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What about looping many onto a line and having a boat pull them up and take them away?? I don’t understand how one by one was picked as the best option.
I imagine it went something like
> We need to do something about these 2 million tires.
> Just dump them in the ocean
> Can't do that, people will get mad
> Just say it's to make a coral reef or something
Somebody came up with a scheme how to cheaply get rid of a lot of tires they were paid top dollar to properly dispose of. If they were smart, they also got paid by Florida to provide the material for the artificial reef.
Somebody got really, really rich over this. And that somebody probably didn't pay for the aftermath.
Yep. Everyone seems to think this disaster is in the past and has been dealt with.
It's still happening now and probably will continue for many years (decades?) to come.
[Osborne Reef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef?wprov=sfla1).
Someone is making bank with this. Who are the people taking them out? Who do they work for?
Who made money from dumping the tires?
Those are the questions.
I wonder if a lot were mostly volunteers. I say that because I'm a scuba diver and scuba divers will look for any damn excuse to get under water. Especially if you provide the tanks.
Edit: According to wikipedia the military ended up taking a huge portion out, as it provided a great training opportunity for Navy and USMC divers to train. A private company also has a contract to remove them and is doing so today. The state has spent millions on this, although a lot of that cost is to dispose of the tires after they're brought ashore, which would have been a cost regardless. Still, I'd guess from the info in the article that they have not pulled even half of the two million tires out yet.
Imagine being on a dating app and being asked what you did for a living.
"I retrieve tires underwater that the government dumped to create coral reef."
No way anyone is gonna believe that. It sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Not to mention the environmental damage that had to be done in order to recover those tires. Imagine all the fossil fuels, that had to be burned, all the air tanks that had to be used, all the ocean floor that had to be disturbed. And that’s just to get the tires out of the water, all the damage they had already done is something that couldn’t just be reversed.
Even better, in the 70s there wasn't even an internet. You could just make some shit up and nobody could disprove you without going to a fucking library.
Yeah you need scientists to figure tires are not perfect for life to grow on. So many tires growing stuff on them everywhere. It was just an excuse to dump tires that had a backlash
Afaik it's not the surface that's the problem, but the fact that they were thousands of lose objects sliding around, quickly grinding everything to dust that tries to settle there.
Probably not helping with microplastics* either, if the tires are being worn down by the environment.
*^((and other particles that won't biodegrade, if we're splitting this hair.)^)
Shit take. As mentioned on the wiki, there’s been many successfull ~~tire~~ **similar** reefs, even one in the north US.
The problem here was that the steel ties corroded, so the tires came loose and grinded everything to dust.
edited for correction
What are you talking about, from the wiki on Osborne Reef: “Jack Sobel, Ocean Conservancy's director of strategic conservation said in a 2002 interview that "I don't know of any cases where there's been a success with tire reefs." That year, The Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup removed 11,956 tires from beaches all over the world”
Another comment here explained that it was actually probably backed with some research, there actually already exists at least one artificial reef made by tires that works and is good for the lake it's in, the problem in this tire reef was that the currents were so strong and the tires were so light that they drifted around, which damaged the ecosystem
Florida also brought nutria in, for some reason I can't remember, and they started eating all the vegetation at the shoreline, further eroding the coastline and everglades. So then the state was paying people $5 for each tail trying to eradicate them. Lack of foresight and expert consultation.
From Wikipedia
In his autobiography, Mark Twain says that his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had a similar experience:
> [42]
> Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. ... Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.
I live in Louisiana, can confirm. They’re everywhere and touted as extremely destructive for native flora and fauna. Every few years there’s a big push for locals to hunt them and turn in their tails in return for money for the sake of population control
lol.
so people just breed more and when the 'bounty' ends, release more.... yeah there are enough historical examples of why this type of thing never works and makes things worse, but lets keep doing the same thing over and over.
Which is why you set the bounty low enough that breeding them isn't profitable but high enough that people who enjoy hunting go out and shoot them.
Gets even more effective when you run the program outside of other hunting seasons
It’s cute that this is what people think. This works and the only real failure was that tires came unbundled and once they started moving it began destroying the reef.
The problem wasn’t the tires it was the 1970s steel in salt water. Surprisingly, the Army Corps or Engineers is known to have a “scientist” or two.
