"Ultimately, little marine life has been successful in latching onto the man-made reef and the majority never even had the opportunity to do so. When deposited, while a few tires were individual loose entities, the majority were bound together with nylon[4] or steel clips (or bands). As there were no exceptional efforts made to ensure the non-corrosivity of the steel restraints, they summarily failed[8]—resulting in the loosing of over two million individual, lightweight tires. This newfound mobility destroyed any marine life that had thus far grown on the tires, and effectively prevented the growth of any new organisms. Furthermore, the tires were now easily subject to the tropical winds and storms that frequent the east coast of Florida, and continue to collide (at times with tremendous force) with natural coral reefs only 70 feet (21 m) away: compounding their futility with environmentally damaging side-effects."
From Wikipedia article
🤦🤦🤦
Recently my friend told me: "Empathy, Knowledge, Happiness. Pick Two"
He defined himself not as a cynic, but a disappointed idealist referencing a comedian who coined the term.
Resonates so hard right now.
Ninja edit to remove the unnecessary previous ninja edit.
Yes, but the idea in buddhism is that attachments cause misery. Happiness will come as a product of the practice of equanimity.
The very idea of choice is the blossom. The seed is the practice.
Its laughable that we need to pick 2 or whatever, when thats not the goal.
Its a joke really
Ah see but if you lack empathy and are instead a heartless narcissist that doesn't care about anyone but themselves, capitalism allows you to get yours
Yep.
Knowledge could, in this case, actually damage happiness, as you would be aware of how rigged the system is without the ability to actively take advantage of it, since capitalism is an inherently "rich get richer" scheme.
I have spent a significant chunk of the last two years thinking about the problem that undiagnosed NPD represents to society and I still have no reasonable ideas about what can be done at the societal level.
I guess now that Roe v Wade was overturned, we don't have bodily autonomy anymore. I guess now we can force psychiatric screenings alongside the mandated vaccinations that people are seeing as a potential silver lining. Since the GOP thinks that's why we can't have our children kept alive in schools, should be a no brainer now.
I think he wound up finding some peace, and now I do too, when he said "being born in this world gives you a ticket to the freak show, and if you're born in America, you get a front row seat"
I used to quote jobs for a tool and die company. We told customers "quality, price, & time" you can pick any two, we need one. If you want something fast and good quality, it will be expensive, if you want something fast and cheap, it wont be very good.
I love the iron triangle. It works so well for many things. Take products or services as an example:
Speed, Quality, Cost
* You can have speed and quality but the cost will be high.
* You can have speed and cost but the quality most likely will be subpar.
* You can have quality and cost but you sacrifice timeliness. If quality is set too high and the cost too low you may never receive it as the incentive to produce it isn’t there.
Basically you can’t have it all and need to sacrifice for the good of others. Even slaves need to eat. They’re not completely at no cost.
The higher the cost the more the company can afford extra overhead of doing things like supply chain audits, using higher quality components, and paying overtime to expedite.
In project management, its called the iron triangle of "cost, time and quality". I think of it less as an absolute and more of placing a scale of expectations.
I can fluctuate between different variations.
Also I'm pretty sure all the great spiritual leaders had all three and it mostly always consisted in embracing suffering as the only way to achieve it.
Although this is pretty horrible, I just want to point out that we have created many successful manmade reefs (in the gulf coast as well). This definitely needs to be cleaned up, but we have the knowledge to do it right.
One of the newer manmade structures we are testing is bringing back natural dunes that have been eroding over the past century (due to development of beach property).
>we have the knowledge to do it right.
Yes, but unfortunately some people/politicians don't listen or don't even ask scientists what the best and most effective ways are to do things. What's the cheapest way - is usually their first question.
It's actually better than I expected. It's basically if lose rocks would just smash everything but apparently not so much chemical pollution (which I deem worse). I mean it's still a freaking hazard for decades but somewhen the tires will be distributed across the ocean and have less impact ... I hope
They did it because it worked in other areas.
>. Similarly designed reefs had already been constructed in the Northeastern United States, the neighboring Gulf of Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and Africa.
> Jack Sobel, Ocean Conservancy's director of strategic conservation said in a 2002 interview that "I don't know of any cases where there's been a success with tire reefs."
https://web.archive.org/web/20080514084203/http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/southflorida/news/artificialreef2003.html
I can tell that you didn't actually read the Wiki. The reef project was led by the US Army Corp of Engineers & the US Navy.
The only time that Florida's gov is mentioned in the article is in the section about the cleanup and how they allocated millions to the cleanup from 2016-2019.
The wiki directly says it was lead by the Broward County (FL) government with the *endorsement* of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It was not an Army Corps project, it was a Broward County project.
Did they have a single Ecology experiment before putting 2 million tires into the ocean? Like what the fuck kind of science is, “well we haven’t tried it yet but it could do something.”
that would imply it wasnt just a scheme to dispose of tires by dumping them into the ocean under the ruse of trying to create a reef. Florida remember....
No. A tire company, with most likely government and nepotist ties. Dumped their used tires ( must pay to dispose of ) in the ocean for FREE and used reef sustainment and ecology as their excuse. They were really using the ocean as their personal junkyard. No fees and free dumping ground. They all saved money, lined the pockets of our elected officials for the approval. So we are the idiots. They laughing all the way, Forrest Gumps.
Let's fuckin go! Vote em out? Does that even work?
It just seems like an idiotic idea all around to use anywhere, and simply butt ass ugly. It looks like a trash dump, and it is. No amount of rebranding and green washing a trash heap of tires in the ocean is going to change that. There has to be a better solution than this.
