PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The SS United States, a fixture for 30 years at Philadelphia’s Navy Yard, is now the world’s largest artificial reef at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Crews worked most of Wednesday to bring down the ocean liner, which finally sank around 10 p.m. off the coast of the Florida panhandle.
“A lot of people over the last two and a half years have asked if I’m crazy,” said Jennifer Adams, tourism director for Okaloosa County, which bought the SS United States in 2025 with the goal of transforming it into an artificial reef. It arrived last year in the Gulf of Mexico after an 11-day journey from the Navy Yard.
“Fortunately, they let me buy the ship because this is bigger — three times bigger — than anything we’ve ever deployed,” she said.
Adams said Destin-Fort Walton Beach — where the large reef is located 22 nautical miles off the coast — is home to more than 600 reefs. Forty to 50 of them are sunken vessels.
Bringing the world’s largest reef to Destin-Fort Walton Beach is expected to bring between $3 million and $5 million to the local economy on the Florida panhandle for activities like diving.
“So when divers go dive the SS United States, it’s gonna be the best dive they’ve ever been on. It’s gonna be iconic,” said Alex Fogg, the chief of Natural Resources with Destin-Fort Walton Beach. It’s not just diving that tourists will do at the new reef either, he added.
“Or to go fishing, and then the fish that they pull off of that could end up in the restaurant and they can sell the fish,” he said, “so there’s a lot of economic benefit there.”
As for science, teams will monitor the ship’s wreckage for the next 10 years to see how marine ecosystems develop on the vessel.
“This is the prime opportunity to study the formation of a marine community from scratch,” said Kirstein Meyer Keiser with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Nicole Atwater, a resident of Destin-Fort Walton Beach, said she was just happy the town has something new to rally around.
“The feeling of all of these people coming together to celebrate this exciting moment,” she said, "is just really special for the whole community.”