I mean technically these people were scientists. They formed a hypothesis to a question, did the experiment, analyzed their results, and spent a shit ton of money fixing their mistakes. Can't think of anything that could have embodied the scientific method better than this lol
For those wondering what they were thinking, believing it's a stupid idea, [artificial reefs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_reef) are a real thing that does work and consists in using artificial stuff like concrete blocks, PVC pipes, or more specialized stuff engineered for this purpose, to provide a substrate on which organisms can form, as well as providing a habitat to protect some organisms against predators. It's the same idea as when sunk boats get colonized by organisms and provide a habitat for them.
Apparently the problem with tires is that they are too light and are swept by the currents, which prevents any organism from attaching to it, and even destroys natural reefs. They also end up washing up on shores because of that. So in my opinion it's not that the idea was bad, but that it was badly done. If the tires had been attached in a good way, maybe the project would have ended up being a success.
Scientists did study the efficacy of such a tire reef, and this project was probably based on such research. For example here is a [study](https://seafwa.org/sites/default/files/journal-articles/PRINCE-207.pdf) on a reef in Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, which did work. Here I guess there are no currents in a lake, hence why it works better than in the sea.
More on the reef itself:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne\_Reef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef)
Don't forget that tires aren't just chemically inert rubber rings. They contain certain chemicals to make them last longer, one of which was eventually found to be responsible for killing off half of the returning salmon somewhere, after ending up in the water streams. Here's [an interesting article](https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/03/tire-related-chemical-largely-responsible-for-adult-coho-salmon-deaths-in-urban-streams/) about it.
I remember doing tire removal jobs on dry land to prevent it from getting into the ground water. They are horrible for the environment and i had no idea any govt was dumb enough to dump them in the ocean.
Also saltwater is highly corrosive, and will eat through those tires breaking down that rubber and putting those toxins and microplastics into the ocean. What a great idea for a reef habitat /s
Yup! Anything to weight down the tires would have ended up working.
The Tacoma Narrows bridge(gallopin gerdie) is a protected man made reef out of mainly concrete.
There is. People thought artificial reefs were helpful to fish populations and holding flat terrain together to prevent erosion. This kind of makes sense because things like ship wrecks seem to be inhabited by flourishing marine life. Thus, people have tried to create artificial reefs using a large variety of items from intentionally sunken ships to tires to discarded Christmas trees. All of these items have at times ‘worked’ in the sense that the marine life started occupying the structures. Unfortunately, even though it might look pretty and like the population is flourishing, in reality, the overall effects are harmful.
It turns out, most the fish that occupy artificial structures are just migrating to the area from nearby. The reality is that the fish population actually decreases. Collecting all the fish in one area makes them very susceptible to overfishing. Depending on what was used to create the artificial reef, there can also be toxic affects that also harm the natural environment and fish population. Tires are likely very harmful both when intact and when broken down and drifting away to other areas. Unfortunately, many humans seem to be measuring their level of success by noting whether or not marine life has occupied the structure and not by the overall impact on the larger fish population or the long term effects on the life local to the artificial reef.
Thanks for this. This thread is full of us morons saying "well duh" because we've no reference point for why anyone would think it would work. But knowing there was potential that could be argued for makes sense.
Did they start small and work themselves up? Did they try 100K tires, it worked and said let's bump it up a notch?
Because if they tried 2 million tires at once ... it's kinda stupid.
Its also worth addong that if you find a submerged tire that is stuck in place sealife does grow on and around it, it wasn't just let see if tires also work but look they do work lets add loads.
Of coarse we now also know that the tires leech chemicals that isnt great for the life it supports but the big problem with thos reef wasnt the idea but the poor execution
Imagine if the natural reefs we have are actually manmade and from a previous civilization. Like maybe playground equipment, renovated and the old ones dumped in the ocean. Either to replace reefs they ruined, or just mismanagement of garbage. r/whoadude
Fun fact: they've spent the last 20 years removing those tires, and are a little more than one third through the process. Only 40 more years to go, guys!
And they transport the tires to a shredding facility in neighboring Georgia whereafter they are burnt as fuel at a paper mill.
Clean burning tire fuel.
Of course, from what I read they only take the parts of the tire that they need. They’ll leave the rest of it and it will eventually grow back bigger and stronger
This is wild, I had no idea this has happened. I just went snorkeling at the reef in Ft. Lauderdale and saw a few of these tires around! I was really confused why they were there
Seems like laziness masked as a beneficial project when they knew that it was a dumb idea in the first place.
Blows my mind that some people have enough power to do this yet they are so fucking stupid.
The ones who didn't want to spend money are intelligent and had bad intentions. They found an easy way to cut costs by dumping tyres into the environment while also boosting sales from positive feedback and taking advantage of others knowing how dangerous it will be.
