" More recently, a chemist named Harold Griffin extracted a bacterium found in shipworms that can be used as a powerful stain remover for laundry detergents. Beyond that, shipworms perform a valuable if unsung service by reducing the amount of driftwood in the oceans. Wood being slow to deteriorate in salt water, shipworms help the process along, unclogging the waterways. In the early 1970s, when the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 started the improvement of the coastal environments, New York's polluted waters were in fact choked with an excess of rotting wood. "As pier decks and pilings were worn or torn away from their structure, these boards, pilings, and pier components began to threaten the safety of boats navigating in the harbor. In 1974, the Army Corps of Engineers developed a program to cope with the monumental rot of the city's pier infrastructure, the New York Harbor Drift Removal Project," wrote Carter Craft, in his study Piers as Public Infrastructure. Meanwhile the shipworms, awaiting improvements in water quality, were getting ready to do their part. But they have overshot the mark, gnawing through sound and rotten wood without distinction. It has not helped matters that virtually all pier development in New York Harbor has been built on wood pilings. One is tempted to say that maybe it would make more sense just to let the shipworms do their damnedest, and not even try to hold on to the piers. Millions of dollars would be saved. The problem with that strategy SHIPWORMS 137 • that our current environmental laws will not permit any further incur ions be they landfill or construction, into the water, so that once a piei it is lost forever, and with it the potential for being someday utilized as public space. Considering how narrow the Hudson River Park will be in certain stretches, hemmed in by the highway, the piers may afford the only opportunity to have a tranquil experience with the river, unimpeded by auto traffic. So the shipworm must be stopped. Various coatings have been applied to wooden surfaces over the centuries to safeguard them against the marine borer, from tar to bacon and lime, but the most common wood treatments are creosote and CCA (a mixture of copper, chrome, and arsenate). Effective as creosote and CCA may be, it is now acknowledged that both treatments leach toxic chemicals into the water. Certain types of wood have proven more impervious to the shipworm because of their extreme density, such as rainforest lumber, but these rare and difficultto replace timbers from the Amazon and Central American forests are increasingly placed off limits, as well they should be. You can wrap old wooden pilings in concrete or steel, as is increasingly done with pier reconstruction, though both materials encounter problems in aqueous environments: the former can be corroded by sulphate attack, the latter through oxidation. Stone, the best, most costeffective material over time, has been neglected because it is the most initially expensive.