SS United States sunk to create largest artificial reef

We want to turn our attention now down to the Gulf Coast. The weather's pretty good down there right now. Did you catch yesterday the SS United States as they were trying to sink it to make it an artificial reef? Yeah, I think that's really cool, too. I feel like it's really exceptionally cool for scuba divers. I'm excited to see in the upcoming years what that reef turns into. Obviously, it's a hunk of metal in the bottom of the Gulf as it continues to sink. It'll be interesting to see the photos after, you know, wildlife comes back to it. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting. But it was only supposed to take 45 minutes, but it ended up taking a lot longer than that. And so Asher Red is joining us now live from Miramar Beach. I think that's the 30A area. Asher, I appreciate you joining us. You were a mile away from where this thing was going down yesterday. Tell us about what all happened. Well, Tyler, it was a long day, and I'll tell you, when I first got on the boat to the time I got off the boat was about 12 hours, and we were out in the Gulf for maybe eight or nine of those hours. Now, this process was only supposed to take 45 minutes. It ended up taking crews eight hours to sink the SS United States, so she surely did not go down without a fight. Now, we found out that at about 2 p.m. Central Time, which was an hour after they were supposed You're supposed to start sinking the ship. The crew did not fill two tanks. They had to fill those tanks with water to help stabilize the ship on its way down, and that took a few hours. And then every 30 minutes after that, we were told, oh, the sinking process is starting. And it clearly didn't start fast enough because we were out there until dark. It was so late that even the media boat and the conservancy boat turned around to go back to shore. We never got to see the ship sink. We did see the first bit of it, maybe the stern of the ship going down a little bit, but that's really all that we were able to see. Now, at the time that this ship was in its prime, 1952 was when it made its maiden voyage from New York to France, it was a 990-foot-long ship. It was the fastest ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and it still holds the record today of three days, 10 hours, and 40 minutes. 40 minutes, and that ocean liner now sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of America, just the top of its deck, 55 feet below the surface, so scuba divers can go down there, they can witness her history for themselves, and the crews even place plaques in and around the ship so that the scuba divers kind of have a guided tour, if you will, along the way. And so, Asher, I understand you spoke with a former passenger who spent years trying to save the ship. What was it like for him to watch all of this go down and be able to see the ship he was on now become something new for sea life? Mm-hmm. Yeah, the guy you're referring to was eight years old when he was on the SS United States. I talked with him yesterday, and he said he remembers how powerful the engines felt once it was going past the Statue of Liberty and they were finally in the open sea. Now, I did talk with him about how he felt of the SS United States going below the ocean, kind of going back into marine life, and he said that it's emotional, but he thinks it was better than the other option that they had, which was for the SS United States. to go to a scrapyard. They didn't want that to happen. They spent years trying to make it a museum, but they just couldn't get the funds for it. So now they're trying to deal with the fact that it's at the bottom of the sea. It has all of the marine life around it. It serves a completely different purpose. Now, I will say the part about the museum is here in Florida on the Panhandle, just a few miles from where I'm at in Destin, they're trying to make some sort of visitor center for the SS United States. So the smokestacks... ...that the S.S. United States is so known for, they had to remove those to allow ships to, you know, clear when they go over the ship as it's underwater, but they're going to use those smokestacks... at this visitor center to kind of be the central point. So we could start to see something like that coming out here in the next few years. It would be a huge tourist attraction on the Panhandle. Yeah, Asher, like you, we both work down in Mobile, which includes Fort Walton Beach and Destin in the markets we both used to work at. So you're familiar with that area just like me. That is a place that a lot of people love to go down to, to be on the water, be on the Gulf. And this is going to be a nice tourist destination for people who want to scuba dive. And do we know how long it's going to take? Until divers are going to start being able to go down there. Well, if everything went according to plan yesterday, which it totally did not, I would say the tourism told me that it should be today that scuba divers were able to go down. Now, we do know that there were six cameras on board the ship when it went down. We know that professional scuba divers who work with the county have to go down and get those cameras so we can get the footage. So we'll start to see one of the biggest things was the ship kind of took a turn before it sunk. It kind of went down on its side and not straight down like it was supposed to. We'll see how that ship is oriented to make sure it's safe as scuba divers go down. And real quick, you mentioned the Mobile tie to this. So Mobile, Alabama is where that ship, the SS United States, was cleaned before they brought it out to sea. They had to get all that hazardous material out of there. They had to get the paint out. They had to remove the smokestacks. On Friday, the USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is going to be in Mobile. Those two ships could not fit in the same port together, so now that the SS United States is out of the way, it makes enough room for the USS Enterprise to come in to start being dismantled at the Mars facility there. Well, Asher Redd, live in Miramar Beach, Florida, I really appreciate your time and breaking all this down for us. Really cool to witness and going to be a great tourist attraction for people for years and decades to come. Asher, thanks so much.