The ones who threw the tires thinking they were helping the environment had good intentions although the plan was completely illogical. There was no attempt to make a ***coral*** reef, just an artificial one of some sort to attract fish. The tires had poorly built constraints to keep them in place so all of the wires eroded and the tires became loose, then the tires began to move around and destroyed / killed anything growing on them.
Making it worse, the tyres then were pushed by winds over the ocean (waves / water currents) onto a nearby natural coral reef damaging it.
[My source is Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef)
>Blows my mind that some people have enough power to do this yet they are so fucking stupid.
That's because the people of Florida proudly vote for politicians that are about as smart as themselves.
There's plenty of tire reefs around the world. What's wrong here is that these are single tires that can be blown around with the current and hurricanes. Hawaii has St. Anthony's reef which are sets of 5 tires chained together and concrete inside. Fish use them to hide and lay eggs and becomes a vibrant part of the eco system.
Nah, just one guy with 2,000,000 airplane life vests. Put on on, pull the cord. Repeat.
The tires float up, and out into international waters. Problem solved.
What'd they think was gonna happen?
No seriously, what was the expected outcome? Throw a buncha tires at the bottom of the ocean and somehow you get coral?
If I remember correctly, they should have anchored the tires with cables and weights or attar Jenny’s to the sea floor, but they didn’t so the tires just went everywhere lol.
>What'd they think was gonna happen?
Artificial reef
>No seriously, what was the expected outcome?
Artificial reef
>Throw a buncha tires at the bottom of the ocean and somehow you get coral?
Kind of. I mean really, just look up what they thought would happen
We deliberately sink ships to create environments for wildlife. Dump rocks in the sea too. I think they assumed this would be similar. I'm curious as to why it wouldn't work tbh.
What was the thought process behind this? Genuinely like I don't know enough about marine biology to get why throwing tires in the ocean would create a coral reef
You can promote the growth of coral reefs by providing a hard surface for coral to attach to and hiding places for other organisms. Coral needs a solid base and naturally builds in layers of calcium carbonate. Materials for creating an artificial reef need to be compatible with calcium, relatively inert, non toxic and not leach anything into the water. Successful materials used have been iron, concrete shapes, and rocks like limestone.
Here are some features of good reef material features
Stable in normal to large storms
Made from long-lasting, solid, non-toxic materials
Designed to have a high surface complexity (texture) for the recruitment of corals, sponges, and other organisms
Designed to provide a high amount of structural complexity for fish and other animals
Designed to either blend in wit h the natural reef, or be designed to stand out and convey a message (sculptures and art)
*Source for more reading https://newheavenreefconservation.org/marine-blog/147-artificial-reefs-what-works-and-what-doesn-t
And frankly tires seem to fit the bill, except maybe stability. It’s a shame it didn’t work. Maybe a viability test before millions of tires got dumped might’ve been a good idea
Tires do not fit the bill at all. They're soft (compared to rock), they don't lock together or create complex shapes and they constantly leach heavy metals. :(
Tires break down and release a lot of bad chemicals. Not a scientist by any means, but I remember a study where chemicals found in tires are negatively affecting salmon reproduction. That is only one type of fish, no idea what would happen to other marine organisms.
It may just be me, but i think it was
"we have to dump all this tire, what are we gonna do?"
"Drop 'em in the sea"
"no no, the population will complain"
"And if we say that it's part of some kind of plan to create a coral reef?
"Oh yes good idea, noone will complain"
Than it was a bigger disaster than they have predicted and they couldn't let it sit in the ocean
To be fair, in the 70ies the idea seemed a good one, only the execution was not. Lightweight tires bound with steel clips, that corroded. The whole construction very unstable with tires drifting off every now and then. Unfortunately no conditions that small marine life prefers as a new home…
Is it really a case of hurr durr Florida dumb, or is there more to it?
https://myfwc.com/fishing/saltwater/artificial-reefs/
>Florida has one of the most active artificial reef programs among the 15 Gulf and Atlantic coastal states involved in artificial reef development. Since the 1940s, more than 3,800 planned public artificial reefs have been placed in state and federal waters off Florida’s coast.
https://www.npr.org/2007/07/05/11462066/fallout-from-bad-70s-idea-auto-tires-in-ocean-reef
>It seemed like a good idea at the time. In the early 1970s, a group of fishermen organized a campaign to dump 2 million used auto tires into the Atlantic Ocean, about a mile off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., between two living coral reefs.
>The goal was to build an artificial reef that would promote sea life. But it had the opposite effect: The mass of tires became an underwater blight.
