cars in question were retired “Redbird” cars, a fleet the MTA had been running since the 1960s and needed to get rid of as newer trains came online. Rather than scrap them, the transit agency struck a deal to hand them over to states willing to sink them offshore as artificial reef material, according to a Scientific American report on the program. The MTA reportedly saved somewhere between $11 million and $13 million in disposal costs by going this route instead of scrapping the cars conventionally.
Before any car went into the water, crews stripped out anything that could pose a hazard or float away, including seats, light fixtures, ad banners, lead paint, doors and windows — that last part specifically so divers wouldn’t get trapped inside a sunken car.
Delaware took to the idea more than most. Some 714 of the stripped-down cars were deployed off Slaughter Beach, about 16 miles offshore, forming what’s now known as Redbird Reef. The state kept the program going for years afterward, eventually placing more than 1,300 cars total across several of its reef sites before the supply of old subway cars finally ran out, according to Delaware public radio station WHYY.
Jeff Tinsman, the artificial reef program manager at the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, was the one who tracked just how well it worked. Within about seven years, he found that the reef supported dramatically more marine life than the surrounding seafloor. “When you compare the amount of food available on this reef to the natural amount, there is 400 times as much food per square foot as the sand bottom,” Tinsman said, in comments carried by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The reason, according to Tinsman, comes down to structure. “They are still three dimensional, and provide thousands and thousands of square feet of hard surface for invertebrates to live on,” he said. Mussels, oysters and other filter feeders latch onto the steel car frames, and the fish that eat them follow. “Fish such as black seabass are not fast swimmers, so need structure to provide both food and shelter,” Tinsman added.
View this post on InstagramThe program wasn’t without controversy elsewhere. When New Jersey initially signed on to take hundreds of the same subway cars, it later backed out after learning the cars contained asbestos, with environmental group Clean Ocean Action warning about the health risks of inhaling stray fibers. An EPA regional oceanographer at the time pushed back on the concern, saying any exposure risk in the water would be far too small to meaningfully affect marine life. Delaware’s program continued regardless.
More than two decades later, the steel car frames are still down there, doing a job they were never built for. However, that’s not always how these stories go. When Florida fishermen tried something similar with old tires back in 1972, the results went the opposite direction, scattering across the seafloor and damaging real reefs instead of building new ones. Subway cars, it turns out, make far better neighbors for marine life than loose tires ever did.
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