I'm Lonny Anderson. I'm with the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. I'm part
of the damage assessment team. We typically go out when a vessel runs aground and assess
the damage to the reef or seagrass beds, whatever the case may be.
Today we ended up going to Looe Key, and that's one of our more popular reefs off of Big Pine
area. And we got a report that a sailboat ran aground there and we did a biological
assessment on the reef. We did not find a whole lot of damage, thank heavens for that, but we
spent most of the morning just looking around and assessing what damage this vessel could have done.
I’m measuring, you know, basically the impact. We want to obviously measure any coral that gets
damaged, but in this particular instance some of the we call “framework”, which is
where the coral attaches to on the reef. Some of that got damaged so I was measuring that. And,
you know, what I'll do is when I get back in the office I’ll
add up all the measurements and and we'll write a report saying exactly what was damaged.
You know the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary is here to protect the
environment and resources here, and the coral reef is one of those resources.
It's clear that the the reefs have degraded over time,
especially just since I've been here in the past 30 years.
But the good news is that NOAA’s newest initiative, Mission Iconic Reefs has begun
and taken off. And what that entails is a bunch of partners getting together and trying to restore
seven iconic reefs here in the Keys.
That's just amazing and the success so far looks promising, so I'm hopeful.
It's difficult to watch the reef degrade, but it makes me happy to go out and see
the new living coral that these practitioners are putting out there. And
they're growing, they're being successful at it and, you know, I hope for the best.