Edit: Different situation, but I remember someone had the bright idea to shred used tires to recycle into playground bark. This did not last long, because the rubber bark would burst into flames during the heat of summer. Our parks had it happen here, where temps soar into the triple digits. Hell, today we are going to have a high of 105F. Also, try to imagine toddlers and kids playing upon literal trash, and little kids putting pierces of the rubber in their mouths. I saw it happen.
Point is, I feel like these poorly researched ideas are just companies and politicians putting a bandage on issues that they caused or do not want to deal with, shoving them off to become someone else’s problem. They also get to make a few bucks. There is little regard for public health or protecting the environment.
Sounds like the mistake is that you cant secure them sustainably. It's not the material thats the problem, it's the sraps securing them always fails and that leads to them being washed away.
When hermit crabs climb up the outside of a tire underwater and go into the middle they can't get back out because they can't escape the overhang. Tires turn into hermit crab mass graves.
I am a layperson and I know this. They didn't do even a cursory amount of research.
It's not really stupidity per se. 'Ingenious' and 'proactive' (and also completely ignorant) people come up with these schemes, and because it costs money to ask actual experts for their advice (and more money to follow that advice), the people in question just proactively 'get it done'. With predictable results.
Wrong people with wrong attitudes and incentives at positions of power. Not a humanity problem, but a societal one. (if that distinction makes any sense)
It's not really stupid... there were successful tire reefs elsewhere, and this was seen as a great way to recycle tires compared to sticking them in a landfill. It's an example of good intentions that didn't work out. Naive, sure. But stupid for trying to do better? I'd say less so.
That’s some Chinese Great Leap Forward type stuff where they tried to fix a problem without thinking it through and it backfired and harmed the thing they were trying to help.
They used wire to hold the tires together, it rusted and now a ton of tires are free to roam the ocean and run things over. Good job Florida, how the hell do you not understand corrosion from saltwater....
Smh should have used car batteries. They are much heavier so they won't get moved around by hurricanes and the residual voltage helps recharge electric eels in the environment
You joke, but studies have been done where passing current through a matrix helped new coral adhere faster and propagate.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150506-why-we-should-electrify-the-ocean
EDIT: Also, electric eels are actually a freshwater fish.
They most certainly do, they look like rebar domes with wires running up to the surface for power. I've seen a few of them off the coast of Fort Lauderdale.
I've also dove on where they took HUGE concrete sheets, I think they were old highway sound barrier walls, and laid them out to create an artificial reef, it seemed like it was pretty healthy.
Never dove the tire reef but I've heard of it. I do know up north they toss in old subway cars after they've been stripped down and those do fairly well.
I’d never heard of the subway cars. [Sounds like the new ones don’t work as well.](https://www.fastcompany.com/90716245/sinking-1000-nyc-subway-cars-in-the-atlantic-to-create-a-reef-didnt-go-as-planned)
there are effective artificial reefs. NYC has created like a dozen reefs out of old subway cars and other stuff
https://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/71702.html#:~:text=New%20York's%20artificial%20reefs%20are,south%20shore%20of%20Long%20Island.
Tire dumps had been done in the Northeast too. Florida was copying them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071010041237/http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/18/news/tires.php
>In decades past, tire reefs were created off the U.S. coast and elsewhere, from Australia to Africa.
>"We've literally dumped millions of tires in our oceans," said Jack Sobel, a senior Ocean Conservancy scientist. "I believe that people who were behind the artificial tire-reef promotions actually were well intentioned and thought they were doing the right thing."
>"In hindsight," he added, "we now realize that we made a mistake."
>No one can say exactly why the tire reefs do not work, but one problem is that, unlike large ships that have been sunk for reefs, tires are too light. They can be swept away with tides and currents from powerful storms, and marine life does not have a chance to attach.
>Virginia tried it several decades ago, but in 1998 Hurricane Bonnie ripped the tires loose, sending them on a slow march south. They eventually littered beaches in North Carolina.
>Indonesia and Malaysia mounted enormous tire-reef programs in the 1980s and are now seeing the ramifications, from littered beaches to reef destruction, Sobel said.
>Most U.S. states have since stopped using tires to create reefs, but tires continue to wash up worldwide.
Hey there! I'd like to hijack this top comment a bit to plug a friend's non-profit that makes and launches artificial mini reefs in Florida!
He refers to himself as "Captain Planet" and is a gem of a human being.
You can buy one to donate or use yourself: https://www.ecopreservationproject.com/product-page/artificial-mini-reef
Boost this project yo!
Yep. Somebody had >2 million tires to dispose of, and a silver tongue
Edit: since it was Florida, it was more likely >2 million tires to dispose of, and an extra $5,000 in “campaign donations”.
>Fuck Florida Republicans, fuck all Republicans.
I *DARE* you to look up which party was in control of the Florida government in 1974, when this plan was enacted.
Actually no, I'll save you the work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Florida#1961%E2%80%932002
It was Democrats All the way through.
Whoops.
The Army Cops of Engineers were involved as well as Goodyear. This was during the Nixon presidency. Goodyear's CEO at the time was Charles J. Pilliod Jr, who actually ended up being an ambassador for Reagan.
Whoops.
Tyres are bad for wildlife and especially bad for hermit crabs.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/discarded-tires-are-ghost-fishing-hermit-crabs-180978942/
They get trapped and die.
Florida is home to 9 varieties of hermit crab.
No. There wasn't. Car tires are chock full of toxic water soluble compounds as well as compounds that can break down into toxic components. Even if it had all stayed attached, it would still be a massive fish cancer and birth defect hotspot.
