Posted on 07/24/2007 8:08:52 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
FORT EUSTIS, Va. - Soldiers from the 97th Transportation Company recently returned from an unconventional mission - recovering thousands of tires from off the Florida coast in an effort to dismantle the world's largest man-made reef.
The 15 Soldiers spent two and a half months off the Florida coast, conducting training operations for dive teams. They then traveled down coast to Fort Lauderdale, where they began a historic effort in environmental preservation.
"In 1972, a number of organizations with good intentions dropped about two million tires in the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to build the world's largest man-made reef," said Chief Warrant Officer Shane Sherrad, vessel master for the LCU-2017, El Caney. "In reality, nothing grew, and the tires began to drift, damaging the existing reefs on either side of the man made reef. Our job was to figure out how to recover the tires in order to protect the other reefs."
Some of the hundreds of thousands of tires lining the ocean bottom have begun to wash up on local shores and into existing marine life, making them a hazardous presence on the ocean floor. The mission is an unconventional one, and the LCU crew faced the task with no existing template of how to complete the project.
Upon arriving in Florida, the Soldiers were given several plans for completing the mission.
"We reviewed those plans, told them what would work and what wouldn't. In the end, we tried three different plans and chose the best from there," Sherrad said.
The crew settled on a plan that had them take position between the two live reefs running parallel with the coast, where divers would bundle approximately 50 to 60 tires together with a steel cable. The tires were then brought to the surface with lift bags and towed into the LCU, lifted with a crane and dropped into the containers.
The operation was an exercise in environmental responsibility. After the tires were collected, they were transported to a Georgia facility where they will be burned to create energy to power a recycling plant.
"The whole mission was about recycle, recycle, recycle," Sherrad said.
The Eustis LCU crew manned the boat for the entire mission, with Army, Navy and Coast Guard divers participating together to recover the tires.
"It was a great experience, being with the three branches and working there together," said Staff Sgt. Don Morales, who worked on the deck, bringing on containers and tires and doing other maintenance to ensure the boat was in peak performance.
The crew got no small share of media attention, with people from CNN, Discovery and a number of area newspapers and television stations reporting the mission.
"It's such a significant environmental issue," Sherrad said. "There were individuals from Germany and England there. There was a big interest in how we were doing it, because others would like to be able to take on projects like this themselves. We're taking down the world's largest artificial reef. It had never been done before, and we had to find a way to do it."
The mission was an opportunity for the Army to showcase its skills in environmental protection.
"The Army goes well above and beyond the civilian environmental laws," Sherrod said. "There isn't a civilian company out there who sticks to the same environmental standards the Army does."
Sgt. 1st Class Jose Lopez acted as the second in command. "On a daily basis, everything we do is about environmental protection," he said.
In addition to helping the environment, the mission also helped save Florida millions of dollars. The project would have taken $20 million to complete using civilian funds, but will cost just $2 million with the military taking the helms.
The Soldiers moved thousands of tires during the mission, and it is slated to continue into 2010. Summer crews of Army vessels and divers will continue to visit the coasts of Florida each summer and remove the tires.
Editor's note: Lindy Dinklage works for the Fort Eustis Public Affairs Office.
Florida raises ill-fated artificial reefs By Jim Loney Mon Jul 9, 3:07 AM ET
When people began dumping used tires in the ocean 40 years ago to create artificial reefs, they gave little thought to the potential environmental cost, or to how difficult it would be to pick them up.
"It was one of those ideas that seemed good at the time," said Jack Sobel, a senior scientist at The Ocean Conservancy, a Washington-based environmental group. "Now I think it's pretty clear it was a bad idea."
Now, local authorities are going after some 700,000 tires dumped off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, up the coast from Miami. A team of 40 divers from the U.S. Army, Navy and Coast Guard spent three weeks in June pulling up 10,373 sand-filled and slime-coated tires from the ocean floor.
Using the tire project as a salvage exercise, the military divers learned they could strap together 50 to 70 tires with wire cables and lift them to the surface with inflatable air bags, where a crane hauled the bundle from the water.
Millions of tires, usually bundled with nylon straps or steel cables, were cast into the sea off Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and off the U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, California and Florida.
The idea was to provide habitat for fish while disposing of trash from the land, but in the rugged and corrosive environment of the ocean, nylon straps wore out and snapped, cables rusted, and tires broke free.
Thousands have been tossed up on U.S. shores, particularly during hurricanes. Tires dotted the sand as far as the eye could see along North Carolina's Topsail Island after Hurricane Fran crashed the coast in 1996.
The tires dumped off Fort Lauderdale posed a particular threat. When they broke free they migrated shoreward and ran into a living reef tract, climbing up its slope and killing everything in their path.
"If we can keep the project going we think they can get all the tires and then the reef can recover," said Ken Banks of Broward County's Environmental Protection Department. "But the reef recovery will probably take decades."
AIRCRAFT CARRIER
Officials said the Fort Lauderdale project drew together a host of government and military agencies to salvage the tires cheaply.
