With our government spending money like drunken sailors for everything under the sun in the name of economic stimulus, I’m happy to find an example of “make-work”‘ spending that I can actually get behind. A group in Washington will receive stimulus money to remove old fishing nets from Puget Sound – nets that continue to kill long after they were lost. I don’t know if this project qualifies as technically “shovel-ready” – it’s underwater!

Divers swim close to 100 feet down to an environment that is anything but friendly. Instead of using scuba equipment, they breathe through air hoses running from the boat above. When the divers find the fields of nets, they begin the labor of cutting them free piece by piece and all by hand. Removing one net can take days.

The nets are then pulled to the boat waiting on the surface. In just a few hours on the water, the divers can pull free about 1,000 pounds of nets. Inside are the bones of countless fish and birds, along with several species of protected sharks and crabs. Anything still alive is cut free and thrown back in the water. Then, biologist Jeff June notes what they have brought up. So far, he says, the group has identified 112 distinct species trapped in the nets.

One of the complaints against many forms of commercial fishing is the lack of foresight given to the methods, and this is a classic example. The nets were deployed, were lost, and were written off as a cost of doing business. But while the nets might have been forgotten, they continued to hunt and kill long after the fishermen had replaced them. This is one time when at least a small part of that damage can be ended.