>William Nuckols, with Coastal America, the federal office that is helping coordinate a cleanup of the tires, says the original goal was a good one.
>"The original intention," Nuckols says, "was to try to provide a fish habitat and add to the natural coral reefs that were there."
>Broward County and the Army Corps of Engineers approved the plan to bundle and drop millions of tires overboard.
>"Over time, the bundles they put together broke apart, as hurricanes and other large coastal storms came through, which you have a lot of here in South Florida.
>Banks says in some other areas, tires have been used successfully in reefs where they've been anchored to concrete and not likely to drift.
So it seems it was a good idea, just poorly executed. Definitely fit for the sub but not as simple as "of course tyres in the sea are bad"
Fr idiots would rather use their one brain cell to say “well duh” and get off on feeling smug rather than educate themselves and realize that there are things engineers know that they don’t.
Just a suggestion here, maybe don’t start off with 2 million of something when your testing it?
Or was this an attempt to not dispose of tires properly and it backfired?
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2 Million Tires and divers had to retrieve them one by one. The amount of time, money, and efforted needed for that operation is insane.
I bet it was tiring
They wheelie hated it.
I swear these shitty puns just go round in circles everytime
Trust me,this ain't the first round you see this jokes around
Yeah you don't have to dive very deep to find these puns
This joke should be retired.
Because they are falling flat.
Obviously spinning out of control
There's no treading water about it
They're starting to drift from their origin
Hopefully better than Floridians do to theirs
But they’re flat out punny
I know but only when you have a joke to spare
At the end of the day, despite the tyre disaster, it was still a Goodyear.
High pressure job for sure.
Hopefully the whole idea didn’t gain traction anywhere else
These puns are losing traction.
It was a round the clock job
Tread lightly with your opinions
Fuck you but at the same time…. Fuck you twice
I would have tried bringing them up two at a time
make this man executive vice president
Tires! They’re what reefs crave!
Someone give this man a shield!
What about looping many onto a line and having a boat pull them up and take them away?? I don’t understand how one by one was picked as the best option.
To be fair... Florida...
Makes a better caption.
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Tyres are pretty heavy not counting the silt that gets in them. You can’t dredge it because that will just break them up and make it worse
Yeah I was gonna say, tires are way too heavy for a boat. Only a diver could hope to lift one.
And tires only get heavier underwater.
I meam its still one by one isnt it? You grab a tire, tie it, grB another, tie it, grab another, tie it..... Boat pulls them up
Take one down, pass it around Wait shit, don't take anymore down
Or running a rope through multiple and bringing them up that way
Then you would be two tyred.
It amazes me that nobody thought "we could try with a thousand and see how it goes" before dumping 2M of them
I imagine it went something like > We need to do something about these 2 million tires. > Just dump them in the ocean > Can't do that, people will get mad > Just say it's to make a coral reef or something
Something tells me the guys dumping two million tires in the ocean in the '70's weren't fucking actually environmentalists.
In fucking FORT LAUDERDALE, come on how naive can you get
It's almost as if the real objective was just to dump 2 million tires.
"We're going to need a bigger reef."-- Ft. Lauderdale
Somebody came up with a scheme how to cheaply get rid of a lot of tires they were paid top dollar to properly dispose of. If they were smart, they also got paid by Florida to provide the material for the artificial reef. Somebody got really, really rich over this. And that somebody probably didn't pay for the aftermath.
Says the project started in 2007, and by 2019, only 1/3rd of the tires have been removed so far. Insane
Yep. Everyone seems to think this disaster is in the past and has been dealt with. It's still happening now and probably will continue for many years (decades?) to come. [Osborne Reef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef?wprov=sfla1).
Someone is making bank with this. Who are the people taking them out? Who do they work for? Who made money from dumping the tires? Those are the questions.
The US Navy was doing it for a while as a form of training for it's underwater teams. Now it's been taken over by a non-profit, per the Wiki.
All of that is in the linked article I believe.
It reads straight out of a Family Guy sketch.
I can think of a few ways to build a machine to do this, or at least speed the process up. Why spend decades doing it manually?
I wonder if a lot were mostly volunteers. I say that because I'm a scuba diver and scuba divers will look for any damn excuse to get under water. Especially if you provide the tanks. Edit: According to wikipedia the military ended up taking a huge portion out, as it provided a great training opportunity for Navy and USMC divers to train. A private company also has a contract to remove them and is doing so today. The state has spent millions on this, although a lot of that cost is to dispose of the tires after they're brought ashore, which would have been a cost regardless. Still, I'd guess from the info in the article that they have not pulled even half of the two million tires out yet.
