Nine months after a Yugoslav freighter ran aground and destroyed a 500-foot swath of live coral off Key West, the state and the ship's owner and captain have reached a tentative $3.3 million settlement. Tuesday's agreement, which must still be approved by Gov. Bob Martinez and the Cabinet, came just one day before a lawsuit filed over the grounding would have gone to trial in Key West. ``We think it's a very, very good settlement,'' John Costigan, chief of environmental litigation in Attorney General Bob Butterworth's office. Allen Von Spiegelfeld, a Tampa attorney who represented the freighter Mavro Vetranic, owner Atlantska Plovidba and captain Zdravko Berana, said his clients agreed to the proposed settlement late Monday by telephone from Yugoslavia. The ?3.3 million will go to the state's coral reef restoration fund, which finances research and other activity to preserve and revitalize the reefs. The Florida barrier reef, a tract of about 6,000 coral reefs extending from Miami along the Keys to the Dry Tortugas archipelago west of Key West, is the third-longest barrier reef in the world. It's home to 52 coral species and 10 times as many fish. It can take 100 years for a coral to grow one yard. The grounding last Oct. 30 was the second of three such incidents in less than three weeks in the Florida Keys. The federal government filed a $9 million lawsuit alleging that the Mavro Vetranic was unseaworthy and its crew incompetent when it ran aground. But government attorneys later conceded that the reef was in state territory and stepped aside to let the state handle the suit, Costigan said.
