Florida’s Osborne Reef: 2 Million Tires Dumped in the Ocean to Build a ‘Revolutionary’ Reef… and It Wrecked the Marine Ecosystem

Oh weird.

What kind of trash can we dump into the ocean next to see if coral reef grows?

IIRC many critters would get inside of a tire and go around and around until they starved to death.

Is maintenance a forbidden word in Florida? As I remember it there was supposed to be a regular check up to make sure the reef was stable.

> **Osborne Reef** is an artificial reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida at 26.10748°N 80.06493°W. Originally constructed of concrete jacks, it was the subject of an ambitious expansion project utilizing old and discarded tires. The expansion ultimately failed, and the reef has come to be considered an environmental disaster—ultimately doing more harm than good in the coastal Florida waters.
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> In 2007, after several false starts, cleanup efforts began when the United States military took on the project. This cleanup exercise provided the military with a real-world training environment for their diving and recovery personnel, coupled with the benefit of helping the Florida coast without incurring significant costs to the state. In 2015, a civilian corporation took over, and had removed one third of the tires by November 2019.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef

Typical Florida brain shit

Another brilliant idea from Florida Man. Maybe next we can shoot the water til the reefs come back, jfc guys

Car tires have anti-fungal chems added to the rubber to prevent tires from rotting, which was a problem in the past. The same thing happens when tires wear over time/use. The tire dust gets washed into creeks killing life in the creeks and everything downstream.

Guaranteed whoever came up with this idea knew it wouldn’t work and thought they could get paid to dump trash in the ocean.

Thaat explains their election tendancies 

Our kind is the fucking worst.

Don’t even try telling me people did not know better. Don’t bother telling people haven’t long since figured out that dumping our mess into any body of water creates catastrophic results.

Tire reefs? The same tires that put micro plastics in the air? Those tyres?

This is the sort of problem that a basic, baseline level of education would prevent. America really doing themselves a disservice by remaining so fucking ignorant.

No one here is reading about what happened.

The tires were bound with cables and chains, which ultimately corroded and broke. The tires were then subject to currents and were moving around. Ocean life will not build an ecosystem around mobile objects, they need to be stable. So now they are trying to get the tires out.

I haven’t seen anything about chemicals being overly harmful, or that they tires harmed any existing wildlife. It looks like the only issue is that they weren’t secured properly. If they had been filled with concrete it may have been a very different story.

Did they not test this at all first on a small scale?

If I am reading this right the tires were and are not the problem but the method of tethering them in place…… or did no one else is. The comments read the article?

Kinda funny how dumb red states are