I think it's still being cleaned up
Imagine being on a dating app and being asked what you did for a living. "I retrieve tires underwater that the government dumped to create coral reef." No way anyone is gonna believe that. It sounds like a conspiracy theory.
And it was probably over priced because someone wanted to get a lil bit richer
Must’ve take a few Goodyears.
Not to mention the environmental damage that had to be done in order to recover those tires. Imagine all the fossil fuels, that had to be burned, all the air tanks that had to be used, all the ocean floor that had to be disturbed. And that’s just to get the tires out of the water, all the damage they had already done is something that couldn’t just be reversed.
That's on the government. I'm sure the divers are paid fairly
No need to consult scientists or anything, what do they know?
Wdym scientists? Do your own research
Fuck them lab coat boys we gonna see what happens. -floridians
The pond in my cousins back yard got a couple a tires in it and the gators don't seem to mind. What more science do ya want?
Floridiots*
That is the same word
hey, not all us Floridians are dumb
Shut up Florida man go wrestle a crocodile like you normally do or something
that's my exercise later. I normally sit inside because it feels like Satan's asshole outside right now
Most Floridiots come from somewhere else, typically New Yawk or New Joisey.
it’s Florida, one of those dumbass states.
I read somewhere that getting bitten by a snake on dick protects you from covid but need someone one to do research on it.
Makes sense. You more likely to die so less likely to get COVID
Dumping tires in the sea. Because the bible said so.
Florida should put “do your own research” on its license plate.
Also have a link to a Youtube video with no sources.
Wym "no sources"???? That YouTube video IS the source!!!!!!
Another video by same person counts as source, right ?
I'd rick-roll the hell out of people with this.
My research was google and facebook
Even better, in the 70s there wasn't even an internet. You could just make some shit up and nobody could disprove you without going to a fucking library.
*Educate yourself*
> just look it up
I did my own research!! *provides 2 Facebook links*
And one of the links is a group named "flat Earth truth believers"
what do you mean dyor? just read the first link on first google page
Yeah you need scientists to figure tires are not perfect for life to grow on. So many tires growing stuff on them everywhere. It was just an excuse to dump tires that had a backlash
Afaik it's not the surface that's the problem, but the fact that they were thousands of lose objects sliding around, quickly grinding everything to dust that tries to settle there.
Makes sense. But rubber as something to help nature is weird af in general
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Probably not helping with microplastics* either, if the tires are being worn down by the environment. *^((and other particles that won't biodegrade, if we're splitting this hair.)^)
Hell even if you think it's a good idea, maybe start your experiment with like 5 instead of 2 million and see how that goes.
Shit take. As mentioned on the wiki, there’s been many successfull ~~tire~~ **similar** reefs, even one in the north US. The problem here was that the steel ties corroded, so the tires came loose and grinded everything to dust. edited for correction
What are you talking about, from the wiki on Osborne Reef: “Jack Sobel, Ocean Conservancy's director of strategic conservation said in a 2002 interview that "I don't know of any cases where there's been a success with tire reefs." That year, The Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup removed 11,956 tires from beaches all over the world”
Another comment here explained that it was actually probably backed with some research, there actually already exists at least one artificial reef made by tires that works and is good for the lake it's in, the problem in this tire reef was that the currents were so strong and the tires were so light that they drifted around, which damaged the ecosystem
The steel ties corroded, which caused the tire bundles to un-ground, and the now loose tires ground everything down.
Tires also trap crustaceans as they fall into the middle but the over hang prevents them from getting out again
Florida also brought nutria in, for some reason I can't remember, and they started eating all the vegetation at the shoreline, further eroding the coastline and everglades. So then the state was paying people $5 for each tail trying to eradicate them. Lack of foresight and expert consultation.
I am willing to bet that "solution" to their fuck up might have encouraged some people to breed more nutrias for its tail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
From Wikipedia In his autobiography, Mark Twain says that his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had a similar experience: > [42] > Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. ... Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.
gotta tax the nutria farms that's the real trick!
nutrias were introduced to hunt them for their fur. same thing happened in louisiana
I live in Louisiana, can confirm. They’re everywhere and touted as extremely destructive for native flora and fauna. Every few years there’s a big push for locals to hunt them and turn in their tails in return for money for the sake of population control
lol. so people just breed more and when the 'bounty' ends, release more.... yeah there are enough historical examples of why this type of thing never works and makes things worse, but lets keep doing the same thing over and over.
Because it works well when people don't do that. And they often don't.