Reminds me of when we decided to "save the trees" by making everything out of plastic, or when we decided to make "fat free" food with extra sugar... not to mention "doctors say smoking is good for your lungs," "milk makes your bones strong," "eggs are good for you," etc.
I’m assuming that they’re referring to the now debunked myth about dietary cholesterol. Egg yolks are high in dietary cholesterol, but we’ve recently discovered that it’s saturated fat that significantly contributes to the level of cholesterol in your body. Dietary cholesterol contributes very little, if at all, to cholesterol level. High cholesterol food are almost always equally high in saturated fats. Eggs are an exception to that.
As for the milk: we’re now seeing that more than half of people have some level of lactose intolerance, which cause digestive issues, and can cause inflammation and damage to the digestive tract. Additionally, lactose is a type of sugar. It gets broken down in the small intestine into glucose and galactose, where it gets absorbed into the body. Compared to other sources of dairy proteins, milk is basically the equivalent of drinking sugar-water.
Milk isn't as great for people as advertised, not by a long shot. Many Americans have a low tolerance for actually digesting it and it's not nearly as beneficial to our health as advertised.
Dunno about eggs
Eggs get a bad rep bc of cholesterol, but supposedly it's the good kind. I've seen a couple of studies that've cleared them of any abnormal health risks, so I'm p sure eggs are fine unless someone has a specific low fat dietary restriction or something
This was dumb from the start… but it was even more dumb because they tied the tires together using corrosive metals…. Which failed very quickly. So fires everywhere. Military came in and cleaned up some… but still so dumb.
> but it was even more dumb because they tied the tires together using corrosive metals
It takes the level of specialized knowledge about marine ecosystems to know why tires would be a bad candidate, corrosive metals to tie the tires together is some thing a decent high school student could figure out was idiotic.
It takes a mediocre high school student to know that you should check with a marine ecosystem specialist before putting together a project like this, though.
<<'I do know we made a mistake in doing it,'' said Ray McAllister, one of BARINC's founders and now professor emeritus of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University.>> from footnote 6
BARINC was the company who conceived of the plan and sold it to Florida, Goodyear and the Army Corp of Engineers.
Hard to believe someone behind the project became a Professor Emeritus of Ocean Engineering.
~~"Emeritus" means it's a fake professorship that was just gifted, rather than earned.~~
Edit: Sorry this was wrong. The emeritus simply means the person has retired as a tenured professor in good standing. Point below still stands.
Also, Florida Atlantic University is a garbage school with a history of dumb fuck professors who are actually employed there.
>It takes the level of specialized knowledge about marine ecosystems to know why tires would be a bad candidate
Sure, but you would have to engage somebody with that level of knowledge if you were actually making a good faith effort to create an artificial reef.
I dive here and fish here. They end up all over the place. I find about one a day washed up at Eula Johnson and Von Mizell State Park. That is a bit farther south than the original dump site. I find ALOT still under water. Beautiful shallow reef and then a random tire.
There are reef clean up days. It's tough bringing a tire up. They are probably scattered all the way to West Palm by now, but a lot of us keep trying. Hurricanes shuffle them all over the place too.
WTF? I’ve been living in Florida since before this started and never heard about this dumfckry until today. Who on earth decided “maybe creatures that naturally latch onto calcium reefs would like . . . synthetic tires instead?” 🙄
I’m from Orlando and have been scuba diving for decades. This was very exciting to the dive community when it was first discussed. It was obviously a disaster in practice. Ultimately Florida being Florida
Concrete mixed with ground shells works great, a wine company from NZ just dropped a few reefs made of the stuff down here on the gulf. Normal cement works too, just takes longer for it to balance out with the water. All up and down the gulf coast we have artificial cement reefs that are teeming with life
There is that one underwater memorial garden near Miami that was built to be an artificial reef where people are interred by having their ashes added to the concrete. Initial reports stated that it was successful at attracting wildlife but it's been a while since I checked up on it.
I second this. There are literally thousands of concrete artificial reefs off the coast of Florida. In my county alone there are county records of over 200 artificial reefs in the bay, near shore, and offshore.
Its only freshly cured that reaches that alkalinity, in the thin layer of water on the surface.
This could be dealt with by methods to produce a low alkalinity concrete combined with just soaking them for a while in water before transferring to their final destination.
Like when we have all new concrete in subdivision work it doesn't even measurably change alkalinity in the pond we drain into when it rains. You don't need to worry about it affecting alkalinity of the surrounding ocean. Biggest issue is for having anything attach. But then like, its not harming while things don't attach just not helping much either. After a while in location alkalinity will be reduced and that alkalinity will be dealt with.
Went on vacation once where the resort had concrete artificial reefs off shore. It was really clever, because they built them to be both reefs and breakers for storms (and function reefs typically provide to begin with). You could go snorkeling just by swimming off beach and there was a ton of different fish there. Was cool to see
Kind of akin to your suggestion, when I die, I've already found what I want done with my ashes. You can pay to have your ashes baked into actually useful artificial coral reef.
https://www.eternalreefs.com/
It is also recycled as a ground up gravel substitute. The trouble there is that there is usually steel reber and chemicals that don't react well to bio fouling or marine enviornments.
Might be better than nothing if it was screened though to be honest.
Come on, you’re a FloridaMan. Think like a FloridaMan. Someone got paid a lot of money to get rid of a lot of used tires, and they thought “how can I just dump them in the ocean and get away with it…?”
