Military Divers Pulled from Artificial Tire Reef Cleanup Project

You may remember back in July of last year we brought you the military tire reef cleanup story.

Well, with all that's going on in Haiti and elsewhere in the world, troops have haulted the cleanup due to thinning resources.

Military divers are being pulled off a project to clean up an artificial reef off the coast of Florida that turned into an environmental disaster.

The divers have spent the last three summers pulling up thousands of tires a mile off the beach at Fort Lauderdale.

Hundreds of thousands were sunk there in 1972 in hopes they would turn into a coral reef. But nothing grew and they became scattered across the ocean floor, damaging real coral reefs.

The military began cleaning up the tires as a training exercise at no cost to the state.

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The earliest the cleanup could continue is 2012.

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It's a shame the cleanup apparently won't resume for another two years, but it's entirely understandable given the support our military is doling around the globe.