What lies beneath

Port Authority spending $180M to combat tiny shipworns ravaging NJ, NY wharves

By: Colleen Wilson
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... Among the biggest threats facing the commercial wharves lining Newark bay and New York Harbor can hardly be seen - yet the resulting destruction to Port Authority infrastructure is of epic proportions.
..... This living menace has many aliases: Marine borer, shipworm and, most recently, naked clam. These underwater bivalves are wreaking havoc on the timber pilings that support the wharves overseen by the Port authority of New York and New Jersey.
..... So the agency's board recently approved $180 million over five years to replace or fortify 1,700 of nearly 100,000 support beams deemed a priority.
..... Eventually, the agency - or in some cases tenant terminal companies - will replace the timber with steel pilings or temporary encase it with cement.
..... The marine borers have only returned to the harbors of New York and New Jersey in the last 10 years or so - and, ironically, it;s because of the improved water quality caused by the Clean water Act of 1972.
..... Before getting board approval for the replacement project, bethann Rooney, director of ports for the Port authority, hoisted the remnants of a timber piling that fell victim to the marine borer. she decried to the board how a strong, slid wooden beam 10 inches in diameter became a fragile and lagged stump laced with tunnel tracks from awry, hung animal.
..... Some areas of the piers are now bing held up with support timbers "that are down to a toothpick in diameter," Rooney said. "We'll replace all of those piles whose structural stability has disintegrated, and that will bring us eight to 15 years of life on each one of those members that's replaced. that will buy us the time that we need - and our tenants need - to completely replace the piers."
..... Reuben Shipway, a lecturer at the University of Plymouth in England who has studied marine borers around the world, said they have been extremely disruptive throughout human history.
..... "These animals destroyed [Christopher] Columbus' fleet on his third voyage to the Americas, so they've literally changed the course of humanity," Shipway said. "Ever since humans started using wooden structures to navigate, to trade, to explore, these animals have caused this havoc, and millennia later we're still facing these issues. It's pretty incredible."
..... They start out as tiny larvae, a third of a millimeter in size, that settle on a piece of wood and bore a tiny incision where they will live and eat, often undetected. Some researchers have reported them to reach over 6 feet in length, Shipway said. Their lifespan is around 2 years, but it varies based on the species and the amount of wood available to them.
..... Their destruction is known around the world.
..... According too a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service leaflet, records show that as far back as 412 B.C., "arsenic and sulfur mixed with oil was used on wooden structures to prevent shipworm invasion."
..... During Columbus' time, bottoms of ships were covered with a mixture of tallow and pitch in hope of discouraging shipworms," it said.
..... In the reign of Henry VI during the mid-1400s, "a ship sent on a voyage of discovery records the sue of land sheathing around the kell to keep out worms 'which many time pearseth and eateth through the strongest oak that is,'" according to the leaflet.
..... In the 1920s at the Port of San Francisco, the teredo naval is species - which Shipway predicts is the one attacking the Port Authority's timbers - caused Bay Area structures to collapse int the water.
..... More recently, the same species has been feasting on the remains of the sunken "Eneavous" ship captained by James Cook in 1778 that settled off the coast of Rhode Island.
..... "Cook and the 'endeavor' - that was the world's first scientific expedition, first circumnavigations of the glob ... this is a monumental feat of human ingenuity and exploration ... and this vessel is really vulnerable to getting eaten by these animals," Shipway said.
..... Despite their calamitous reputation, marine borers do some good.
..... There are countless pieces of wood floating in harbors around the world that could disrupt waterways or vessels but are instead being demolished by marine borers. They are, in turn, recycling that wood to cerate habitat for other animals and boosting biodiversity.
..... Other species are eating that wood and converting the carbon locked in the wood into energy that eventually gets transfered throughout the ecosystem - skilled that few animals have evolved to do, Shipway said.
..... Shipway and his colleagues have also recently published research that proves these marine animals can be farmed. Shipworms, dubbed "naked clams" to make them sound more delectable, are eaten as a delicacy in such places as the Philippines.

Pilot program for global economies

..... Before the clean water Act of 1972, "you could dump anything and everything into the water," said Rooney, the ports director.
..... "Raw sewage went into the Hudson River, and the harbor chemical companies dumped dioxins and toxins into the water - and the critters couldn't survive in that environment.
..... "As the water got cleaner, the bugs were able to flourish," she said.
..... Evidence of their resurgence was noticeable because of concrete splitting on wharves, or where sinkholes appeared .
..... Each piling is inspected every three years and measured for degradations . During one of those inspections divers found a piling so disintegrated that the Port authority had to close the wharf in September 2021 because it could no longer hold any weight.
..... The agency received a $32 million federal grant through the Port Infrastructure Development Program in November [2023] to completely replace that beth.
..... To advance their inspections of thousands of piles, the Port Authority turned to the Innovation Hub, a department at the agency that allocates money for pilot programs using new technology.
..... In hits case, remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, are being used above the water and below it to take thousands of pictures and collect date in nanoseconds that would otherwise take divers significantly more time to do with underwater cameras whose images then have to be downloaded before the information could be analyzed.
..... The ROV data, combined with artificial intelligence, could instantly create analyses predicting which pilings are more rapidly deteriorating than others.
..... Rooney said the pilot to test out the ROVs was pitched as a security program, but she asked if they could include routine inspections. The company hired to conduct the pilot, Netherlands-based AquaSmartXL, agreed to include the inspections and last month [11/2023] came to the Port Authority to try out its technology for the first time in the U.S.
..... "Our engineering department will be looking at, 'OK, what did we get from the ROV versus what did we get form the human,'" Rooney said.
..... This will provide valuable information to the ports of New York and New Jersey - which battle for first - and second-busiest ports in the country, making them a major diver of the national economy - but also for policymakers and marine business internationally, Shipway said.
..... The economic damage shipworns cause "is really significant globally, but we don't have many modern-day case studies that out a financial figure on it," he said.
..... Cleaner water, climate change and warming waters could expand the spawning season of shipworns and rapidly increase their population - exacerbating their destructive power. "It's a confluence of factors that mean economic distastes," Shipway said.

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