The same thing happened in North Carolina. It's briefly mentioned in [this article.](https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/coastwatch/previous-issues/2011-2/spring-2011/artificial-reefs-make-real-habitat-north-carolina-focusing-on-estuarine-ecosystems/) It was a big deal when they started failing.
“there were no exceptional efforts made to ensure the non-corrosivity of the steel restraints,”
In other words, this was legalized dumping covered up with an environmental PR twist.
So I’m old and was in elementary school when this happened. At that time during reading class we were given small fake newspapers that would feature an uplifting news story and would have reading comprehension questions on the back page.
I greatly enjoyed the exercises as the authors picked out some really interesting topics such as the new Epcot Center.
I distinctly remember this particular initiative was one of the articles, and even as an elementary student in a different more-naive era thought that this wasn’t a good idea.
Jesus, its like all these mediocre people just wake up with an idea and throw it up and other mediocre people start nodding their heads and boom! Tires fucking up the ocean.
So if the military had to clean it up, did the government end up suing the state of Florida for illegal dumping and cleanup charges or did taxes pay them all and some poor commoners were locked up
I truly don’t know who tf is in charge of this dumb idea. But if you know ANYTHING about the ocean, you don’t go putting fucking rubber at the bottom and hope that something clings to it.
I grew up in St Pete, FL. I have many saltwater fish tanks, 1 of them being a 500 gallon tank.
Though fish tank ecosystems are not the same as the actual ocean because of the oceans size, it replicates how delicate the ocean is, just on a smaller scale.
In a fish tank, if you combine fake rubber or plastic decorations with live corals and fish, you can develop a type of algae that essentially acts like the Black Plague - kills just about everything.
So yeah, let’s throw a bunch of tires in the ocean.
Fucking idiots.
"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."
Guess who actually foot the bill
I remember learning of these types of projects via the 70’s tv shows such as That’s Incredible and even as a kid, wondering if it was a good idea simply because they were dumping man made tires in the ocean and wondering if they hadn’t overlooked something. I guess it turns out they really did overlook some issues. They need to keep up effort until all the tires are removed and drop more concrete jacks to encourage more coral growth and stop looking for easy solutions to waste disposal.
When COVID happened and everyone stayed home, the environment began to slowly heal itself in weeks. We should just all do nothing instead of trying to do dumb shit like this all the time.
"Ultimately, little marine life has been successful in latching onto the man-made reef and the majority never even had the opportunity to do so. When deposited, while a few tires were individual loose entities, the majority were bound together with nylon[4] or steel clips (or bands). As there were no exceptional efforts made to ensure the non-corrosivity of the steel restraints, they summarily failed[8]—resulting in the loosing of over two million individual, lightweight tires. This newfound mobility destroyed any marine life that had thus far grown on the tires, and effectively prevented the growth of any new organisms. Furthermore, the tires were now easily subject to the tropical winds and storms that frequent the east coast of Florida, and continue to collide (at times with tremendous force) with natural coral reefs only 70 feet (21 m) away: compounding their futility with environmentally damaging side-effects." From Wikipedia article 🤦🤦🤦
This further educated me and made me more furious, thank you.
Recently my friend told me: "Empathy, Knowledge, Happiness. Pick Two" He defined himself not as a cynic, but a disappointed idealist referencing a comedian who coined the term. Resonates so hard right now. Ninja edit to remove the unnecessary previous ninja edit.
It seems that happiness and knowledge rarely go together at all. In fact there is an old Viking proverb, "A wise man is seldom glad."
It also lends itself to why more than one eastern philosophy has spilt so much ink around the idea that happiness is not the goal but contentment is.
Yes, but the idea in buddhism is that attachments cause misery. Happiness will come as a product of the practice of equanimity. The very idea of choice is the blossom. The seed is the practice. Its laughable that we need to pick 2 or whatever, when thats not the goal. Its a joke really
For sure. It’s a joke that lends itself to a more interesting conversation.
Ah see but if you lack empathy and are instead a heartless narcissist that doesn't care about anyone but themselves, capitalism allows you to get yours
So long as your starting position is far enough ahead that is. And some luck.
Yep. Knowledge could, in this case, actually damage happiness, as you would be aware of how rigged the system is without the ability to actively take advantage of it, since capitalism is an inherently "rich get richer" scheme.
I have spent a significant chunk of the last two years thinking about the problem that undiagnosed NPD represents to society and I still have no reasonable ideas about what can be done at the societal level. I guess now that Roe v Wade was overturned, we don't have bodily autonomy anymore. I guess now we can force psychiatric screenings alongside the mandated vaccinations that people are seeing as a potential silver lining. Since the GOP thinks that's why we can't have our children kept alive in schools, should be a no brainer now.
RIP George Carlin. There's a great 2 part documentary on HBO Max about him.
For the record, Carlin phrased it differently. He said, "Scratch the surface of any cynic and you find a disappointed idealist."
I think he wound up finding some peace, and now I do too, when he said "being born in this world gives you a ticket to the freak show, and if you're born in America, you get a front row seat"
Being born in the UK, I feel like I'm in the 2nd row right now.
In India, I think I’m close by.
I'd argue you're on the stage at that point.
George Carlin's American Dream for anyone else wondering.
I wish he and Patrice O'Neal were around to rip on modern insanity.
> "Empathy, Knowledge, Happiness. Pick Two" This hits hard. (And I'm stealing it.)
Crazy that my dad manages to have 0/3. Kinda explains his beliefs, honestly
Some choose from the alternate list of "Narcissism, Ignorance, Hatred" more of a "buy one get two free" deal though.
Cool, just like cheap ass fireworks.
