Details have surfaced on a plan to sink a 2,800-tonne warship in the St. Lawrence River just west of Brockville, creating an artificial reef and an attraction for scuba divers.
Proponents believe the $2-million project will generate $8 million in tourism income for eastern Ontario in its first year and attract more than 6,000 divers annually.
"With the manufacturing sector and all the jobs we've lost in eastern Ontario ... one of our biggest assets is our land and our water and tourism," said Michael Ryan, a Rockport resident and member of the six-member Eastern Ontario Artificial Reef Association (EOARA) board spearheading the project.
The group will publicly unveil its plans tonight in Gananoque.
In an interview Thursday, Ryan told The Recorder and Times EOARA has made a $150,000 bid to buy the decommissioned HMCS Terra Nova, a 372-foot anti-submarine destroyer escort built in 1956.
The vessel, now docked at CFB Halifax, would be towed here and sunk in the river two miles east of Brown's Bay about 3,000 feet offshore and 130 feet down.
They've been working on the project for two years and their goal is to have the ship on the river bottom by summer 2009.
Terry Eccles, regional lands specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources office in Peterborough, said the project's scale is unique in this province.
"This would be probably the first sinking in Ontario provincial waters of such a large vessel," he said.
Aside from providing a tourism boost by building on the already booming eastern Ontario dive business, Ryan stressed the project has two other big benefits.
First, he said it will increase diver safety because of its location about one nautical mile away from St. Lawrence Seaway shipping traffic.
"We're hoping to move about 80 per cent of the diving out of the commercial shipping lane that presently happens in that area and move them to where this shipwreck will be in the small-craft channel," he explained.
Further, the new site will take the pressure off of existing historical wrecks.
"The heritage wrecks are much smaller and have deteriorated greatly over the last five years. You can go look at a wooden skeleton of a ship or you can look at a fully structured destroyer escort," he said.
Ryan said dive traffic is having a noticeable effect on the historic ships.
"If we don't get the people off the heritage ones, there won't be anything to look at in five years."
The Terra Nova has seven decks and 120 compartments to explore and will rise some 70 feet off the river bottom when sunk.
EOARA is seeking up to $1.5 million from the federal and provincial governments and has met with both Leeds-Grenville MP Gord Brown and his provincial counterpart, MPP Bob Runciman.
It's not the first time a local group has pursued the idea of bringing a warship here.
In the late 1990s, the St. Lawrence Artificial Reef Association spent some three years on an ultimately unsuccessful effort to acquire the HMCS Gatineau.
Brockville economic development officer Dave Paul said yesterday he's thrilled to see the idea rekindled.
"We're kind of excited because it's going to accomplish all of the things we were hoping to do in the early days - take the pressure off the historic wrecks and create another economic engine for the community," he said.
With its clear, even-temperature water, the St. Lawrence is rapidly becoming one of the world's hot spots for freshwater diving.
Paul's department estimates there are 50,000 "diver visits" into the region every year, representing as many as 9,000 individual divers.
"It's not just the prime tourism season, they dive year round," added Paul.
EOARA is working with Canadian Artificial Reef Consultants, an organization that has overseen 22 similar projects.
Ryan said their experience has helped as they attempt to secure approvals from provincial and federal ministries along with Seaway officials .
"Now we have enough support from all of these agencies that we don't see any hurdles and we decided to go public," said Ryan.
Eccles was careful to stress the approval process is in the very preliminary stage.
"There's a lot of evaluation that has to be done," said Eccles, including a full federal environmental assessment with public meetings.
"We want to make sure this has a clean bill of health from Environment Canada," he said.
Ryan said contaminated wiring is being stripped out of the Terra Nova by the Department of National Defence, but EOARA is responsible for removing the machinery, fluids and other components that could contain contaminants.
He said the first stage of that cleanup would happen in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, with the final three months of work done in Prescott.
Eccles would not speculate on whether the group's efforts will prove successful.
"This is fairly new for us, it's not every day that someone wants to sink a battleship in Ontario inland waters. We're going to let the environmental assessment process take its course and dictate what the final response will be, from various levels of government not just Ministry of Natural Resources," he said.
Tonight's press conference to reveal details begins at 7 o'clock at the Best Western Country Squire Inn.