Shipwreck vegetation removal

Before this shipwreck could be removed from Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, the crew had to remove all the vegetation that was growing on it with pail and shovel. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has taken an extraordinary conservation action to remove nearly one million pounds of shipwrecks to protect some of the most pristine coral reefs in the world. Removing the shipwrecks is the first phase of coral reef restoration work at Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef National Wildlife Refuges. With the shipwrecks gone, the otherwise very healthy reefs will have the opportunity to recover from the onslaught of added nutrients and the explosion of invasive corallimorph and filamentous algae. A pontoon barge grounded at Palmyra Atoll Refuge since the 1950s, had disintegrated over decades into small shale-like pieces of rust. The most viable option for its removal involved days of back-breaking manual labor for team members as they shoveled 277,800 pounds of debris into buckets and totes.