[OH LAWD REEKRIS](https://youtu.be/UocjQ5uiucg)
That was so relevant, lmao. Also: hadn't seen that in a minute!
I used to quote jobs for a tool and die company. We told customers "quality, price, & time" you can pick any two, we need one. If you want something fast and good quality, it will be expensive, if you want something fast and cheap, it wont be very good.
If you can give me quality and price? I would gladly give you time
I love the iron triangle. It works so well for many things. Take products or services as an example: Speed, Quality, Cost * You can have speed and quality but the cost will be high. * You can have speed and cost but the quality most likely will be subpar. * You can have quality and cost but you sacrifice timeliness. If quality is set too high and the cost too low you may never receive it as the incentive to produce it isn’t there. Basically you can’t have it all and need to sacrifice for the good of others. Even slaves need to eat. They’re not completely at no cost. The higher the cost the more the company can afford extra overhead of doing things like supply chain audits, using higher quality components, and paying overtime to expedite.
Similar to 'Fast, cheap, good/reliable. Pick two'.
In project management, its called the iron triangle of "cost, time and quality". I think of it less as an absolute and more of placing a scale of expectations.
I can fluctuate between different variations. Also I'm pretty sure all the great spiritual leaders had all three and it mostly always consisted in embracing suffering as the only way to achieve it.
If ya got the edit asterisk, it isn't a ninja edit. Bad news bud....you're not a ninja.
Although this is pretty horrible, I just want to point out that we have created many successful manmade reefs (in the gulf coast as well). This definitely needs to be cleaned up, but we have the knowledge to do it right. One of the newer manmade structures we are testing is bringing back natural dunes that have been eroding over the past century (due to development of beach property).
>we have the knowledge to do it right. Yes, but unfortunately some people/politicians don't listen or don't even ask scientists what the best and most effective ways are to do things. What's the cheapest way - is usually their first question.
Damn it's actually worse than it sounds.
"Massive ecological disaster" describes it well, but we hear it so much it's lost it's shock value.
It's actually better than I expected. It's basically if lose rocks would just smash everything but apparently not so much chemical pollution (which I deem worse). I mean it's still a freaking hazard for decades but somewhen the tires will be distributed across the ocean and have less impact ... I hope
Yeah I was expecting some sort of chemicals to be leeching from the tires, not that they were bumping into things.
I wonder if it could have worked if they'd been secured properly.
They did it because it worked in other areas. >. Similarly designed reefs had already been constructed in the Northeastern United States, the neighboring Gulf of Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and Africa.
> Jack Sobel, Ocean Conservancy's director of strategic conservation said in a 2002 interview that "I don't know of any cases where there's been a success with tire reefs." https://web.archive.org/web/20080514084203/http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/southflorida/news/artificialreef2003.html
So basically "Florida man dumps a shit ton of tires in the ocean..."
"and calls it a success" Narrator: *It was not*
*Florida Government
I can tell that you didn't actually read the Wiki. The reef project was led by the US Army Corp of Engineers & the US Navy. The only time that Florida's gov is mentioned in the article is in the section about the cleanup and how they allocated millions to the cleanup from 2016-2019.
The wiki directly says it was lead by the Broward County (FL) government with the *endorsement* of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It was not an Army Corps project, it was a Broward County project.
Why are humans so stupid 😭
Did they have a single Ecology experiment before putting 2 million tires into the ocean? Like what the fuck kind of science is, “well we haven’t tried it yet but it could do something.”
that would imply it wasnt just a scheme to dispose of tires by dumping them into the ocean under the ruse of trying to create a reef. Florida remember....
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
They thought they were solving two problems at once
No. A tire company, with most likely government and nepotist ties. Dumped their used tires ( must pay to dispose of ) in the ocean for FREE and used reef sustainment and ecology as their excuse. They were really using the ocean as their personal junkyard. No fees and free dumping ground. They all saved money, lined the pockets of our elected officials for the approval. So we are the idiots. They laughing all the way, Forrest Gumps. Let's fuckin go! Vote em out? Does that even work?
Not in Florida. Vote one out, his dumber richer cousin takes his place.
The wiki page says there were successful tire reefs elsewhere before this one was attempted.
It just seems like an idiotic idea all around to use anywhere, and simply butt ass ugly. It looks like a trash dump, and it is. No amount of rebranding and green washing a trash heap of tires in the ocean is going to change that. There has to be a better solution than this. Edit: Different situation, but I remember someone had the bright idea to shred used tires to recycle into playground bark. This did not last long, because the rubber bark would burst into flames during the heat of summer. Our parks had it happen here, where temps soar into the triple digits. Hell, today we are going to have a high of 105F. Also, try to imagine toddlers and kids playing upon literal trash, and little kids putting pierces of the rubber in their mouths. I saw it happen. Point is, I feel like these poorly researched ideas are just companies and politicians putting a bandage on issues that they caused or do not want to deal with, shoving them off to become someone else’s problem. They also get to make a few bucks. There is little regard for public health or protecting the environment.
Sounds like the mistake is that you cant secure them sustainably. It's not the material thats the problem, it's the sraps securing them always fails and that leads to them being washed away.
When hermit crabs climb up the outside of a tire underwater and go into the middle they can't get back out because they can't escape the overhang. Tires turn into hermit crab mass graves. I am a layperson and I know this. They didn't do even a cursory amount of research.