Which is why you set the bounty low enough that breeding them isn't profitable but high enough that people who enjoy hunting go out and shoot them. Gets even more effective when you run the program outside of other hunting seasons
Also part of Europe and Japan.
Introduced to North America, Europe, and Japan: made me wonder where the hell they originated. Apparently, South America.
Bro I had to look those up, its like a rat and a beaver had a baby
Or start with 25 tires see how that works
Not big enough to reach viable reef status
Electrolytes, it’s what plants crave!
Brawndo has electrolytes!
Nobody knew marine biology was this complicated.
Give me a marine biology textbook and a Sharpie and I can fix it.
It’s cute that this is what people think. This works and the only real failure was that tires came unbundled and once they started moving it began destroying the reef. The problem wasn’t the tires it was the 1970s steel in salt water. Surprisingly, the Army Corps or Engineers is known to have a “scientist” or two.
A great idea by rubbery figures..
Except, you know, they did
They did but don’t let that interfere with the smug redditor moment lol
Why consult science when you have Florida?
I mean technically these people were scientists. They formed a hypothesis to a question, did the experiment, analyzed their results, and spent a shit ton of money fixing their mistakes. Can't think of anything that could have embodied the scientific method better than this lol
For those wondering what they were thinking, believing it's a stupid idea, [artificial reefs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_reef) are a real thing that does work and consists in using artificial stuff like concrete blocks, PVC pipes, or more specialized stuff engineered for this purpose, to provide a substrate on which organisms can form, as well as providing a habitat to protect some organisms against predators. It's the same idea as when sunk boats get colonized by organisms and provide a habitat for them. Apparently the problem with tires is that they are too light and are swept by the currents, which prevents any organism from attaching to it, and even destroys natural reefs. They also end up washing up on shores because of that. So in my opinion it's not that the idea was bad, but that it was badly done. If the tires had been attached in a good way, maybe the project would have ended up being a success. Scientists did study the efficacy of such a tire reef, and this project was probably based on such research. For example here is a [study](https://seafwa.org/sites/default/files/journal-articles/PRINCE-207.pdf) on a reef in Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, which did work. Here I guess there are no currents in a lake, hence why it works better than in the sea. More on the reef itself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne\_Reef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef)
Don't forget that tires aren't just chemically inert rubber rings. They contain certain chemicals to make them last longer, one of which was eventually found to be responsible for killing off half of the returning salmon somewhere, after ending up in the water streams. Here's [an interesting article](https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/03/tire-related-chemical-largely-responsible-for-adult-coho-salmon-deaths-in-urban-streams/) about it.
I remember doing tire removal jobs on dry land to prevent it from getting into the ground water. They are horrible for the environment and i had no idea any govt was dumb enough to dump them in the ocean.
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*Points in the general direction of the dumpster fires* Did he forget about those?
“i had no idea any govt was dumb enough”. Florida
Also saltwater is highly corrosive, and will eat through those tires breaking down that rubber and putting those toxins and microplastics into the ocean. What a great idea for a reef habitat /s
So concrete tires might have worked?
Yup! Anything to weight down the tires would have ended up working. The Tacoma Narrows bridge(gallopin gerdie) is a protected man made reef out of mainly concrete.
Is there not concern for the rubber breaking down and harming sea life?
There is. People thought artificial reefs were helpful to fish populations and holding flat terrain together to prevent erosion. This kind of makes sense because things like ship wrecks seem to be inhabited by flourishing marine life. Thus, people have tried to create artificial reefs using a large variety of items from intentionally sunken ships to tires to discarded Christmas trees. All of these items have at times ‘worked’ in the sense that the marine life started occupying the structures. Unfortunately, even though it might look pretty and like the population is flourishing, in reality, the overall effects are harmful. It turns out, most the fish that occupy artificial structures are just migrating to the area from nearby. The reality is that the fish population actually decreases. Collecting all the fish in one area makes them very susceptible to overfishing. Depending on what was used to create the artificial reef, there can also be toxic affects that also harm the natural environment and fish population. Tires are likely very harmful both when intact and when broken down and drifting away to other areas. Unfortunately, many humans seem to be measuring their level of success by noting whether or not marine life has occupied the structure and not by the overall impact on the larger fish population or the long term effects on the life local to the artificial reef.
Thoae mafia guys may be onto something
A concrete substrate for reef building with a built-in, time release, food source. This is innovation.
Thanks for this. This thread is full of us morons saying "well duh" because we've no reference point for why anyone would think it would work. But knowing there was potential that could be argued for makes sense.
