The U.S. military made the mess, but they appear to be tired of cleaning it up.
Officials announced Wednesday it has called off the clean up of a big pile of junk the U.S. Navy dumped off the coast of Fort Lauderdale in 1972.
The mesh of 700,000 old tires, metal and nylon was supposed to become this grand artificial reef, but Nemo and his pals weren't too keen on living in the military's junk house.
Little sea life formed on them and many tires came loose and scoured a patch of the ocean floor the size of 31 football fields. Thousands have wedged up against the nearby natural reef, stacked several feet high, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.
Army and Navy divers began trying to clean up the ecological blunder in 2007 and used it as a training exercise, but the mess is only 10 percent cleared away, officials said.
The Army and Navy crews are just stretched too thin by conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror and earthquake relief in Haiti, a Pentagon official said this week. Divers won't return to the area for at least another two years and that's if President Obama sticks to the withdrawal plan in the Middle East..
"Unfortunately, they're not having a lot of time to train because they're committed, as the whole military is pretty well swamped," said David McGinnis, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. "We had to send them because we had no choice. We didn't have anybody else."
Local
Sounds like a bunch of junk to us.