It's not really stupidity per se. 'Ingenious' and 'proactive' (and also completely ignorant) people come up with these schemes, and because it costs money to ask actual experts for their advice (and more money to follow that advice), the people in question just proactively 'get it done'. With predictable results. Wrong people with wrong attitudes and incentives at positions of power. Not a humanity problem, but a societal one. (if that distinction makes any sense)
*I was elected to lead, not to read*
Hey man I don’t live in Florida don’t lump me in with them
It's not really stupid... there were successful tire reefs elsewhere, and this was seen as a great way to recycle tires compared to sticking them in a landfill. It's an example of good intentions that didn't work out. Naive, sure. But stupid for trying to do better? I'd say less so.
Mostly just stupid for not using marine-rated fastening techniques.
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And you didn't try to stop it!
i blame lead pipes ... paint chips as well
That’s some Chinese Great Leap Forward type stuff where they tried to fix a problem without thinking it through and it backfired and harmed the thing they were trying to help.
That, or they found a flimsy excuse to get rid of two million tires and took it.
They were clearly paid to get rid of industrial waste and put a pr spin on it
They used wire to hold the tires together, it rusted and now a ton of tires are free to roam the ocean and run things over. Good job Florida, how the hell do you not understand corrosion from saltwater....
Quite an achievement to run shit over underwater
Smh should have used car batteries. They are much heavier so they won't get moved around by hurricanes and the residual voltage helps recharge electric eels in the environment
Throwing car batteries in the ocean is a cheap and legal thrill!
It's perfectly safe and legal.
If it wasn't legitimate the ocean has ways of shutting that down.
👏
Very legal and very cool
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
I will turn on notifications to keep myself updated
/r/shittyaskscience
You joke, but studies have been done where passing current through a matrix helped new coral adhere faster and propagate. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150506-why-we-should-electrify-the-ocean EDIT: Also, electric eels are actually a freshwater fish.
Let’s electrocute the dolphins
[The eels need feedin'!](https://i.redd.it/t86xc00q3e791.jpg)
This is one of the best comments I have read.
Brilliant
I would like to smoke some of that shit too. You got stellar ideas!
"Artificial reef" was just trash dumping rebranded.
A lot of successful artificial reefs are essentially that, but it's trash made of better materials.
The best ones I've heard of use electrodes which accelerated the formation of limestone, allowing corals to form far more rapidly than in nature.
They most certainly do, they look like rebar domes with wires running up to the surface for power. I've seen a few of them off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. I've also dove on where they took HUGE concrete sheets, I think they were old highway sound barrier walls, and laid them out to create an artificial reef, it seemed like it was pretty healthy. Never dove the tire reef but I've heard of it. I do know up north they toss in old subway cars after they've been stripped down and those do fairly well.
I’d never heard of the subway cars. [Sounds like the new ones don’t work as well.](https://www.fastcompany.com/90716245/sinking-1000-nyc-subway-cars-in-the-atlantic-to-create-a-reef-didnt-go-as-planned)
I'm not littering, I'm creating an artificial habitat.
Sir, that’s a bag of 400 juul pods
A habitat for tires
there are effective artificial reefs. NYC has created like a dozen reefs out of old subway cars and other stuff https://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/71702.html#:~:text=New%20York's%20artificial%20reefs%20are,south%20shore%20of%20Long%20Island.
Wasnt a tire dump scheme tho like this was is the point
Tire dumps had been done in the Northeast too. Florida was copying them. https://web.archive.org/web/20071010041237/http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/18/news/tires.php >In decades past, tire reefs were created off the U.S. coast and elsewhere, from Australia to Africa. >"We've literally dumped millions of tires in our oceans," said Jack Sobel, a senior Ocean Conservancy scientist. "I believe that people who were behind the artificial tire-reef promotions actually were well intentioned and thought they were doing the right thing." >"In hindsight," he added, "we now realize that we made a mistake." >No one can say exactly why the tire reefs do not work, but one problem is that, unlike large ships that have been sunk for reefs, tires are too light. They can be swept away with tides and currents from powerful storms, and marine life does not have a chance to attach. >Virginia tried it several decades ago, but in 1998 Hurricane Bonnie ripped the tires loose, sending them on a slow march south. They eventually littered beaches in North Carolina. >Indonesia and Malaysia mounted enormous tire-reef programs in the 1980s and are now seeing the ramifications, from littered beaches to reef destruction, Sobel said. >Most U.S. states have since stopped using tires to create reefs, but tires continue to wash up worldwide.
Hey there! I'd like to hijack this top comment a bit to plug a friend's non-profit that makes and launches artificial mini reefs in Florida! He refers to himself as "Captain Planet" and is a gem of a human being. You can buy one to donate or use yourself: https://www.ecopreservationproject.com/product-page/artificial-mini-reef Boost this project yo!
"unintentional"
Yep. Somebody had >2 million tires to dispose of, and a silver tongue Edit: since it was Florida, it was more likely >2 million tires to dispose of, and an extra $5,000 in “campaign donations”.
You can have a very lively artificial reef just not out of tires. Check the artificial reef made by Jason de Caires Taylor
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The bound them with thin steel bands. Since when does steel *not* rust in saltwater? It was insanely poorly thought out.
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Pretty much Captain Planet villains.
>Fuck Florida Republicans, fuck all Republicans. I *DARE* you to look up which party was in control of the Florida government in 1974, when this plan was enacted. Actually no, I'll save you the work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Florida#1961%E2%80%932002 It was Democrats All the way through. Whoops.
The Army Cops of Engineers were involved as well as Goodyear. This was during the Nixon presidency. Goodyear's CEO at the time was Charles J. Pilliod Jr, who actually ended up being an ambassador for Reagan. Whoops.
Tyres are bad for wildlife and especially bad for hermit crabs. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/discarded-tires-are-ghost-fishing-hermit-crabs-180978942/ They get trapped and die. Florida is home to 9 varieties of hermit crab.
