These days, we’re jumpstarting artificial reefs with all sorts of things: cement, subway cars, ghost ships, and more—but we might not be doing so if it weren’t for pioneers with some wacky ideas in what might well be the wackiest state of all, the Sunshine State.
Artificial reefs as a concept date back to pre-Christendom, at least to when the Romans built a reef of “stones and construction material” at the mouth of the harbor at Lilybaeum to protect it from the Carthaginians during the First Punic War, around 250 BCE. Similarly, Persians kept Arabian pirates at bay by blocking off the mouth of the Tigris.
A floating fish-aggregating device (now known as a FAD for short) has also long been employed by the native fisherfolk of the modern-day Philippines dating as far back as anyone knows, too.
In the 18th century, Japan contrived the first modern artificial reef for purposes beyond war and conflict, using rubble and rocks to grow kelp.
These here United States took to the experiment during the early 19th century using logs to improve fishing off the coast of South Carolina.
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Shortly thereafter, of course, came the industrial revolution, and, naturally, the plot twist. Rocks, rubble, and timber gave way to retired refrigerators, vending machines, cars, and shopping carts, and so on. Some of those things worked better than others. (Refrigerants, like freon, probably didn’t do the seafloor or its occupants so well over time.)
Moving ahead to Florida in the early 1970s, an initiative under the guise of ecology, dubbed Broward Artificial Reef Incorporated (BARINC), sought to stimulate coral-reef regrowth by sinking millions of worn-out tires off the coast of Fort Lauderdale.
Headed up by Florida Atlantic University Professor of Ocean Engineering Ray McAllister and approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, BARINC’s Osborne Reef project enlisted the retired minesweeper USS Thrush (no. 2, because that name was apparently too good to retire) more than 100 private vessels to bundle and sink more than 2 million tires.
Goodyear, needless to say, was stoked and quickhanded with the following 1972 press release hyping up the project by proclaiming that it would “provide a haven for fish and other aquatic species” thanks to the “excellent properties of scrap tires as reef material.” Experts in matters of marine biology? They would be.
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If you’re imagining this initiative failed, you probably have no idea how right you are: Not only did nothing stick to the rubber tires, leaving the area devoid of life, the steel-and-nylon-bound bundles, which stretched across 31 soccer fields’ worth of seafloor, eventually gave way. The tires, as you might imagine, began to return to the surface.
“They’re a constantly killing coral destruction machine,” William Nuckols, a spokesman/coordinator for the federal environmental committee Coastal America told CBS News as the disaster first began unraveling in 2007.
At the time, thousands of those tires, CBS reported, were found wedged against a nearby natural, presumably healthy coral reef, killing not only many corals but much wildlife therein and -about.
“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area,” McAllister said. “It just didn’t work that way. I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”
Then Governor Charlie Crist initially proposed a budget of $2 million, which was swiftly expanded to $3.4 million.
By 2009, efforts by the U.S. Navy, Army, and U.S. Coast guard all claim to have recovered 72,000 tires (no expense reported), and today, Florida’s DEP states that cleanup efforts have resulted in more than half a million tires recovered thanks to probably another contract for $5 million.
Schlueter Vessel Management & Consulting, the beneficiaries of that pretty little contract, say they’ll maybe have just shy of 1 million tires—roughly half of those deposited—collected by 2033, per car-culture-and-news blog Jalopnik.
Who knows, maybe a few more decades and another cool $10 mil and we’ll stop seeing the havoc wrought.
But in all fairness to MacAllister, FAU, Florida, and perhaps even Goodyear, their hearts were in the right place, and you might argue their heads sort of were, too. If they hadn’t experimented (along with others in—and out of—the states), we might not have so many artificial reefs scattered so far and wide on our beloved blue marble today—not least among them those that create the canvases for our great sport’s very particular designs.
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