WOW! Have you guys heard of this????

[Tamas]

Tire 'reef' haunts Florida
Ecological dream of fish sanctuary now a nightmare with big repair bill

ORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—Now, the idea seems daft. But, in the spring of 1972, dumping a million or so tires offshore here looked like ecological enlightenment.

From the scrap tires, artificial reefs would grow and fish would throng, or so it was thought. A flotilla of more than 100 private boats with volunteers turned out to help. A Goodyear blimp christened the site by dropping a gold-painted tire.

"A potential grouper haven," one county report opined. Reefs from tires seemed "the next best thing to recycling."

What happened instead is a vast underwater dump — a spectacular disaster spawned by good intentions. Today there are no reefs, no fishy throngs, just a lifeless underwater gloom of haphazardly dropped tires covering nearly 12 hectares of ocean bottom.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ANASTASIA WALSH/SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Frank Schmidt, a dive instructor from Lighthouse Point, swims over an area covered with tires off Fort Lauderdale Beach in Florida.[/FONT]

It's not just a matter of botched scenery. Because they roll around, the tires are pounding against natural reefs nearby.

"It's depressing as hell," said Ken Banks, a reef specialist for Broward County, who recently explored the site. "We dove in and swam for what seemed like an hour and never came to the end of it. It just went on and on.''

Robin Sherman, a professor at Nova Southeastern University, led a project a few years ago to retrieve some of the tires most directly damaging Fort Lauderdale's natural reefs.

Two months later, she dove in the area again. "It was completely re-covered with tires. It was even hard to find where we had worked. That's when I realized: we have to clean up the whole thing."

So, after years of study and then neglect, officials here are planning to clean up the experiment gone awry.

Coastal America, a partnership of federal agencies, state and local governments and private groups, is trying to organize a cleanup using military salvage teams that would use tire retrieval as a training exercise. Once up, the tires would be disposed of by the state at a cost of $3 million to $5 million (U.S.).

Some say as many as 2 million tires are off Fort Lauderdale.

Will Nuckols, project co-ordinator for Coastal America, called the rolling tires a "coastal coral destruction machine."

If each dive team retrieves about 700 tires a week, officials estimate it will take three years. They plan to begin in 2008.

"It's easy to throw something into the water," said Keith Mille, of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. ``What we're finding is it's extremely expensive to remove something from the water."

The first documented artificial reef in the United States was created off South Carolina in the 1830s. Over time, people have sunk rocks, trees, concrete, ships and barges to create reefs. When successful, they attract anglers and divers alike.

Artificial reefs made from scrap tires began in the United States in the late 1950s or early '60s. At the time, stockpiled tires were creating fire hazards, fostering mosquito breeding and blighting the landscape.

Communities in Texas, California, Florida and North Carolina embraced the idea, but few were on the grand scale of the one off Fort Lauderdale. Proponents touted it as the world's largest scrap-tire reef.

A 1974 Goodyear boast said, "Worn-out tires may be the best things that have happened to fishing since Izaak Walton," author of The Compleat Angler.

The project had a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers and active support from Broward County. There were initial hopeful reports but, after a decade, tires lashed together for stability broke loose. In motion, they make it difficult for sea life to establish homes. Today, the tires look the same as the day they were dropped.

The Gulf and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says most states now restrict or ban tires in artificial reefs.

"We all thought we were doing a good job for the environment,'' said Ray McAllister, part of a local group that pushed for the tire reef and now professor emeritus of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University. "It was a terrible mistake and I hate to admit it ..."

Washington Post

Link ---> http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&pubid=968163964505&cid=1159825812803&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News

 

[H2Andy]

it's one of those ideas that someone should have said... "wait a minute now... we're gonna do what with the tires?"

 

[Ocean One]

Kinda like "Hey filtered cigarettes will cut down on cancer!" Nice idea but never worked!!

 

[plot]

should've dropped them into an abyss

 

[DaytonaDave]

OK... so what will it take to help out?

 

[limeyx]

it's one of those ideas that someone should have said... "wait a minute now... we're gonna do what with the tires?"

Similar (ish) but on a much smaller scale on Maui.
By the wreck of the St Anthony are lots of tires embedded in concrete for an "articifial reef"

Sadly someone discovered (way too late) that nothing likes to grow on or in tires.
Sometimes something hides underneat it but ...

Still nothing like the scale of this disaster

 

[Scububbs]

It seems like some marine biologist somewhere would have known this wouldn't work. What a mess!

 

[Rapida]

I heard about it on the news one day and I couldn't believe it. Later on in the week I mentioned it to one of my dive buddies and he said he'd been there before. He thought it was eerie, I imagine it was.

 

[FredT]

I was involved with this early on. The original plan was to place tires into a bottom depression formed from mining sand for beach replenishment. This depression would trap them and form an "interlocked pile not subject to movement." When the Feds (MMS, Dept of Interior) refused to even consider the mining lease (to deliver gov't owned sand to the government at 1/4 the then going rate with no secondary environmental damage) for at least 7 years the mining project died, but the tire reef didn't. I was involved in the mining proposal.


The recovery could be done a LOT cheaper if some folks would think a bit outside the box. To define the job more clearly the actual "problem" tires are those that have migrated to nearby reefs. Those need to be relocated to "safe" areas either below or above storm wave induced surge.

This can be done with local sport divers rather easily and at minimal cost. The tires are nearly neutral in the water, so it doesn't take much to lift the majority of them. A "special" single use lift bag costing pennies each can easily be developed with a UV deteriorization rate measured in single digit days. A plus would be for the bag to also be edible to deep water benthic organisms. The "training" needed to allow sport divers to utilize these bags can easily be printed on the bag itself. The Gulf Stream off Ft Lauderdale is a rather dependable current, with a few eddy issues, that generally will sweep a floating object with minimum sail area out over the Blake-Bahama plateau. This is a sand & hard bottom area that stretches between southern Virginia, the Carolinas and the northern Bahama banks at a depth of about 2500 feet. Any tire lifted from a reef area off Ft Lauderdale will generally be swept over this deep water area and within a few days of sunlight exposure dropped in water well below the surge zone of any storm that will leave the eastern US shoreline habitable. The small percentage that are wind driven to the beach can be picked up there for shore based disposal. This beach pickup can be done either by existing work crews or folks doing "community service" time courtesy of the local courts. On days with a west wind effectivley none of these tires will return to a hazard area or be washed up on any beach. The well under a quarter each "sale" price of these bags to individual divers and clubs may be enough to fund both the bags and the beach recovery process. OTOH the "tire disposal fee" tax we all pay when buying tires could actually be used to pay for this effort.

FT

 

[Bigcape]

I can sum it up in one word. PROPAGANDA! There were never good intentions. It was BULL****. Some lobby group got PAID!