The headline says big tires washed up on Campbell River on Vancouver Island in B.C. They are 11 or 12 feet in diameter. They are filled with styrofoam. There are at least eleven of them. The beach cleanup collected the styrofoam the next week. The first three tires came in and then were followed a week later by eleven more. It cost $6,000 to remove the first three, so you can imagine the cost of the next set. They will have to cut them apart on the beach and then they will figure out how and when to move them.
These are tires used on off-road haul trucks and front-end loaders in the mining and heavy construction industries. Quarries, open-pit mines, and oil sands operations are places where they would be seen.
Their next life happens in industrial docks, piers or resort breakwaters as they are typically filled with styrofoam and strapped together to be flotation devices or fenders.
So now we know a bit more about the massive tires. That’s less worrisome than the bodies with burn marks and missing limbs that washed up on Trinidadian beaches after the U.S. has blasted boats in the Caribbean recently.
That seems too gruesome, so going back to tires, they are not unknown on beaches.
“In the 1970s, the Osborne Reef off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was created by dumping over two million tires into the ocean, hoping to form an artificial reef. Instead, the bindings eroded, and loose tires drifted, damaging natural coral rather than fostering marine life.
For decades, these rogue tires have been washing up on Florida’s beaches and even appearing as far away as the Carolinas and the Gulf of Mexico. Large-scale clean-up efforts began in the 2000s, with divers and military teams working to remove the tires.
Our final wash up story is a giant eyeball. It showed up in Florida in 2012. The likely source was a swordfish. It would have been over 10 feet long. Why the fisher would have cut out the eye seems to me to be the mystery. Supposedly a discarded souvenir of the catch.
My own version of discovered items comes from the Lilycrest hybridizing field yesterday. I noticed the orange and blue paint on a few of the pallets and got some nice abstract images.
