Tamas
Contributor
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
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