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.

Goodyear supplied a compactor, tyres and money. Port Everglades handed over two acres for storage. Broward County absorbed the project in 1973 and put nine people on the payroll full-time to assemble bundles. A single 1974 deployment dropped 200,000 tyres.

Doubts arrived early and lost. Porsnovs’ account has county commissioner Anne Kolb trying to halt the operation in February 1975, by which point officials were openly complaining that the reef was failing to attract marine life. She was overruled. The tyres had to go somewhere, and the seabed was still cheaper than a landfill.

The straps went first

Each bundle was held together with plastic strapping and one metal clip.

Neither lasted. In its status report to the Florida legislature, the state Department of Environmental Protection records that many straps snapped as a clamshell crane dropped the bundles from a barge, and that the ones which survived loosened as the metal clips corroded. Tyres that could not be hole-punched drifted off in the current instead of settling where they were dropped. Storms handled the rest.

Robin Sherman and Richard Spieler of Nova Southeastern University surveyed the wreckage and presented their findings in a 2006 paper on tyres as reef material. They described natural reef organisms broken and buried under drifting rubber, and a seabed with the appearance of a scrapyard. Their recommendation was unambiguous: unstable material has no business in reef construction, and where it has already gone in, it should come out.

Even the name is borrowed. In state paperwork, Osborne Reef is a ring of concrete ero-jack structures on the same sand flat, and the tyre field next to it was never officially given that name at all. The rubber simply drifted into the title.

What one diver can carry

Taking it out is where the story slows down.

Between 2007 and 2009, Army, Navy and Coast Guard divers worked the site under a Defense Department training program, which meant the state paid for haulage and processing rather than for labour, and three seasons brought up just over 72,000 tyres. A commercial contractor has run the operation since 2015, using a similar approach at a smaller scale. One diver works the bottom, bundling tyres by hand. A crane or winch hoists each bundle onto a support vessel that holds roughly 300, and once it is full the boat steams back to Port Everglades to unload.

Across every effort since 2001, the department counts 543,197 tyres recovered, a tally that folds in Nova Southeastern’s original 1,600-tyre pilot and 414 more brought up by the ocean cleanup company 4ocean.

The arithmetic of taking something back

State senator Bryan Avila, pushing the 2023 bill that forced Florida to produce a restoration plan, told colleagues the removal work drags on and the finish line keeps receding. As reported by CBS News Miami, senator Ben Albritton was blunter: “It’s not getting the job done.”

The department’s own figures support him. Roughly 484,000 exposed tyres remained inside the surveyed zone as of September 2023, and that survey never covered the full spread of the debris field. Buried tyres are additional and largely uncounted. Removal inside the permitted area was projected to run to 2033, and the Osborne Reef Waste Tire Removal Project page shows a second contractor engaged in September 2025 on an agreement running to 2032.

Cost per tyre climbs as the site empties out. Pat Quinn, the Broward County biologist who supervises the removal work, told Phys.org in 2023 that early on, a diver could simply tie a bundle up and send it to the surface. What is left now sits partly buried in sand, heavy with suction and slow to shift. “We’ll never be done,” he admitted.

There is one further wrinkle. Parts of the seabed here have sat still long enough for stony coral, including great star coral, to take hold on the rubber. Biologists now have to prise those living colonies off and replant them on natural reef before divers are permitted to lift anything from that patch. It has happened 747 times so far.

So the tyres got their coral after all. Half a century late, growing on the wrong material entirely, and now it has to be saved from the very thing it grew on before that thing can finally go.