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Osborne Reef is an artificial reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida at . Originally constructed of dolos, it was the subject of an ambitious expansion project utilizing old and discarded . The expansion ultimately failed, and the reef has come to be considered an environmental disaster—ultimately doing more harm than good in the coastal Florida waters.
In 2007, after several false starts, cleanup efforts began when the United States military took on the project. 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. In 2015, a civilian corporation took over, and had removed one third of the tires by November 2019.
With endorsement of the project by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Broward County government approved the project in 1974. That spring, more than 100 privately owned boats enthusiastically volunteered to assist with the project; accompanied by the US Navy's , thousands of tire bundles were simultaneously dropped onto the reef. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company provided equipment for the auspicious undertaking, even supporting the project so far as to drop a gold-painted tire from a Goodyear Blimp to christen the site. The culmination of the project was the deposit of over two million tires bound with steel clips over of the ocean floor, approximately offshore, and at a depth of .
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 away: compounding their futility with environmentally damaging side-effects. Lastly, the concern of adjacent coastal areas is that the tires are not remaining within the boundaries of Osborne Reef.
This project is not the only one of its nature to fail; Indonesia and Malaysia mounted enormous tire-reef programs in the 1980s and are now seeing the ramifications of the failure of tire reefs, from littered beaches to reef destruction. In 1995, Hurricane Opal managed to spread over 1,000 tires onto the Florida Panhandle, west of Pensacola. In 1998, Hurricane Bonnie deposited thousands of the tires onto North Carolina beaches. 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." That year, The Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup removed 11,956 tires from beaches all over the world.
In 2002, Florida and Broward County environmental officials began the long and arduous process of setting into motion a plan to remove the tires. An original estimate of between $40 and $100 million (equivalent to about $M and $M in ) led the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to plan to arrange a deal with those companies whose construction damages the seabed and reefs. Where they would previously mitigate their destructive construction with replacement constructs for reefs, the state would require them to make their amends by removing tires from the Osborne Reef. This plan faced criticism by environmental groups who felt that this would only hasten the destruction of more marine habitats.
Coastal America, an office of the United States federal government, was tasked with coordinating the cleanup of the reef; they were instrumental in finalizing the deal wherein the Florida government would allocate (equivalent to about $M in ) to cover transport and recycling of the tires. Ken Banks with the Florida DEP estimated the project to take three to five years, and while that timeline would not allow for the removal of all two million tires, it should mitigate the majority of the damage they were causing to the corals and coastline, though Banks predicted it could take decades for the reefs to rebuild.
Beginning in June 2007, the United States military and Coast Guard began “DiveExEast 07" to ascertain the best and most efficient processes for the cleanup effort. Barring unforeseen operational commitments and engagements, military divers hoped to use this project as a training platform for several years and "recover the maximum number of tires possible from day one." Summer 2007 saw US Navy, Army, and Coast Guard divers based out of a Coast Guard base in Dania Beach, Florida working to clean the reef. The joint team first worked to remove the tires from where they were doing the most damage, abutting against natural reefs in the area. In 2007, the recovery effort brought approximately 10,000 tires ashore.
By the time other operations required the military to end their cleanup at Osborne Reef, 72,000 tires had been collected by soldiers, sailors, and coasties.
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