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Reefs To Be Burial Sites

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By STEVE KORNACKI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 20, 2008

About 10 years ago, Jason Rew and his father, Tim, were skipping through the Florida Keys in Wanderlust, a 47-foot sailboat they had spent a summer restoring.

They stopped where they sensed the grouper might be biting, and they entered into a deep conversation about their lives and life in general.

"Wouldn't it be really neat if you could be buried in one of these reefs?" the son remembers the father asking.

The son agreed.

"And so it became an idea of ours," says Jason Rew, 30, an only child. "We didn't have the resources to create any burial-at-sea company, but we held onto the idea."

Tim Rew flew in from New York in May 2006 to attend his grandson Riley's fifth birthday party in Sarasota. He said goodbye to his family after the visit and drove to Tampa, where he would spend some time before catching a flight home.

"But Dad got into a car accident in Tampa," Jason Rew says. "He died the next day in the hospital."

He was 49.

"It made me reflect on things over the next six months," says Rew, then a mortgage trader with Goldman Sachs. Early last year, he launched Great Burial Reef Inc.

The company has since secured a dozen burial plan agreements, some for the living and some for the deceased, to have their sealed urns buried in specially created concrete reef structures 1.8 miles west of Lido Key, near Sarasota. Rew promoted the idea at green-living expos in Florida.

"My dad came up with the name," he says. "Puns were his singular sense of humor."

He recently received clearance for a second reef in Collier County, west of Naples. He's also discussing a burial reef with Pinellas County officials and has reached an agreement with Anderson-McQueen Funeral Home of St. Petersburg as the exclusive provider of Pinellas burials.

"Many people scatter the ashes of loved ones in the Gulf of Mexico, but now they will be able to put them in a definite place," says funeral home president Bill McQueen. "I could see myself doing something like this; it's dignified. This style of burial could definitely catch on, and cremation itself has become much more popular."

Cremations totaled just 20 percent of his business 25 years ago, he notes; it's 65 percent now.

McQueen, a board member of the Cremation Association of North America, said this is the only burial process of its kind that he's encountered. One company offers mixing ashes into concrete and then dropping it in waterways, but clients tend to find that unappealing, he says.

Great Burial Reef charges $9,800 to have a couple buried or $7,500 for a single. A 2,500-pound concrete structure 5 feet wide and 3 1/2 feet high will be constructed with niches for each couple or single, and deployed from large barges onto the ocean floor 35 feet below. The blocks are designed to encourage marine growth, while ensuring security for their contents.

"It took everything and then some" to finance the venture, Rew says.

Great Burial Reef will create its first reef on state-owned, protected land at Silvertooth Memorial Reef. The venture was approved by state and county officials.

Burials include maple urns and a luxury charter boat for friends and family that anchors above the site for a ceremony. Families will receive GPS coordinates and an underwater photograph of the placement, including a bronze plaque with the deceased's name and birth and death dates.

"It will be an ecofriendly, living, growing legacy," says Rew. "Every square inch of it eventually will be covered in marine life."

The first burial will be in early March, for the man who named and imagined Great Burial Reef.

"My stepmother, Kim Anderson, has dad's ashes in an urn in New York," says Rew, whose mother, Liz Rew, lives in Bradenton. "She will bring that and we will place him down there.

"It will be a tribute to him, and closure for me."

For information, call (941) 750-0617 or go to www.greatburialreef.com.

Reporter Steve Kornacki can be reached at (813) 731-8170 or skornacki@tampatrib.com.

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