Wrath of the Hudson
A recent news article I found described the chilling tale of a man, who without the help of a New York firefighter, would have lost his life to the waters of the mighty Hudson. The twenty three year old was spotted just before midnight and luckily was rescued by a John Rizzo of the FDNY. Insured by a harness and rope, Rizzo located the victim and pulled him to safety.
Reading this article revealed to me a more dangerous side of the Hudson that I had failed to recognize. Although many of our readings have described the Hudson as a beautiful wonder of nature, I was reminded by this article of the danger inherrent in natural forces and made me consider the Hudson as something much more sinister. The thought of someone drowning in the Hudson can portray it as a vengeful force waiting to lash out at the beings that threaten its purity. If the Hudson could forgive I wonder if it would ever express these sentiments to mankind after the years of abuse and burden we have forced upon it. Either way the Hudson is a powerful and merciless body of water. I now better appreciate its power and shudder in knowing that it would take a life regardless of an individual's political views or feelings about the river itself.
posted by MattFell @ 1:54 PM
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Here's a NYT article about mapping of shipwrecks:
Hudson Shipwrecks Found, but No Loose Lips
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By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: December 18, 2002
Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the last 400 years or more. Not just some of them, or most of them, but -- astonishingly -- all of them, except for a few that may have been disturbed by dredging.
The ghostly images provide a record of collisions and carelessness and storm-tossed fate -- most of it previously unrecorded and utterly unknown -- from the days of sail and steam through the diesel tugs and tankers on the river today. Altogether, more than 200 possible wrecks, spread out over 140 miles from the southern tip of Manhattan to Troy, have been identified.
But don't ask where the wrecks are. It's a state secret.
The sonar maps are the unexpected byproduct of a state-financed project to map the river's bottom for habitat and pollution-abatement studies, and because of the thoroughness of the research mandate -- every square foot of river deeper than six feet was scanned -- scientists feel confident that they missed almost nothing.
But the sonar maps do not just locate the wrecks. They pinpoint them with the accuracy that only satellites and global-positioning technology can achieve. And that level of precision, say state officials who have stamped the maps ''confidential'' and barred their publication, is precisely the problem. Centuries of maritime history, they say, would be up for grabs by salvagers and collectors before the state -- which claims ownership over everything on the river's bottom -- could even know what was at risk.
''We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly,'' said Mark L. Peckham, a historic preservation coordinator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which led a team earlier in December to begin assessing the first of the sites. State officials allowed a reporter and photographer to see the maps and accompany the research team on the condition that specific depths of the wrecks and other clues about their locations not be published.
''These are important resources for understanding New York's history and we really need to do the responsible thing,'' Mr. Peckham said.
Some of the images are definitely hull-shaped; others are simply vague rectangular or oval lumps, entombed by decades or centuries of mud. Of the handful that have been tested so far for metallic content using a towed magnetometer, some have indicated the likely presence of an engine; others -- perhaps the oldest of the old -- show almost no metal.
''This is like going into your grandmother's attic, which you thought was full of junk, and finding it's actually a museum,'' said Robin E. Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has led the mapping team.
Archaeologists say that while many of the wrecks probably have little historic significance -- several overturned barges, for example, have already been identified by their distinctive outline -- the likelihood is high that the river will yield at least a few long-held secrets.
What appears to be a largely intact 19th-century sailing sloop -- something that historians and sailors have hungered after for years and never found -- has been located in Haverstraw Bay, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, for instance, and the suspected remains of a half-dozen Revolutionary War vessels scuttled in 1777 have been tentatively identified farther north.
The surveys have also turned up more mysterious structures, including a series of submerged walls more than 900 feet long that scientists say are clearly of human construction. They say the walls are probably 3,000 years old because that was the last time the river's water levels were low enough to have allowed construction on dry land.
''I think there are going to be really significant findings,'' said Warren Riess, a research associate professor of history and marine sciences at the University of Maine who has been asked by the state to help assess the sites. ''A lot will be uninteresting too, but that's O.K.; that's science.''
Because the Hudson was never much of a pirate's nest or a conduit to gold and silver mining country, historians and maritime experts do not expect any lost chests of doubloons. The ships of the Hudson were the working stiffs of their day, and even after New York became the nation's busiest port in the mid-19th century, the river's cargo was predominantly still the stuff of workaday capitalism: coal, furs, wood and iron. Many of the boats that sank were never even recorded, except perhaps on some merchant's ledger sheet. But some experts say that that humble portrait of ordinary life is perhaps the real potential value of the data.
In 1870, for example, a severe storm in Haverstraw Bay sent as many as 10 boats to the bottom. Their cargo? Tons and tons of bricks. Mr. Peckham said he thought, on the basis of old newspaper accounts, that the sunken sloop was from that lost fleet.
''People recorded the lost warships and the special ships, but these would have been the mundane type of ships that no one recorded. They didn't bother,'' Professor Riess said. ''I think the possibility of finding something that no one has seen before -- a type of vessel that we have no written records about -- is very high.''
People also should not expect haunting photographs, like the ones made famous at sites of deep-ocean wrecks like the Titanic, because for much of the time, in much of the Hudson, the visibility is only about two inches because of the concentrations of marine life and mud. On an unusually pristine day, divers might be able to see to the end of their arms -- never farther.
That is also, perhaps, why many of the wrecks have not been found, even ones that sank in water only 30 to 40 feet deep. Fast currents and heavy river traffic also make diving or salvage work at the sites treacherous -- another fact that worries state officials, who say that publishing the locations could attract recreational divers who are not familiar with the river and its dangers.
Figuring out what is best for science is not so easy either. Dr. Bell of the mapping team said state officials first suggested that she leave the spaces blank where the wreck sites were found. But a blank spot on a map otherwise filled with numbers about depths and sediment would probably itself be seen as a signal that something had turned up, she said. It was then suggested that numbers be made up to fill the blank spaces.
''As a scientist, that really gave me the heebie-jeebies,'' she said. ''You don't make up numbers.''
So for now, the publication of the maps is suspended, though state officials say that their goal is to open all the documents to the public eventually and put the maps on the Internet.
''The project we're starting is to come up with a method of assessing the significance of the sites and what level of protection they require,'' said Frances F. Dunwell, a special assistant for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, which paid for the mapping under the $186 million Hudson River Estuary Plan, announced in 1996 by Gov. George E. Pataki. ''The reason we're doing this is so we can publish the maps.''
State officials in charge of the historical investigation say they have no plans to raise any of the ships, partly because of the huge cost and logistical issues involved, but also because in many cases river bottom mud, which has almost no oxygen, is a nearly perfect preservative. Professor Riess, who has dived to and explored Revolutionary War-era ships in northern New England, said that on those dives, he found cloth, leather, even food -- including potatoes and blueberries -- that had been held in stasis by the mud for two centuries or more.
''The potato fell apart as soon as you touched it, but it was still there,'' he said.
Professor Riess was unable to dive to any of the new sites during the first week of the historical analysis because of weather and equipment problems. And the winter weather, he said, now makes it unlikely that he will be able to dive again until spring.
But hope runs high. The scans in December with a magnetometer showed that the suspected sloop in Haverstraw Bay, whether it turns out to be from the lost fleet of 1870 or not, showed very little metal content, supporting the belief that it was indeed a sailing vessel.
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