"Reef" Tires Create Fla. Ocean Nightmare

(AP)  Less than a mile offshore from this city's high-rise condos and beachside bars, where glitz and glamour mix with spring break revelry, lies an underwater dump — up to 2 million old tires strewn across the ocean floor.

A well-intentioned attempt in 1972 to create what was touted as the world's largest artificial reef made of tires has become an ecological disaster.

The idea was simple: Create new marine habitat and alternate dive sites to relieve pressure on natural reefs, while disposing of tires that were clogging landfills.

Decades later it's clear the plan failed miserably.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the bundles bound together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 soccer fields. Tires are washing up on beaches.

Thousands have wedged up against the nearby natural reef some 70 feet below the sea surface, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life. Similar problems have been reported at tire reefs worldwide.

"They're a constantly killing coral destruction machine," said William Nuckols, coordinator for Coastal America, a federal group involved in organizing a cleanup effort that includes Broward County biologists, state scientists and Army and Navy salvage divers.

Gov. Charlie Crist's proposed budget includes $2 million to help to dispose of the tires. Broward County will manage the work onsite, and military divers will use the effort as part of their annual training missions at no cost to Florida.

A monthlong pilot project is set for June. The full-scale salvage operation is expected to run through 2010 at a cost to the state of about $3.4 million.

"The size of the salvage job has just been way too massive and expensive for county and state government to handle alone," Nuckols said.

Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University, was instrumental in organizing the 1970s tire reef project with the approval of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

McAllister helped found Broward Artificial Reef Inc., which got tires from Goodyear and organized hundreds of volunteers with boats and barges. A Goodyear blimp even dropped a gold-painted tire into the ocean at the site to commemorate the start. It's unclear how much it cost to build the reef, but McAllister said his group raised several thousand dollars. The county also chipped in, and Goodyear donated equipment to bind and compress the tires.

A 1972 Goodyear news release proclaimed the reef would "provide a haven for fish and other aquatic species," and noted the "excellent properties of scrap tires as reef material."

"The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area," McAllister said. "It just didn't work that way. I look back now and see it was a bad idea."

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[ntlgtprimate]

Plowhandle,
You sure are funny. Thanks for the laughs.
For your information a Democrat was in the Florida's Governor's office from 1877 to 1987 with only one exception, that being Claude Kirk from 1967 to 1971. Reubin Askew, a Dem, was in office during the reef building attempt and it was he that signed off on the project. Since the REPUBLICANS have taken over the Governor's office the State of Florida has one of the most intense tire recovery and proper disposal programs in the United States. They also have in place heavy punitive recourses for violators. Try to actually know what you are talking about before you espouse that trype you erroneously consider political savvy. You make all Dems sound like fools when you personally attack every Republican with nonsense like your sophmoric attempts at word play. Also, Republicans aren't denouncing global warming, they just aren't taking the blame for it. Got news for you, if you drive your car EVER, then you are just as responsible for it as anyone else. So take your brain out of the rat trap you have it in as bait and put it back into your cranium and read something besides the ingredients section on the box of cat food you have clutched in your claw.

[djberson]

Artificial reef = LITTER! Tires are the least of what gets dumped in the ocean for "reefs". Don't purposely sunken ships not only waste reusable steel, but also contain harmful paints, oils, grease, aspestos, plastics, and on and on??? When will we learn to stop trying to "help".

[rf35]

Corporation + Science = BS!!

The 70%u2019s was a bad decade for science. Must have been all the drugs.

[mitdgreenb]

aardbear -- re: the road paved with good intentions. Yep. (Uitstekend.)

Triassic -- re: small tests. Yep.

[bildooreilly]

A few years ago some scientists out in Oregon I think it was found a group of 20 or so rabbits of a species they had thought to be extinct, prospering out in the wild out in Oregon or somewhere. So the scientists of course capture and try to reproduce them in captivity in the name of saving them and then of course they can't even get rabbits to breed and kill off the entire species once again.

[bildooreilly]

Take a closer look into ethanol and check out the next do gooder nightmare. It all sounds good on the surface until you get into the details and the millions of gallons of water it uses and the ecological effects of that, and the higher price of food.

[pete_in_az]

Wow. Anybody who has ever been through first year P-chem knows that the "vulcanizing" process that Dr. Goodyear (who incidentally died penniless) patented involved using sulphur compounds to stabilize the natural decay of tire rubber. Look at your tires after a few weeks in the sun and not washing them -- that nasty reddish brown stuff is loaded with toxins. What a great habitat.

[plowhandle]

More trash-science, which the Republishit Party seems to revel in. The Republicraps were in power for the past umpteen years in Florida...so we can thank them and their big-business buddies, the tire corporations, for yet another eco-disaster.

The latest trash-science the Republiturds are fostering has to do with global warming. Their buddies in the oil and industries are pooh-poohing the idea that global warming even exists. Yeah - right.

The Republishits, once again, wear the dunce cap.

So good to be rid of them.

[j1m4363]

Ed Begley build a house out of tires, I wonder

if they are leaking toxic gas, or chemicals.

Something must be poisonus about those reef tires?

[slfrighteous]

I wonder how much goodyear is going to use of this publicity, maybe they could donate some more cables to chain the tires together, then use the blimp to pull them out of the ocean. oy vey