On 22 April 1972, a Goodyear blimp hung over the water off Fort Lauderdale while a flotilla of more than 150 boats tipped its cargo into the sea.
The cargo was old tyres. Bundled, hole-punched, roped together and dropped with all the ceremony of a state funeral. The people on those boats were not dumping rubbish. They had been told by federal scientists that rubber made superb reef material, and they believed it, because the men saying so had budgets, job titles and government letterhead.
How a fishing club built the largest artificial reef in the world
Broward Artificial Reef Inc, run by a party boat captain named Virgil Osborne, started with concrete. Environmental historian Dmitrijs Porsnovs, writing in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, traces how the group sank 400 concrete erosion blocks in 1968, discovered the cost was ruinous, and switched to tyres after making contact with the federal researchers then promoting them.
Those researchers had numbers behind them, or seemed to. A team at the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory, led by oceanographer Richard Stone, had been lowering test panels of different materials into the water to see what marine life preferred to settle on, and in 1968 reported that rubber came out on top. A year later, the same testing found concrete performed better. By then a federal solid-waste program and the national tyre dealers’ association had signed on as partners, and the public recommendation never changed. Porsnovs traces the mismatch through the program’s own records…