In the clear blue, pristine waters off Panama's coast, several ships are rusting under the Central American country's sun, raising concerns about their impact on the environment. Local advocates are now seeking innovative solutions to turn these derelict ships into artificial reefs.
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00:30The important thing for me is not to take out the boat, because it carries oil inside,
00:42before it damages my stones, my reefs, so as not to kill the fish, the lobsters that
00:50are going to be damaged with that diesel, gasoline.
01:00It is an inconvenience for tourism, a risk to the environment, a danger to navigation.
01:22It contaminates, it contaminates visually, it contaminates chemically, it contaminates
01:26in all senses.
01:28We ask ourselves the question, who is responsible for preventing this type of situation from happening?
01:33The list has to be exact, not only a nominal list of which boats sank or which semi-sunk,
01:58but also where it is located, so that this danger to navigation is catalogued and at
02:03least identified.
02:04The agreement is unknown to many public servants of the Republic of Panama.
02:20The Hong Kong agreement still belongs to a category of fiction rights, for many of
02:26those who have to fulfill it, and every time it is invoked to safeguard the environment,
02:32the officials have to carry out a search in their files or even a search on the Internet
02:38to be able to delimit whether this agreement exists or not.
02:47For Panama it is very important that the problem of these sunken boats be solved, that we have
02:52problems with this throughout the country.
02:54In fact, we estimate that there are more than 70 sunken boats at the national level.
02:59This is a serious problem.
03:11What we ask is that this bad practice be ended, that this problem be solved and that
03:17pollution on the upper coast be ended by means of abandoned boats, metal boats.
03:23We can transform a problem into a tourist attraction.
03:27You simply take the boat, extract all the hydrocarbons, do a treatment on the boat,
03:33make perforations, look for a specific place where you can sink to a depth that is within
03:39the recreational diving levels, and in this way we transform a problem into a solution,
03:46an attraction and an income generator for the local communities.
03:53For more information visit www.panama.gov