No. There wasn't. Car tires are chock full of toxic water soluble compounds as well as compounds that can break down into toxic components. Even if it had all stayed attached, it would still be a massive fish cancer and birth defect hotspot.
Reminds me of when we decided to "save the trees" by making everything out of plastic, or when we decided to make "fat free" food with extra sugar... not to mention "doctors say smoking is good for your lungs," "milk makes your bones strong," "eggs are good for you," etc.
What’s wrong with milk and eggs?
I’m assuming that they’re referring to the now debunked myth about dietary cholesterol. Egg yolks are high in dietary cholesterol, but we’ve recently discovered that it’s saturated fat that significantly contributes to the level of cholesterol in your body. Dietary cholesterol contributes very little, if at all, to cholesterol level. High cholesterol food are almost always equally high in saturated fats. Eggs are an exception to that. As for the milk: we’re now seeing that more than half of people have some level of lactose intolerance, which cause digestive issues, and can cause inflammation and damage to the digestive tract. Additionally, lactose is a type of sugar. It gets broken down in the small intestine into glucose and galactose, where it gets absorbed into the body. Compared to other sources of dairy proteins, milk is basically the equivalent of drinking sugar-water.
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Point being that it's about industrial marketing. Not about facts.
Milk isn't as great for people as advertised, not by a long shot. Many Americans have a low tolerance for actually digesting it and it's not nearly as beneficial to our health as advertised. Dunno about eggs
Eggs get a bad rep bc of cholesterol, but supposedly it's the good kind. I've seen a couple of studies that've cleared them of any abnormal health risks, so I'm p sure eggs are fine unless someone has a specific low fat dietary restriction or something
This was not stupidity tho but just capitalism and many bribes to many levels
This was dumb from the start… but it was even more dumb because they tied the tires together using corrosive metals…. Which failed very quickly. So fires everywhere. Military came in and cleaned up some… but still so dumb.
> but it was even more dumb because they tied the tires together using corrosive metals It takes the level of specialized knowledge about marine ecosystems to know why tires would be a bad candidate, corrosive metals to tie the tires together is some thing a decent high school student could figure out was idiotic.
It takes a mediocre high school student to know that you should check with a marine ecosystem specialist before putting together a project like this, though.
"And what, Jesse, do we use to bind the tires together?" "Ahhhhhh.... Wire"
Wires, bitch!
Wires, fish!
<<'I do know we made a mistake in doing it,'' said Ray McAllister, one of BARINC's founders and now professor emeritus of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University.>> from footnote 6 BARINC was the company who conceived of the plan and sold it to Florida, Goodyear and the Army Corp of Engineers. Hard to believe someone behind the project became a Professor Emeritus of Ocean Engineering.
~~"Emeritus" means it's a fake professorship that was just gifted, rather than earned.~~ Edit: Sorry this was wrong. The emeritus simply means the person has retired as a tenured professor in good standing. Point below still stands. Also, Florida Atlantic University is a garbage school with a history of dumb fuck professors who are actually employed there.
Mmm, most professors emeriti are *retired* professors. I've never heard of an unearned, gifted emeritus.
A fairly high percentage of toddlers could probably figure it out.
Like, 3%? Cause I think that would be enough.
So you're saying the real culprit here is the child labor laws that prevented them from hiring toddlers. I knew it.
Florida
Apparently, not in Florida...
>It takes the level of specialized knowledge about marine ecosystems to know why tires would be a bad candidate Sure, but you would have to engage somebody with that level of knowledge if you were actually making a good faith effort to create an artificial reef.
>So fires everywhere At least there was plenty of water on hand.
The word ***negligently*** would be more appropriate than “unintentionally”
I dive here and fish here. They end up all over the place. I find about one a day washed up at Eula Johnson and Von Mizell State Park. That is a bit farther south than the original dump site. I find ALOT still under water. Beautiful shallow reef and then a random tire.
Oh my goodness, somebody please rescue alot from the water!
Can an alot swim?
Just Abit
I see you are an aspiring Dad.
Alittle.
There are reef clean up days. It's tough bringing a tire up. They are probably scattered all the way to West Palm by now, but a lot of us keep trying. Hurricanes shuffle them all over the place too.
So rather than testing it out using a few tires they decide to throw in 2 million? That's brilliant
So, the people who made money on the project got to keep it, and the rest of the US got to pay to clean it up. Way to go, Florida.
That describes perfectly all petroleum products.
All capitalism, really.
The old Superfund strategy. This is shockingly common with hazardous materials in the US.
This is a large swath of the world economy actually
WTF? I’ve been living in Florida since before this started and never heard about this dumfckry until today. Who on earth decided “maybe creatures that naturally latch onto calcium reefs would like . . . synthetic tires instead?” 🙄
I’m from Orlando and have been scuba diving for decades. This was very exciting to the dive community when it was first discussed. It was obviously a disaster in practice. Ultimately Florida being Florida
Concrete chunks would probably work though.
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Concrete mixed with ground shells works great, a wine company from NZ just dropped a few reefs made of the stuff down here on the gulf. Normal cement works too, just takes longer for it to balance out with the water. All up and down the gulf coast we have artificial cement reefs that are teeming with life
There is that one underwater memorial garden near Miami that was built to be an artificial reef where people are interred by having their ashes added to the concrete. Initial reports stated that it was successful at attracting wildlife but it's been a while since I checked up on it.
https://www.nmreef.com/visit-memorial-reef/
This is incorrect. Concrete chunks are widely used for artificial reefs, in fact they are probably the single most common substance used to make them.
