Tired ideas: reef rescue rebuffed.LIKE MANY well-intentioned ideas from the '70s--leisure suits, the Mustang mustang [Sp. mesteño=a stray], small feral horse of the W United States. Mustangs are descended from escaped Native American horses, which in turn were descended from horses of North African blood, brought to the New World by the Spanish c.1500. II, the eight-track tape a 1972 project to dump 2 million tires off the coast of Florida has gone horribly wrong. What was supposed to be an artificial reef An artificial reef is a man-made, underwater structure, typically built for the purpose of promoting marine life in areas of generally featureless bottom. Artificial reefs may also serve to improve hydrodynamics for surfing or to control beach erosion. brimming with life has instead become an undulating 36-acre dead zone on the sea floor. "They thought it would be a good fish habitat," William Nuckols, project coordinator for the public-private partnership Public-private partnership (PPP) describes a government service or private business venture which is funded and operated through a partnership of government and one or more private sector companies. These schemes are sometimes referred to as PPP or P3. Coastal America, told The Miami Herald. "It turned out to be a bad idea. It's a coastal coral destruction machine." The reef's designers overlooked the small matter of securely fastening the tires together so they would not bulldoze bull·doze v. bull·dozed, bull·doz·ing, bull·dozes v.tr. 1. To clear, dig up, or move with a bulldozer. 2. To treat in an abusive manner; bully. 3. the seabed when they moved with the tide. Metal fasteners were originally used on the tires, but they were quickly rusted away by the seawater seawater Water that makes up the oceans and seas. Seawater is a complex mixture of 96.5% water, 2.5% salts, and small amounts of other substances. Much of the world's magnesium is recovered from seawater, as are large quantities of bromine. . Who knew? The original project was funded by the Broward County, government and endorsed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Now the county has called in the U.S. Navy to aid the cleanup. (One idea has Navy divers essentially treating the tire pickup job as a massive salvage training operation.) It will take an estimated $5 million and three years to pick up the tires, haul them back to dry land, and recycle them or bury them in landfills. The landfill option is the solution rejected in 1972 as environmentally irresponsible. |
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