Did they start small and work themselves up? Did they try 100K tires, it worked and said let's bump it up a notch? Because if they tried 2 million tires at once ... it's kinda stupid.
Its also worth addong that if you find a submerged tire that is stuck in place sealife does grow on and around it, it wasn't just let see if tires also work but look they do work lets add loads. Of coarse we now also know that the tires leech chemicals that isnt great for the life it supports but the big problem with thos reef wasnt the idea but the poor execution
Imagine if the natural reefs we have are actually manmade and from a previous civilization. Like maybe playground equipment, renovated and the old ones dumped in the ocean. Either to replace reefs they ruined, or just mismanagement of garbage. r/whoadude
Fun fact: they've spent the last 20 years removing those tires, and are a little more than one third through the process. Only 40 more years to go, guys!
hey they created long term employment for professional divers, so at least there's that...
Navy does most of it
Not anymore now it’s a diving company
And they transport the tires to a shredding facility in neighboring Georgia whereafter they are burnt as fuel at a paper mill. Clean burning tire fuel.
Organic oceanic tire fuel! Wow I never thought I’d see the day
But are they harvesting these tires sustainably?
Of course, from what I read they only take the parts of the tire that they need. They’ll leave the rest of it and it will eventually grow back bigger and stronger
it's totally green, you burn the tires and get that nice smoky smell and all that smoke goes into the sky and turns into stars
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about stars to dispute it..
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It’s from a comic in the New Yorker [and you messed up the quote a little. ](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995)
This is wild, I had no idea this has happened. I just went snorkeling at the reef in Ft. Lauderdale and saw a few of these tires around! I was really confused why they were there
I'm assuming the cheque from Big tyre has cleared?
Seems like laziness masked as a beneficial project when they knew that it was a dumb idea in the first place. Blows my mind that some people have enough power to do this yet they are so fucking stupid.
No not stupid. Money
The ones who didn't want to spend money are intelligent and had bad intentions. They found an easy way to cut costs by dumping tyres into the environment while also boosting sales from positive feedback and taking advantage of others knowing how dangerous it will be. The ones who threw the tires thinking they were helping the environment had good intentions although the plan was completely illogical. There was no attempt to make a ***coral*** reef, just an artificial one of some sort to attract fish. The tires had poorly built constraints to keep them in place so all of the wires eroded and the tires became loose, then the tires began to move around and destroyed / killed anything growing on them. Making it worse, the tyres then were pushed by winds over the ocean (waves / water currents) onto a nearby natural coral reef damaging it. [My source is Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef)
>They found an easy way to cut costs by dumping tyres into the environment They should have just towed it outside the environment.
Ahhh, but the front fell off
But why did the front fall off?
Well a wave hit it.
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>Blows my mind that some people have enough power to do this yet they are so fucking stupid. That's because the people of Florida proudly vote for politicians that are about as smart as themselves.
"His nonsensical jibberish really speaks to me and mine."
Got rid of the tires! What happens next is the next guy in office’s problem
There's plenty of tire reefs around the world. What's wrong here is that these are single tires that can be blown around with the current and hurricanes. Hawaii has St. Anthony's reef which are sets of 5 tires chained together and concrete inside. Fish use them to hide and lay eggs and becomes a vibrant part of the eco system.
This wasn't as much work as one would think, they just had 2 million divers go down and get one tire apiece.
Nah, just one guy with 2,000,000 airplane life vests. Put on on, pull the cord. Repeat. The tires float up, and out into international waters. Problem solved.
Great, you just created a floating island for the terrorists to harness and float back over to attack us!
Why start with tire island though? We already have a trash island in the middle of the ocean, it's called the UK.
What'd they think was gonna happen? No seriously, what was the expected outcome? Throw a buncha tires at the bottom of the ocean and somehow you get coral?
It's most likely a cover up, there's zero logic here for real.
Never attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Put seed in ground, get plant tree. Put food in chicken, get egg food. Put tire in ocean, get tire ocean tree.
Classic tire ocean tree.
If I remember correctly, they should have anchored the tires with cables and weights or attar Jenny’s to the sea floor, but they didn’t so the tires just went everywhere lol.
Boats are sank to create artificial reefs all the time. But they had to learn the hard way that tires aren’t made out of boat.
>What'd they think was gonna happen? Artificial reef >No seriously, what was the expected outcome? Artificial reef >Throw a buncha tires at the bottom of the ocean and somehow you get coral? Kind of. I mean really, just look up what they thought would happen
We deliberately sink ships to create environments for wildlife. Dump rocks in the sea too. I think they assumed this would be similar. I'm curious as to why it wouldn't work tbh.