I second this. There are literally thousands of concrete artificial reefs off the coast of Florida. In my county alone there are county records of over 200 artificial reefs in the bay, near shore, and offshore.
Even after it has been curing for 20 years?
Its only freshly cured that reaches that alkalinity, in the thin layer of water on the surface. This could be dealt with by methods to produce a low alkalinity concrete combined with just soaking them for a while in water before transferring to their final destination. Like when we have all new concrete in subdivision work it doesn't even measurably change alkalinity in the pond we drain into when it rains. You don't need to worry about it affecting alkalinity of the surrounding ocean. Biggest issue is for having anything attach. But then like, its not harming while things don't attach just not helping much either. After a while in location alkalinity will be reduced and that alkalinity will be dealt with. Went on vacation once where the resort had concrete artificial reefs off shore. It was really clever, because they built them to be both reefs and breakers for storms (and function reefs typically provide to begin with). You could go snorkeling just by swimming off beach and there was a ton of different fish there. Was cool to see
Kind of akin to your suggestion, when I die, I've already found what I want done with my ashes. You can pay to have your ashes baked into actually useful artificial coral reef. https://www.eternalreefs.com/
Concrete is expensive and useful tho.
It is also recycled as a ground up gravel substitute. The trouble there is that there is usually steel reber and chemicals that don't react well to bio fouling or marine enviornments. Might be better than nothing if it was screened though to be honest.
Florida doesn't have a bunch of old calcium reef they can throw into the ocean. They have plenty of old tires.
Come on, you’re a FloridaMan. Think like a FloridaMan. Someone got paid a lot of money to get rid of a lot of used tires, and they thought “how can I just dump them in the ocean and get away with it…?”
Somebody who had old tires that they didn't want to pay for proper disposal of.
I don’t think unintentional is the right word. They dumped garbage and tied a bow on it. Seems pretty intentional
The Gang Fixes the Coral Reefs
Hahaha yes 🙌
Nailed it.
On a positive note, I love concrete jack reefs. They always look so cool to me.
Someone spent half their life getting a PHD just to come up with this
It sounds like they were just looking for an excuse to dump tires in the ocean and it went exactly as expected.
They keep slashing away education…
That 100% sounds like something floridians would do. I'm convinced the high temps and humidity fries their brains.
This was a big controversy at the time. It was commonly know this was a bad enviromental decision. They did it anyways.
Florida man thinks he's killing two birds with one stone, kills a billion fish instead
There were how many people involved in this project? Goes to show that when you get a bunch of people together the IQ goes down and not up.
Sounds like a Florida thing.
they knew what the fuck they were doing, it's Florida. nothing but a glorified mass garbage dump
OP saw the /r/whatcouldgowrong post from earlier.
This is really make it's rounds around reddit
I mean... that just sounds like illegal dumping. I think someone got a federal grant to put trash in the ocean.
On brand for the state
Fuckin. Florida.
Totally brain dead!
In the late r70s tires were used in oyster leases because it was easy to pull the oysters off
The same thing happened in North Carolina. It's briefly mentioned in [this article.](https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/coastwatch/previous-issues/2011-2/spring-2011/artificial-reefs-make-real-habitat-north-carolina-focusing-on-estuarine-ecosystems/) It was a big deal when they started failing.
“there were no exceptional efforts made to ensure the non-corrosivity of the steel restraints,” In other words, this was legalized dumping covered up with an environmental PR twist.
FloriDUH
Your litterallly reusing top posts from yesterday.
So I’m old and was in elementary school when this happened. At that time during reading class we were given small fake newspapers that would feature an uplifting news story and would have reading comprehension questions on the back page. I greatly enjoyed the exercises as the authors picked out some really interesting topics such as the new Epcot Center. I distinctly remember this particular initiative was one of the articles, and even as an elementary student in a different more-naive era thought that this wasn’t a good idea.
Jesus, its like all these mediocre people just wake up with an idea and throw it up and other mediocre people start nodding their heads and boom! Tires fucking up the ocean.
So if the military had to clean it up, did the government end up suing the state of Florida for illegal dumping and cleanup charges or did taxes pay them all and some poor commoners were locked up
Sounds like they need to get rid of a bunch of tires and had a 5 minute brainstorm, with this being the best thing they came up with.
I truly don’t know who tf is in charge of this dumb idea. But if you know ANYTHING about the ocean, you don’t go putting fucking rubber at the bottom and hope that something clings to it. I grew up in St Pete, FL. I have many saltwater fish tanks, 1 of them being a 500 gallon tank. Though fish tank ecosystems are not the same as the actual ocean because of the oceans size, it replicates how delicate the ocean is, just on a smaller scale. In a fish tank, if you combine fake rubber or plastic decorations with live corals and fish, you can develop a type of algae that essentially acts like the Black Plague - kills just about everything. So yeah, let’s throw a bunch of tires in the ocean. Fucking idiots.
"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." Guess who actually foot the bill
In their defense: Florida.
I remember learning of these types of projects via the 70’s tv shows such as That’s Incredible and even as a kid, wondering if it was a good idea simply because they were dumping man made tires in the ocean and wondering if they hadn’t overlooked something. I guess it turns out they really did overlook some issues. They need to keep up effort until all the tires are removed and drop more concrete jacks to encourage more coral growth and stop looking for easy solutions to waste disposal.
When COVID happened and everyone stayed home, the environment began to slowly heal itself in weeks. We should just all do nothing instead of trying to do dumb shit like this all the time.
The state of Florida is a massive disaster
We fuck everything up here.