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Green Jacket Shoal is a 33-acre shoal in Providence River, at the mouth of the Seekonk River. It sits between the cities of Providence and East Providence, Rhode Island. It contains a large amount of debris from a century of abandoned and wrecked ships, destroyed docks, pilings, and other remnants of the area's industrial past. Due to the dangers posed by the debris, as well as the changing character of the cities and increased public recreational use of surrounding India Point Park and Bold Point Park, a cleanup effort began in 2015 with federal, state, and non-governmental funding. An analysis of the shoal conducted prior to a cleanup found it to be Rhode Island's largest ship graveyard, with 26 separate vessels having accumulated over the years.
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History
Green Jacket Shoal is a 33-acre area of the Providence River in Providence Harbor. It sits between the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence and the Riverside section of East Providence. The Seekonk River, a tidal extension of the Providence River, continues to the northeast.
India Point, on the Providence side in the northeast part of the shoal, was Providence's first port, established in 1680. It remained a busy and prosperous waterfront area into the early 1900s, but began to decline during the Great Depression. By the 1940s, after being battered by the 1938 New England hurricane, commerce largely ceased and it turned into a scrap yard. In the 1960s and 1970s, Providence underwent a concerted beautification effort, including the transformation of India Point into a park, which opened in 1974.
The long period of neglect is still reflected in the condition of the shoal, which has accumulated a century's worth of debris. Remnants of destroyed docks, pilings, a dry dock, shipwrecks, abandoned ships, and other structures stick out of the water in many places around the shoal, owing to many years of natural disasters and economic hardship.
As the character of the area moved away from its industrial past, and with increased public use of the water and its surroundings via India Point Park and Bold Point Park, the detritus has come to be a noted source of urban blight and significant safety concern for anyone using the water.
Ship graveyard
Prior to a major 2015 cleanup effort, the Rhode Island Sea Grant funded a study of the debris in Green Jacket Shoal. According to marine archaeologist David Robinson of the University of Rhode Island, the shoal holds 26 shipwrecks, making it the state's largest ship graveyard. Fifteen of the wrecks are barges, six are steamboats, and six are sailing ships. Two are well known steamboats from the late 1800s and early 1900s: the Bay Queen and the Mount Hope, passenger boats measuring 182 feet and 193 feet, respectively.
Robinson cites two reasons the site accumulated so many ships: "location and infrastructure". While the shoal was shallow enough to be difficult for many ships to travel through, its place in the busy harbor made it a convenient place to dump unwanted ships. The shoal was also home to ship maintenance facilities, including a dry dock, making it easy to recover anything of value before they were discarded.
Robinson describes the graveyard as not junk but "an archaeological site of some significance ... the last gasp of the merchant sailing fleet and the use of the bay as a playground for Rhode Islanders."
Cleanup
Clean Bays, a non-profit organization based in Middletown, Rhode Island, developed a technique for clearing underwater debris. It is based on the Aqualogger, a ship designed by Maine-based company Deadhead Lumber to recover valuable underwater timber. Clean Bays modified the design by equipping it with an underwater chainsaw which can drop down to cut pieces of wood from larger structures. By chopping up debris into smaller parts, it can be easier to bring them to shore, but importantly, it also does not dig up potentially harmful sediments like using more forceful pulling or dragging methods could. The technique was piloted near Bold Point Park in summer 2014, with a grant from the Schmidt Family Foundation's 11th Hour Racing project.
In 2015, Clean Bays removed two old barges from the shoal, and in 2014 and 2015, it received state and federal funding, through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to pursue a year-long project to clean up not just Green Jacket Shoal but 350 acres of the Providence River and Seekonk River. For the larger project, the organization modified its own ships to function like the Aqualogger, rather than make arrangements to use it again. Some of the debris with historic value is planned to be left submerged.
According to U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who supported the project, "This is kind of an effort at reclaiming the Seekonk River and the northern tip of the Bay from long-gone industrial uses and making them appropriate for the kind of residential and recreational uses that could be a real gift to the cities if it were made a more appealing amenity."