www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=4632588
International Herald Tribune A 1970s plan for a tire reef off Florida turns into an ecological disaster The Associated Press Sunday, February 18, 2007 FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida: Less than a mile offshore from this city's high-rise condos and beachfront bars, where glitz and glamour mix with the annual spring revelry of vacationing college students, lies an underwater dump -- up to two 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 alternative dive sites to relieve pressure on natural reefs, while disposing of tires that were clogging landfills. Some of the bundles bound together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a nearly two-mile, or three-kilometer, swath. Thousands of them have wedged up against the nearby natural reef about 70 feet, or 20 meters, 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 county biologists, state scientists and US Army and Navy salvage divers. Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, will manage the work onsite, and military divers will use the effort as part of their annual training missions at no cost to Florida. "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 US Army Corps of Engineers. A Goodyear blimp even dropped a gold- painted tire into the ocean at the site to commemorate the start. It is 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 that 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. In decades past, tire reefs were created off the US coast and elsewhere, from Australia to Africa. "We've literally dumped millions of tires in our oceans," said Jack Sobel, a senior Ocean Conservancy scientist. "I believe that people who were behind the artificial tire-reef promotions actually were well intentioned and thought they were doing the right thing." "In hindsight," he added, "we now realize that we made a mistake." No one can say exactly why the tire reefs do not work, but one problem is that, unlike large ships that have been sunk for reefs, tires are too light. They can be swept away with tides and currents from powerful storms, and marine life does not have a chance to attach. Virginia tried it several decades ago, but in 1998 Hurricane Bonnie ripped the tires loose, sending them on a slow march south. Indonesia and Malaysia mounted enormous tire-reef programs in the 1980s and are now seeing the ramifications, from littered beaches to reef destruction, Sobel said. Most US states have since stopped using tires to create reefs, but tires continue to wash up worldwide. In 2005, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy's annual international coastal cleanup removed more than 11,000 tires from beaches. The tires retrieved from the waters off Fort Lauderdale will be used in road projects and burned for fuel as part of Florida's tire-disposal program, said Michael Sole, chief of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. "It's going to be a huge job bringing them all up," Sole said.
|
http://csua.com/feed/