Another good swim, but in a yucky place.

[amblypygi]

It's called coal tar, and there are a bunch of places where it occurs. Basically, at the end of the 19th century, but before commercial electricity became widely available, someone discovered that if you burn coal anoxically it separates into two phases: a gas and a liquid tarry residue. The gas could be used to light streetlamps and piped into houses for cooking, but the tar was useless and was dumped into pits or very often directly into rivers. These manufactured gas plants sprang up everywhere for the brief period before electricity put them out of business, but in that 20 or 30 years they created quite a mess. The tar is a morass of really bad sh!t like benzene and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH's), all of which have been shown to be very carcinogenic. In rivers, 100 years of sublimating into the water and mixing with sand has made much of it into a semi-solid phase that looks and feels like very soft asphalt. I'll attach a picture of that here in a minute. The more dangerous phase is still very liquid, and is present under the surface and gets into the water if it's disturbed. A picture of that will be next.

 

[amblypygi]

Here's a blob of the liquid stuff. It actually seems to damage and sicken glass, so once a bottle is embedded in it it's usually not worth recovering anyway. Even if the glass is undamaged though, messing around in this stuff isn't worth it; cancer's a bitch...

 

[amblypygi]

Where we've been working we are avoiding the coal tar as much as possible; the bottles I've shown are from areas upstream of the hazmat or from out in the sandy areas where the tar isn't there. Like I said, there were things that we saw and wanted to recover, but we decided not to because of the danger from the tar. Like I also said; it ain't worth it.

 

[glass man]

A PLACE I WISH I COULD LOOK UNDER WATER IS AT A DAM BUILT IN 1873 TO DIVERT WATER INTO A CHUTE TO RUN A IRON FURNICE. I WOULD GUESS A LOT OF THE COAL TAR STUFF WOULD BE IN THE WATER,BUT MY GREAT,GREAT ,GRANDFATHER SUPPLIED COKE TO THIS IRON FACTORY [COKE BURNS HARDER AND MAKES IRON STRONGER.

MY QUESTION IS SINCE COKE WAS USED WOULD IT BE WORSE OR BETTER THEN IF COAL WAS USED? JAMIE

 

[Just Dig it]

it looks like a seal from a bottle just chilling on the bottom..Our river is full of pcbs..its only 230 years old though so there cant be anything too good down there [8D].Your like an underwater indiana jones..keep kicking glass..

 

[amblypygi]

This is a reply to a PM that I couldn't respond to because somebody's mailbox is full. It's probably good information for everyone to have anyway:

It wasn't a secret, and it doesn't really matter now because that area is the focus of a lot of official attention at this point. Anyone who tries to dive it now without an official reason will be sent packing by the Env. Police, and by next year it will be a hazmat cleanup site and nobody will get in. The shame of it is that it's more than likely a lot of good stuff is going to get buried under 1000 tons of riprap and never be seen again.

Believe me, I know about keeping secrets and I know a lot of good river sites that nobody will ever hear about. This one though isn't one of them; I mean if nobody knew that one of the oldest cities on the east coast would have bottles then they're too dumb to figure out how to dive anyway

 

[amblypygi]

ORIGINAL: capsoda

Excellent dive finds Sean. Know what you mean about to dangerous to get. Melted a pair of tennis shoes and turned a pair of acrylic socks into duffel bags one time to get to a rare bottle. It was stupid and I was lucky. Won't do anything like that again.

Now I'm curious Warren, it was in a volcano??

 

[bottle_head9]

Nice Finds.

 

[GACDIG]

I'll take a ovid find any day. [] You all always do good.