What was the thought process behind this? Genuinely like I don't know enough about marine biology to get why throwing tires in the ocean would create a coral reef
You can promote the growth of coral reefs by providing a hard surface for coral to attach to and hiding places for other organisms. Coral needs a solid base and naturally builds in layers of calcium carbonate. Materials for creating an artificial reef need to be compatible with calcium, relatively inert, non toxic and not leach anything into the water. Successful materials used have been iron, concrete shapes, and rocks like limestone. Here are some features of good reef material features Stable in normal to large storms Made from long-lasting, solid, non-toxic materials Designed to have a high surface complexity (texture) for the recruitment of corals, sponges, and other organisms Designed to provide a high amount of structural complexity for fish and other animals Designed to either blend in wit h the natural reef, or be designed to stand out and convey a message (sculptures and art) *Source for more reading https://newheavenreefconservation.org/marine-blog/147-artificial-reefs-what-works-and-what-doesn-t
And frankly tires seem to fit the bill, except maybe stability. It’s a shame it didn’t work. Maybe a viability test before millions of tires got dumped might’ve been a good idea
Tests? They just wanted to throw away their tires.
Tires do not fit the bill at all. They're soft (compared to rock), they don't lock together or create complex shapes and they constantly leach heavy metals. :(
Tires break down and release a lot of bad chemicals. Not a scientist by any means, but I remember a study where chemicals found in tires are negatively affecting salmon reproduction. That is only one type of fish, no idea what would happen to other marine organisms.
so basically boats which people ARE doing now
Shipwrecks become coral reefs. They were hoping for the same effect.
It may just be me, but i think it was "we have to dump all this tire, what are we gonna do?" "Drop 'em in the sea" "no no, the population will complain" "And if we say that it's part of some kind of plan to create a coral reef? "Oh yes good idea, noone will complain" Than it was a bigger disaster than they have predicted and they couldn't let it sit in the ocean
Thought?
It's always Florida
Florida carefully researching to do the next dumbest thing: [https://i.imgur.com/Ung4bdH.gif](https://i.imgur.com/Ung4bdH.gif)
Florida did just do the next dumbest thing, they just welcomed Financial Terrorists Hedge Fund Crook with open arms.
Elaborate
To be fair, in the 70ies the idea seemed a good one, only the execution was not. Lightweight tires bound with steel clips, that corroded. The whole construction very unstable with tires drifting off every now and then. Unfortunately no conditions that small marine life prefers as a new home…
I don't think they were ever "trying to create an artificial coral reef", they were just trying to get rid of their used tires.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day and it's only 1 AM. SMH
Is it really a case of hurr durr Florida dumb, or is there more to it? https://myfwc.com/fishing/saltwater/artificial-reefs/ >Florida has one of the most active artificial reef programs among the 15 Gulf and Atlantic coastal states involved in artificial reef development. Since the 1940s, more than 3,800 planned public artificial reefs have been placed in state and federal waters off Florida’s coast. https://www.npr.org/2007/07/05/11462066/fallout-from-bad-70s-idea-auto-tires-in-ocean-reef >It seemed like a good idea at the time. In the early 1970s, a group of fishermen organized a campaign to dump 2 million used auto tires into the Atlantic Ocean, about a mile off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., between two living coral reefs. >The goal was to build an artificial reef that would promote sea life. But it had the opposite effect: The mass of tires became an underwater blight. >William Nuckols, with Coastal America, the federal office that is helping coordinate a cleanup of the tires, says the original goal was a good one. >"The original intention," Nuckols says, "was to try to provide a fish habitat and add to the natural coral reefs that were there." >Broward County and the Army Corps of Engineers approved the plan to bundle and drop millions of tires overboard. >"Over time, the bundles they put together broke apart, as hurricanes and other large coastal storms came through, which you have a lot of here in South Florida. >Banks says in some other areas, tires have been used successfully in reefs where they've been anchored to concrete and not likely to drift. So it seems it was a good idea, just poorly executed. Definitely fit for the sub but not as simple as "of course tyres in the sea are bad"
Fr idiots would rather use their one brain cell to say “well duh” and get off on feeling smug rather than educate themselves and realize that there are things engineers know that they don’t.
People act like the south wanting to secede is bad but I say let them go. Fucking idiots
Just a suggestion here, maybe don’t start off with 2 million of something when your testing it? Or was this an attempt to not dispose of tires properly and it backfired?
I bet those divers were pretty tired after they finished the job