These ships posed a severe hazard to navigation, and small boats, trawlers and drifters, moving around the Flow regularly became snagged on them with the rise and fall of the tides. The Admiralty initially declared that there would be no attempt at salvage, that the sunken hulks would remain where they were, to 'rest and rust.' In the first few years after the war, there was abundant scrap metal as a result of the huge quantities of leftover tanks, artillery and ordnance. By the early 1920s, the situation had changed.