Right now, on a section of ocean floor roughly a mile off Fort Lauderdale, a team of contractors continues to tally tires. Not a figure of speech. A genuine state contract, set to renew in 2025 and extending into the next decade, compensates divers to keep retrieving tires from the Atlantic’s depths one barge load at a time. By the conclusion of 2025, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection reported the removal of 538,176 tires solely within the current cleanup phase, with its own estimates indicating that efforts will carry on into the early 2030s. That\u2019s the conclusion. The starting point, for most of the intervening fifty years, is that virtually nobody was handling this at all.<\/p>\n
The statistic that truly counts here is the one that wasn’t precisely defined at the time. Florida\u2019s environmental agency now estimates the initial count at somewhere between 1 million and 2 million tires, a range broad enough to suggest that individuals from the organization that established the reef were not counting thoroughly as it occurred. Two million is the number that persisted in the media and folklore. A more measured estimate aligns more closely with what the state will officially acknowledge in writing. Regardless, it represented a substantial number of tires, and in 1972, that seemed to encompass the entire point.<\/p>\n
The strategy that made sense in 1972<\/p>\n
Consider the issue from the opposite perspective for a moment. During the early 1970s, the nation was facing a mounting accumulation of used tires and lacked appropriate disposal options. Landfills rejected them because tires capture methane underground and often resurface through the fill. A nonprofit named Broward Artificial Reef, collaborating with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, proposed an elegant solution on paper: bundle old tires with steel bands, deploy them offshore, and allow them to form the foundational layer for a new coral reef. It was touted at the time as the largest artificial reef project in existence, spanning around 34 acres of ocean floor according to subsequent Navy dive-team records. Inexpensive materials, a pre-existing disposal dilemma resolved, and a public relations success transforming waste into habitat. All parties involved were acting in good faith.<\/p>\n
What they failed to account for was physics.<\/p>\n
Why a tire is a poor building block and a submerged ship is a sound one<\/p>\n
Contrast the tires with the artificial reefs that actually succeed: cleaned and stripped ship hulls, retired subway cars, poured concrete modules specifically designed for the task. All of these possess a characteristic that tires lack, which is mass that remains where placed. A steel hull embeds in the sand, providing coral larvae with a stable, textured surface to cling to for decades. A rubber tire, secured with a few metal bands to a dozen of its counterparts, remains buoyant, smooth-sided, and light enough that a single tropical storm can dislodge an entire group.<\/p>\n
This is precisely what transpired repeatedly for nearly fifty years. Marine scientists Robin Sherman and Richard Spieler at Nova Southeastern University documented this trend in a 2006 engineering paper, noting that \u201cstorm events and ocean currents have caused the bands to give way and the break-up of the reef.\u201d Once adrift, the tires didn’t settle. They rolled. Storm after storm drove them across the seafloor and into adjacent natural reefs, scraping live coral down to bare rock along the way. The material intended to support new coral instead spent five decades achieving the opposite\u2014and did so remarkably well.<\/p>\n
Decades of efforts to resolve it<\/p>\n
For almost thirty years following 1972, hardly anyone retrieved a single tire. The first substantial attempt didn\u2019t occur until the 2000s, and even then progress was sluggish until the U.S. Navy became involved. \u201cBy coordinating military salvage training exercises with this real-world issue, we are executing a coral protection project that government natural resource agencies would have struggled to achieve independently,\u201d stated William Nuckols, the Coastal America project coordinator who helped organize the initiative, in the winter 2008 edition of Currents, a U.S. Navy dive-team magazine. Between 2007 and 2009, divers from Navy Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit Two worked the site every summer, recovering nearly 1,000 tires per day and aiming to remove between 500,000 and a million tires across the 34-acre area.<\/p>\n
I prefer this segment of the narrative to the disaster aspect, honestly. It aligns with something I have always believed about remedying real issues: genuine repair is almost never a single grand overhaul. It consists of many unremarkable seasons, the same team returning to the same stretch of ocean floor, one barge at a time, for over twenty years. In my experience, true progress appears much more like that than like a dramatic rescue.<\/p>\n
Where the count stands currently<\/p>\n
Navy divers could not operate the site indefinitely, and after 2009, the responsibility shifted to commercial contractors under state contract. From 2015 through 2025 alone,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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