http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/01/AR2006100101090.html?referrer=emailBright Idea of Tire Reef Now Simply a Blight
Officials Plan Recovery Off Florida Coast
By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 2, 2006; A12
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Now the idea seems daft. But in the spring of 1972, the dumping of 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. What happened instead is a vast underwater dump -- a spectacular disaster spawned from good intentions. Today there are no reefs, no fishy throngs, just a lifeless underwater gloom of haphazardly dropped tires stretching across 35 acres of ocean bottom.
It's not just a matter of botched scenery. Because they can roll around, the tires are pounding against natural reefs nearby.
So, after years in which the site was studied and then neglected, officials here are planning to clean up the environmental 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 the tire retrieval as a training exercise. Once the divers pulled the tires up, they would be disposed of by the state at a cost of about $3 million to $5 million.
The scale of the project -- some say there are as many as 2 million tires below -- and the number of different specialties required had prevented previous bureaucratic efforts from going forward.
With each dive team retrieving about 700 tires a week, officials estimate that the effort would take three years. They plan to begin in 2008.
A tire reef had seemed to work in New England, he said, and organizers figured it would work here.
The project had received a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers and had active support from Broward County, officials said. Today, most states have restricted or banned tires in artificial reefs, according to a 2004 joint publication of the Gulf and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
In retrospect, McAllister said, "it was a terrible mistake and I hate to admit it. . . . The conventional wisdom, or whatever you want to call it, was not such a bright idea."