For more than 20 years, Scott Bartkowski, president and founder of Living Shoreline Solutions Inc., has been engineering and constructing artificial reef modules for a variety of project owners, across the U.S. and internationally. His impetus for creating the patented wave-attenuation devices, known as WADs, occurred in the 1990s during a Gulf of Mexico fishing excursion on a boat that was pulling a barge full of old Volkswagen Beetles out to sea to create a reef.
The former U.S. Navy pilot—an avid scuba diver who had explored numerous reefs all over the world, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—was dumbfounded by the idea that rusted-out cars would be used for that purpose.