Good day all. Did you know that back in the 1970’s, the environmentalists came up with a brilliant idea on dealing with all the old tires sitting around in dumps. That idea? Throw them in the ocean and make artificial reefs out of them.
There’s just one small problem with that brilliantly progressive idea. It failed miserably, just like most progressive ideas. Now we have a massive and expensive cleanup operation underway, and would you care to guess who will be paying for it? Take a look in the mirror. Here are the details from Fox News:
What to do with a million used tires? Dump them in the ocean, of course. As unthinkable as that idea is today, back in 1972, that was what Florida environmentalists chose to do, in an attempt to create an artificial reef. They gathered up old tires, ferried them a mile offshore from Fort Lauderdale’s world-famous beach and tossed them overboard.
“Ummmm, seemed like a good idea at the time. Looked good on paper,” said Pat Quinn, Broward County’s environmental resource manager.
Now, the castaway tires are an environmental menace, and taxpayers are footing the bill on a new project to retrieve them. Quinn is project manager on the $1.6 million operation to undo the damage from the ill-conceived environmentalist push from the early ‘70s.
Back in the olden days, when your tires were replaced, the old one’s weren’t recycled. They were sent to the dump. Then, when there were millions of them, they caught fire. Putting out those tire fires was a nightmare, usually requiring pulling the whole pile apart to get at the source of the flames. So that is when our friends, the environmentalists, came up with this idea.
Back then, discarded car and truck tires typically were sent to a landfill. So a handful of Fort Lauderdale environmentalists — thinking they were doing the earth good — got permits to bundle the tires and sink them adjacent to the reef that runs up the Florida coastline. They thought coral would grow on the tires, attracting more fish and aquatic life.
But, like most members of the Progressive Liberal Elite, they failed to take into account a few minor details, like the tides. They also forgot that coral and rubber don’t mix.
But routine storm surges ended up breaking the bundles apart and slamming the tires into the healthy reef. Coral didn’t grow on the rubber, the fish didn’t come and, today, there’s a ghostly wasteland of tire after tire as far as the diver’s eye can see. “The first impression of every diver who goes down there is the same. … It’s just spooky,” said Rocco Galletta.
Now Mr. Galleta’s company has been contracted by the government to clean up the mess caused by…the government. Since the tire bundles have long since broken apart, the divers have to go down and gather them all back up again, by hand.
It’s a two-year contract and they began hoisting up the tires, 30 at a time, in May. He says his crew has a sense of not only cleaning up an underwater mess but improving the health of the ocean.
When will people learn that when it comes to things like dealing with pollutants, the Environmentalist nut jobs are the last people you want to talk to. They rely on what feels good, not actual science and engineering.
The 1972 blunder probably would never happen again, considering the advent of tire recycling in the 1990s. Today, shredding and recycling tires is a booming business, contributing to bouncy playgrounds, artificial football and soccer fields, and rubber mulch for gardens.
The “Dreaded and Evil Private Sector” is always on the lookout to make money. Since there’s boodles of money to make in recycling old tires, they are actually buying old tires. They are also looking at ways to make even more money from even more products that use old tires. For instance…
Once the tires make it to land, they’re trucked upstate to be burned in a power plant incinerator, to produce green electricity.
Excuse me? Green energy? From burning tires?
[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbp_JQ7RxqM’]
Much as I hate to bust the Progressive Liberal Environmentalists bubble, (actually, I enjoy busting their bubbles), burning tires produce “Greenhouse gases” and is probably as bad as burning coal. Granted the plants will have scrubbers built into them, but lets be honest. Burning tires in a power plant is not a way to generate “Green Energy.” It does get rid of the tires and produce electricity, which is a good thing.
Today, when they want to make a reef, they sink old ships and toss cars into the ocean after they have been cleaned out. Why? Because they know that coral and fish will attach themselves to metal. They can see this from all the old shipwrecks around the world. Obviously, no one bothered to do a test dump with a few hundred tires to see if the coral would actually attach itself to them. A few hundred, once they found out it didn’t work, would have been far easier to clean up instead of the 1 million plus they dumped in the ocean.
Environmentalists. You can’t beat them, and if you shoot them you get ticketed for littering.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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