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Officials to remove 1970s tire reef that became eco-disaster off Fort Lauderdale |
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An undersea graveyard of discarded
tires dumped off Fort Lauderdale in the early 1970s will start to be dismantled
this summer to correct a misguided effort to create the world's biggest
artificial reef.
About 1 million to 2 million tires, often strapped
together in bundles, were tossed overboard from ships and pleasure boats about
35 years ago to create a fishing reef, a structure that would attract fish for
people to catch. But the tires broke free during storms and bounced around to
invade real reefs, killing coral, sponges and other marine life.
The debacle left a 34-acre field of tires about a mile from the beach, an
undersea eyesore that one environmental official compared to a hazardous waste
dump.
Gov. Charlie Crist has proposed spending $2 million to dispose of
about 675,000 of the tires. In June, about three dozen Army and Navy divers will
test methods for recovering them, such as stringing them necklace-like onto
ropes or loading them into nets on the ocean floor.
"It will get the
tires off the reef and away from the reef," said Ken Banks, a reef specialist
with the Broward County Environmental Protection Department, which will manage
the work. "It should allow the reef to come back to life."
Of the tires
heaved into the ocean, about 700,000 remain in dense packs between two reefs,
the rest having drifted off or washed up on the beach. While some tires that
appear to be tied together and stable will be left in place, the state's money
will allow most of the rest to be removed.
The military divers will work
for free as part of their training. In a similar operation, Army and Navy divers
have removed microfilament fishing lines from the floor of Puget
Sound.
"It's a large-scale salvage operation," said Will Nuckols, project
coordinator for Coastal America, a federal agency that sets up partnerships with
other branches of government. "These are the same guys who recover sunken
vessels, who recover military assets that have fallen into the
ocean."
Accompanying the divers will be an Army transport vessel, called
an LCU 2000, that is equipped with a crane. The crane will hoist the tires
directly onto cargo containers on the ship. When they're full, the ship will
head to Port Everglades, and trucks will haul the tires to recyclers,
incinerators or landfills.
When the state first considered recycling,
there was concern that the tires would be so encrusted with sand, salt and sea
organisms that they would decay and generate odors that would make the tires
unsuitable for many uses. But samples collected a few months ago turned out to
be not as difficult to deal with as feared, with organisms drying and falling
off, rather than decaying and sticking in cracks in the rubber.
Recyclers
slice tires into pieces for use as playground surfaces, colored mulch and
septic-tank drainage fields. Power plants burn tires to produce
electricity.
Jan Rae Clark, environmental manager for the solid waste
section of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, said the
recyclingwill cost the state about $3 per tire.
The work this summer will
be a pilot project, intended to test methods for removing tires from the seabed.
Assuming all goes well, divers will return each summer for the next three years
until the 675,000 tires have been hauled up.
Source: South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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