DiveBar assists veterans
THE DIVEBAR’S ROOT project culminated this summer with some heroic scuba divers — military veterans with service-related disabilities. ROOT — Restoring Our Oceans Together — paired specially-trained divers with wounded veterans, some of whom are paraplegics or who had lost limbs in combat. The project is a collaboration among DiveBar, Diveheart, and Nova Southeastern University’s Coral Nursery Initiative. DiveBar lawyers trained with Diveheart to become certified adaptive dive buddies for the vets. The teams then embarked on a two-dive trip where they transplanted corals and performed maintenance at the offshore nursery belonging to NSU’s Coral Nursery Initiative and visited DiveBar Reef, where some 1,500 staghorn corals have been planted over the past two years. “ROOT empowers wounded veterans to explore the world beyond their wheelchairs or the limits of their disabilities,” said Robert W. Kelley, co-founder of DiveBar. “They’re not just restoring corals to the ocean floor; they’re restoring a level of freedom to their lives.”