"If you have to pay to make them go away, it would have cost about $17 per tire. We got that down to about $2 per tire, in part because they are making other products out of them," said William Nuckols, a project coordinator for Coastal America, a U.S. government agency.
The tires were trucked to a disposal plant in Georgia, where they were chipped into fuel for a waste recycling plant.
U.S. states no longer permit tire reefs. But Sobel said the entire concept of artificial reefs needs to be reexamined.
They have been created around the globe using all manner of material, from tires and concrete sewer pipes to discarded airplanes and ships. One of the largest, the rusting 880-foot (270-metre) U.S. aircraft carrier Oriskany, was sent to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico last year.
They are promoted by local officials as tourist attractions and by fishing captains and scuba operators who say they create new habitats and nurseries for fish and other sea creatures.
But Sobel said there are big questions that need to be answered.
Do they damage natural habitats, as the tires did off Fort Lauderdale? Do they concentrate marine creatures and make it easier for fishers and divers to catch them, exacerbating an overfishing problem and causing lasting damage to fisheries?
Do they draw eggs and larvae that would otherwise settle in natural habitats?
"There's little evidence that artificial reefs have a net benefit," Sobel said.
Great. But that's not what armies are for. I'd prefer they practiced killing people who want to take away my freedom.
army sailor stuff
Another failure of the genius environmentalists.
Sounds like great training to me.
Diver Ping! If anyone wants on or off the Diver Ping List, please notify me here or by freepmail.
And Dan...haven't you heard of the Army Corps of Engineers? Like it or not, this is an Army function in the USA.
This is the typical outcome of moonbat liberal lunacy.
But are they around when their stupid, infantile, idiotic schemes go bust and start to do damage? Course not, they have no “rear view mirror”. Just one dumb “social experiment” after another.
Jim Quinn has a saying: “Liberalism always generates the EXACT OPPOSITE of its stated intent.”
Yea, find one of the moonbat idiots who dreamed up this scheme, put em on the hotseat, and I’ll bet they bleat: “But its George Bush’s fault!”
I just simply hate liberals.
I was thinking the same thing- any mission that involves extensive work underwater makes for great practice.
Great underwater practice. I agree. It’s not like we’re pulling them from duty in the deserts of Iraq.
“Liberalism always generates the EXACT OPPOSITE of its stated intent.”Always.
If the mission was "an opportunity for the Army to showcase its skills in coordination and problem solving, I'd agree. But again the article said:
The mission was an opportunity for the Army to showcase its skills in environmental protection.
Again, I question the need for an army's "skills in environmental protection." In fact, an army's duties, quite often run counter to "environmental protection." I fear the day when some future tank commander in a hostile conflict directs his vehicles to avoid protected vernal pools that may lie in the most direct path to an enemy.
“It was one of those ideas that seemed good at the time,” said Jack Sobel, a senior scientist at The Ocean Conservancy, a Washington-based environmental group. “Now I think it’s pretty clear it was a bad idea.”
The same can be said for nearly every envirowacko proposal. Somehow it never stops their new proposals from being taken seriously.
Hugely expensive recovery operation, if you ask me. Having divers burn air chaining 3 or 4 dozen tires together & using lift bags? There’s gotta be a better way to do this cause they’re gonna bend some good divers eventually.
How do we know this? Iraq's main geographical features include 2 major rivers. Army divers are sometimes used to support riverine operations, so it's entirely possible that these divers could be deployed to Iraq to support engineering operations (bridging, etc.).
This type of recovery is wildly inefficient and it's going to take a physical toll on the divers.
“Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University, was instrumental in organizing the 1970s tire reef project with the approval of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.”
http://www.coralreefalliance.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=503
Professors...
OK, depending on which article you believe, there’s either 2 million tires or 700,000 tires off the coast of Florida.
And extracting other information, they seem to be able to pull about 60 tires up at a time, whatever “a time” is but i’m guessing hours. Also, it appears that in the 3-week period they ran the operation, they pulled up 10,000 tires.
So if they ran this operation full time, they could pull about 170,000 tires a year, which means it would take between 5 and 12 years to get all the tires, depending on which initial number is correct.
Except that I presume the FIRST sets were the easiest to round up in groups of 60. As they get more tires, they will be further spread out in the water, more buried, and harder to put together. My guess is the last couple hundred thousand will be a lot harder than the first hundred thousand.
I also doubt they are getting enough energy out of each tire to make up for the energy costs of filling the dive tanks, running the ships and equipment to harvest the tires, and transport them to the facility. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Why is it that every scheme of the environmental movement ends up with some cruel irony? Like entire pine forests being wiped out by beetles because we couldn’t harvest the older trees (which are the ones susceptible to the beetles, who also can’t spread unless the older trees are in close proximity to one another).
Of the removal of DDT which has lead to millions of cases of Malaria?
Or the shutdown of our nuclear power industry, which has led to untold damage caused by burning fossil fuels?
These are the same people now calling skeptics of global warming, "uninformed". They are telling us the debate is over.
Curious how long it will take to remove 700,000 tires.
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