Rubber Reefs To Burn

[ricki]

I can remember when Broward Artificial Reef or BARINC was a popular, widely supported concept. It started in the mid 1960's and extended into the 1970's. They had a massive stockpile of used tires at the south end of Port Everglades in Ft. Lauderdale. Barges and even individual pleasure boats at times conveyed bundles of tires ballasted with concrete cylinders and banded together to be dropped between the second and third reefs off Sunrise Blvd. As I recall, in one approach the tires were banded into a stack of five or six tires. Concrete test cylinders were banded into the tire well. Some of the bands were designed to fail allowing the tire cluster to spread into a "flower" of sorts. Single tires were also place which proved to be quite mobile moving over inner reefs over a large area.


Photos from: http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/cat...bornepilot.htm

Problem was the tires designed to roll, did that and managed to migrate over a very large section of bottom including right up on to the beach. Some of the tires would even float and wash in. Someone eventually figured out that rubber isn't a good substrate for hard bottom colonization (i.e. corals, bryozoans, crustose algae, etc.). So, the plug was pulled on this nifty waste disposal aka reef "building" effort.



A recent video about the recovery effort appears above



Not sure why this tire loaded barge is heading in?



Tires were stockpiled at several local boat ramps and recreational boaters were encouraged to haul and dump the tires.






It was a marine civic project of sorts.
Photos from: http://netsciencenews.no-ip.org/www....-be-retrieved/



EPD staff cruising the reef in more recent times

Above image and historic photos from: http://netsciencenews.no-ip.org/


Now there is a massive project to pickup and dispose of the millions of tires dumped offshore.



Military divers snag more than 10,000 tires from Lauderdale dumping ground


By David Fleshler
Sun-Sentinel.com

June 29, 2007, 12:32 PM EDT


FORT LAUDERDALE -- At the end of three weeks of work, military divers retrieved 10,370 tires from an infamous underwater dumping ground off the city's famed beaches.

The operation by Army, Navy and Coast Guard divers was intended to test methods for recovering the tires, dropped offshore in the early 1970s in a failed attempt to create an artificial reef.

Spread over 34 acres of the ocean floor, the tires have harmed the real reefs, drifting onto them and killing the coral, creating a bleak undersea vista of doughnut-shaped rubber. After the tires are removed, it will take years for corals, sponges and other marine life to recolonize the bottom. If budgets hold out and things go as planned, the divers will return for three or four months each summer for the next three years, with the goal of retrieving about 700,000 tires from the bottom.

Army 1st Lt. Russell Destremps, Platoon Leader, 86th Engineering Dive Team, based in Fort Eustis, Va., said the initial operation went forward without injuries or major problems, although they had hoped to retrieve more tires than they did.

"The mission ran really well," he said, speaking by phone from Fort Eustis. "It was a bit overwhelming, with the amount of tires on the bottom. Hopefully next year we'll be able to improve our production rate."

With the blessing of biologists and government officials, the tires originally were dumped into the water in bundles in hopes of creating structures that would attract fish and surfaces that would support sponges and coral. But few marine creatures showed up and the tires ended up as a barren field of rubber. The nylon cords on the bundles broke, allowing tires to wash up on the beach and come to rest on the real reefs.

The cost of cleaning it up would have run into the tens of million by some estimates. But by using tire retrieval as a training program for salvage divers -- paid for out of military training budgets -- the cleanup became affordable.

The tires picked up this month were taken by truck to Georgia, where a paper recycler was to burn them as fuel. Jan Rae Clark, environmental manager for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, said it's unclear who will take the much larger number of tires anticipated to be collected next summer. But she said the department expects to receive price quotes from two contractors, both of which would use the tires to produce energy.

The state has budgeted $2 million for the tire disposal, which she said is expected to cover the costs for all three years.

William Nuckols, project coordinator for Coastal America, a federal agency that set up these combinations of training and community service, said future funding will depend on whether Congress maintains training budgets for military salvage diving. Although the budget dipped the year before last, he said, it has usually held steady. Next years, assuming funding comes through, he said he would try to bring more divers than the 40 who worked on the tires this month.


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