Glass-Bottom Goals

For years, Paula Russo has been on a mission to provide a handicapped-accessible glass-bottom boat to Silver Springs. This summer, her long-awaited dream finally came true.

By Richard Anguiano • Photos by John Jernigan

For decades, Paula Russo took visiting family members and friends to Silver Springs and enjoyed the park’s natural beauty with them—up to a point. Russo, who contracted polio as a baby in the early 1950s, could only watch as others boarded glass-bottom boats, the signature attraction at Silver Springs. The boats were built decades before the Americans with Disabilities Act and are inaccessible to patrons in wheelchairs.

A longtime environmental advocate and an employee of the Florida State Parks Foundation, Russo says she has never experienced firsthand the breathtaking views of nature and historical artifacts through the deep, crystal waters of the springs, as visitors from all over the world have for about 150 years.

That is about to change, however.

THANKS TO RUSSO and the nonprofit Florida State Parks Foundation, Silver Springs State Park is introducing a wheelchair-accessible glass-bottom boat. Russo, who is grants and programs administrator for the foundation and a former board member, says she expects the boat to be available for public use at the park not long after an invitation-only ribbon-cutting set for late August.

“As a person with a disability who can’t just join her family or friends all the time for activities, sometimes I get left behind, and that’s just a reality of life,” Russo says. “What this is going to mean is people aren’t going to get left behind on the dock anymore.”

Sally Lieb, park director at Silver Springs, welcomes the addition. “We are very excited about the new glass-bottom boat,” Lieb says, “and look forward to having the ability to serve more people than we’ve been able to on the original boats.”

St. Johns Shipbuilding of Palatka built the boat from designs by Lay, Pitman & Associates of Jacksonville.

“What makes it ADA-accessible is that there’s a flat deck,” says Leif Detlefsen, a naval architect with Lay, Pitman & Associates. “With their existing boats, you go down about three steps to board the boat, and, obviously, a wheelchair is not capable of going down those steps.

“We meet what’s necessary for a wheelchair, a power chair, or the electric carts,” Detlefsen adds. “The width of the door and the aisle is wide enough to accommodate them and their turning circles. There’s like a 5-foot-by-5-foot turning circle for the wheelchair to turn around.”

FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED visitors, the boat is equipped with an “inductive-loop” system, through which hearing aids equipped with telecoils can pick up the captain’s tour narration.

“The viewing area is 16 feet by 4 feet,” says Steve Aprile, vice president and senior project manager with Lay, Pitman & Associates. “It’s got about a 30-inch-high ledge that you can go right up to and lean on that ledge and look over down into the glass and see the bottom of the water.”

The new boat is 35 feet long and 12 feet wide and equipped with two Elco electric motors, powered by lithium batteries manufactured in Clearwater by Lithionics Battery.

“We were wanting to have clean energy as much as we could,” Russo says.

Detlefsen says this boat is the first his firm has designed with a Coast Guard-approved lithium battery. “With a standard marine battery, gases are emitted when you charge it,” he says. “The lithium batteries do not do that. They are more sophisticated in that during any point in time, you can see how much power is left, the time remaining at the current load, and the battery temperatures.”

Russo says the final costs of the boat are to be determined, but estimates they will be less than $500,000. The foundation raised funding for the boat, she says.

Silver Springs has a tradition of naming glass-bottom boats after Seminole chiefs. In keeping with its spirit of innovation and breaking barriers, the new boat will take the name “Chief Potackee, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper,” in honor of the first and as yet only woman Seminole chief, who died in 2011.

“I wanted to honor the fact that she was a chief and I also wanted to indicate that she was a woman,” Russo says, adding she has invited Moses Jumper Jr., the chief’s son, to attend the ribbon-cutting.

Russo says she has ridden the new one on sea trials on the St. Johns River, just a preview of what awaits her at Silver Springs State Park.

Paula Russo

“It’s going to be magical, I think, to be able to see the fish and the bottom and the turtles swimming around and so forth in that blue, blue water,” Russo says. “I’m looking forward to it very, very much.”

WANT TO KNOW MORE? Silver Springs State Park (352) 236-7148 floridastateparks.org/ silversprings