As a tax paying citizens, I urge you to protest NOAA's gross mismanagement overseeing the U.S.S. Monitor Sanctuary. The site was dramatically damaged by NOAA's neglect while allowing the wreck to remain in situ, and further by their abhorrently wasteful pet excavations, where tax payers financed multi-million dollar projects that could have been financed privately with less destruction.
NOAA has unreasonably restricted public access to the site to control and prevent damage to the historic site. In fact, the evidence of the deterioration of the wreck was predicted and proven during the first photographic expedition by privately funded members of Gary Gentile's Photographic Project in July of 1990. The final decimation inflicted by NOAA's misguided leadership was the death blow to the site where tax payers financed the unwarranted removal of the foundational turret structure. The wreck immediately collapsed after the gutting and today is no longer a worthy photographic site. What once was an attractive dive site for future photographic and historical research divers has been ripped to shreds by a power hungry controlling few of NOAA's unrestricted pontificating minority. NOAA's failure to manage has wasted obscene amounts of unneccessary tax moneys with no warranted benefit.
If we don't complain to our representatives, seven years to get a permit will be the norm... to dive any wrecks. There should be unrestricted access to all these sites and NO PERMITS. NOAA is not saving anything except their jobs... They are gaining public sanction to destroy and regulate more wrecks like the Monitor.
Write your representatives and tell them how NOAA is wasting excessive tax dollars and destroying the economy of fisheries, boating, marine industry and diving industry.
Note: This will include the New Jersey coastline with no limit on the expansion area.
I strongly urge you to sign the petition against NOAA's proposal for it's Expansion Action Plan and gross waste of tax payers money.
https://www.change.org/petitions/noaa-and-the-us-senate-stop-the-abuse-of-noaa-and-the-monitor-national-marine-sanctuary-mnms?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=share_button_modal
Good Wreck Diving!
Atlantic Diver