Right now, on a stretch of ocean floor about a mile off Fort Lauderdale, a contract crew is still counting tires. Not a metaphor. An actual state contract, renewed in 2025, running into the next decade, paying divers to keep pulling tires off the bottom of the Atlantic one barge load at a time. By the end of 2025, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had logged 538,176 tires removed under the current cleanup phase alone, with its own projections showing the work continuing into the early 2030s. That’s the ending. The beginning, for most of the five decades in between, is that almost nobody was doing this at all.

The number that actually matters here is the one nobody nailed down at the time. Florida’s own environmental agency now describes the original count as somewhere between 1 million and 2 million tires, a range wide enough to admit that nobody at the group that built the reef was counting carefully while it happened. Two million is the figure that stuck in the press and the folklore. A more conservative number is closer to what the state will commit to in writing. Either way, it was a lot of tires, and in 1972 that felt like the whole point.

The plan that made sense in 1972

Picture the problem from the other direction for a second. In the early 1970s, the country had a growing pile of used tires and nowhere good to put them. Landfills didn’t want them, since tires trap methane underground and tend to float back up through the fill. A nonprofit called Broward Artificial Reef, working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, proposed a fix that looked elegant on paper: bundle old tires with steel bands, drop them off the coast, and let them become the base layer for a new coral reef. It was billed at the time as the largest artificial reef project anywhere, spread across roughly 34 acres of ocean floor according to later Navy dive-team records. Cheap material, an existing disposal problem solved, a public-relations win about turning trash into habitat. Nobody involved was acting in bad faith.

What they didn’t plan for was physics.

Why a tire is a bad building block and a sunk ship is a good one

Compare the tires to the artificial reefs that actually work: cleaned and stripped ship hulls, retired subway cars, poured concrete modules built specifically for the job. Those all share one property tires don’t have, which is mass that stays where you put it. A steel hull settles into the sand and gives coral larvae a stable, textured surface to attach to for decades. A rubber tire, clipped with a few metal bands to a dozen of its neighbors, is buoyant, smooth-sided, and light enough that a single tropical storm can rip a whole cluster loose.

That’s exactly what happened, over and over, for roughly fifty years. Marine scientists Robin Sherman and Richard Spieler at Nova Southeastern University documented the pattern in a 2006 engineering paper, writing that “storm events and ocean currents have caused the bands to give way and the break-up of the reef.” Once loose, the tires didn’t settle. They rolled. Storm after storm pushed them across the seafloor and into nearby natural reef, scraping live coral down to bare rock as they went. The material meant to host new coral spent five decades doing the opposite, and did it well.

Decades of trying to undo it

For nearly thirty years after 1972, almost nobody removed a single tire. The first serious attempt didn’t come until the 2000s, and even then progress was slow until the U.S. Navy got involved. “By aligning military salvage training exercises with this real world problem we are accomplishing a coral protection project that government natural resource agencies would not have been able to accomplish on their own,” said William Nuckols, the Coastal America project coordinator who helped organize the effort, in the winter 2008 issue of Currents, a U.S. Navy dive-team magazine. Between 2007 and 2009, divers from Navy Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit Two worked the site every summer, hauling up close to 1,000 tires a day and targeting between 500,000 and a million tires across the 34-acre footprint.

I like this part of the story more than the disaster part, honestly. It fits something I already believed about fixing things that are actually broken: the real repair is almost never one dramatic overhaul. It’s a lot of unglamorous seasons, the same crew going back to the same patch of ocean floor, one barge at a time, for twenty-plus years running. In my experience, actual progress looks a lot more like that than like a rescue.

Where the count stands now

Navy divers couldn’t work the site forever, and after 2009 the job passed to commercial contractors under contract with the state. From 2015 through 2025 alone, that contractor-led phase pulled up 538,176 tires by the state’s own year-by-year count, on top of whatever the earlier Navy years and pilot removals had already taken out of the water in the 2000s. Florida’s environmental agency renewed the removal contract again in September 2025, this one running through September 2032, and its own projections show annual removal numbers still climbing toward the end of that window rather than tapering off.

How many tires are actually still down there depends on which of the state’s own estimates you use, but even the more optimistic ones put it in the hundreds of thousands, most of it buried under sand in patches too fragile to dredge without another round of permitting. The current contractor was still, as the agency’s own project page put it in September 2025, “in the process of obtaining local, state, and federal permits to commence work.” Until that clears, the tally updates once a year, and the crews go back out to the same 34 acres they have been working for two decades now.