Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
New projects aim to clean up waste tires from ocean floor
Attempt to create artificial reef in 1970s failed
An undersea waste dump of tires, a South Florida environmental problem as weird and intractable as the Burmese pythons in the Everglades, may shrink over the next few years if several proposed clean-up initiatives go into action.
Three companies and a nonprofit organization have applied for or received permits to retrieve some of the tires, dumped off Fort Lauderdale in the early 1970s in a failed attempt to create an artificial reef. Leading the list is a Louisiana company that won a state contract to use ships to pull trawl nets along the ocean floor to scoop up tires and bring them ashore.
The tires had been heaved off ships and boats into 70 feet of water about a mile off Fort Lauderdale to create a fishing reef, a structure that would attract fish for people to catch. The structure, known as Osborne Reef, was a disaster. Bundles of tires broke apart and tires drifted onto corals, creating a lifeless, industrial expanse across 36 acres that still stuns divers more than 40 years later.
Several hundred thousand of the estimated 2 million tires rest on the largest field, off Hugh Taylor Birch State Park in Fort Lauderdale. Several removal projects have retrieved about 300,000 tires.
B & J Martin Inc., which services the offshore oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico, was awarded a $600,000 contract by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to use 60-foot-wide nets to collect tires from the ocean floor. Three 110-foot ships will take turns pulling the nets along the sea bottom, each off-loading its haul at Port Everglades. The work is expected to take three years, stopping for hurricane season.
The nets would have a 4-inch mesh, preventing most marine life from being caught in them. Any fish, sea turtles, corals or other animals caught in the nets would have to be immediately returned to the ocean.
Pat Quinn, a biologist for Broward County who oversees efforts to deal with the tires, said the net method is likely to dislodge corals that have settled on tires, but he compared it to the tissue damage the body may have to endure in the removal of a tumor.
“There are going to be some corals that have to be sacrificed,” he said. “There are tires out there that are bundled together. They actually look like rubber caterpillars, and they’re pretty stable. Those do have some decent-sized stony corals on them. To remove all those corals would be expensive. Some may have to be removed, but then others may just have to be sacrificed for the greater good.”
Several safeguards would be imposed, according to the company’s application for a federal permit. B & J Martin would not work in environmentally sensitive areas, it would have to take steps to watch for manatees, sea turtles and smalltooth sawfish.
Although the company has a state contract, Quinn said it may be difficult for it to obtain the necessary state and federal environmental permits to do the work.
“That’s something that’s never been done before on the coral reefs,” he said. “They may think the potential harm that a trawler could do could outweigh the benefits of removing the tires.”
The company official handling the contract did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Dee Ann Miller, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, said the B & J Martin contract was a pilot project to see whether this method would be quicker and more effective than using divers, without harming the environment.
“The department plans to conduct an analysis of the results of the pilot project, its potential to shorten the time and costs to complete the tire abatement while preserving the reef, and projections for continuing or expanding the diver retrieval of tires from the area,” she said.
Another $1 million has been appropriated by the state Legislature to allow for a continuation of work by Industrial Divers Corp. of Fort Lauderdale, which has successfully retrieved tires in previous years, according to DEP. Another company, 4Ocean, and a nonprofit group called South Florida Association of Environmental Professionals, have both applied for permits to use divers to bring them up.