"Well, that backfired"

[calendria]

 

 

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What is the greatest instance of "Well, that backfired" in all of history?




This method is meant to support marine life and get rid of the tires in the process.
They would call this the Osborne Reef.

https://qr.ae/pNH7YP

Because of climate change and pollution, marine life over the years has started to deteriorate.
In the 1970s, and just like many places in the world, Florida found this was a problem and sought to find a solution.
Around that time, Florida was also facing an issue with tires.
Before the era of recycling, people didn’t know how to get rid of objects. And as a result, discarded objects often piled up in their landfills.
So with problem preserving the marine life and also an issue with piling up tires, what could they possibly do?
They came up with a plan. Artificial Reefs.
An artificial reef, as you may have known, is a man-made structure that was sunk in the ocean as a means to provide habitat to fishes in hopes that it would encourage their living conditions and reproduce.
A non-profit group composed of fishermen called Broward Artificial Reef (BARINC), aimed to create artificial reefs using the tires that were piling up in the landfills.
And so sinking tires they did.

In 1972, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Million of tires were sunk off the coast.
With the support of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the plan was carried out, and 2 million tires were placed over 36 acres ocean floor, 7,000 feet offshore in 65 feet of water.

The tires were bundled using steel clips and nylon.
They concluded that if they were to sink these tires, the coral reefs would attach to the tires and continue to grow to provide a home to fishes underwater.
Initially, the corals successfully latched into the tires. However, this did not go well when no one thought of the corrosivity of the steel restraints.

Consequently, the saline water corroded the materials leading the tires to separate from each other.

Due to the newfound mobility, the tires started to destroy the corals both nearby and the ones that were already successfully attached to it.
It not only destroyed the existing corals but also prevented new ones from forming ultimately leading to its failure.
If that’s not bad enough, the east coast of Florida is prone to tropical winds and storms making the tires subject to those forces and littering nearby beaches, some even reaching as far as North Carolina.
Ever since the event, several organizations have attempted to retrieve the tires but the operation is costly. In 2007, the military took action and removed 73,000 from the ocean.
Despite the efforts, it is still believed that hundreds of thousands still rest on the ocean floor.

So far, no one has successfully retrieved all the tires from the site.

The government of Florida may have had an ambitious intention of overturning a problem by using another one as a solution.
But unfortunately, it didn’t solve it but rather merged it into a bigger one and causing it to be more problematic.

[calendria]

 

 


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https://qr.ae/pNH7Hc

In 1958, Mao Zedong made sparrows enemy #1 and ordered all sparrows to be killed because he felt they ate too much grain and hindered food supply.

Three years later, China was hit with famine and millions dead of starvation. Killing sparrows didn’t improve agriculture and instead, worsened it.


Without sparrows eating insects like locusts and caterpillars, insect population boomed and ate all the crops. Locusts proved to be the worst and flooded the countryside in droves. With no sparrows to control the population, the locusts and other insects feasted on grain.



Mao Zedong's narrow-minded view on nature caused the deaths of 36 million people. The nationwide campaign to kill sparrows spread fast and in the first year, 2 billion sparrows were killed. This environmental disaster was so severe Mao realized his mistake and stopped the campaign but it was too late. The sparrow population had drastically declined and Communist China had to ask the Soviet Union for sparrows.


Comment:

Lan Yenchiu
·
August 9
This is basically a good answer, but the story is not that simple. The Great Chinese Famine was only partly caused by killing out the sparrows. In bigger part it was caused by the forced industrialization of China. Mao visioned a Soviet-style transformation into a heavy-industry based country, and he imported lots of heavy machinery and technology from the Soviet Union, and promised to pay back by agricultural products. Then: “Hippity, hoppity your food is our property” — said the Party, and every peasant needed to provide a fixed amount of crop to the Party so they could pay back to our Soviet brothers. The ratios were so high that it was impossible to do, the Party took most of the crop and people were starving, they were eating grass and bark. They were not even brave enough to make a fire, because if Party officials noticed that, they were suspected that they make food from hidden crop and they were executed. People were begging before the grain storages, “Chairman Mao, give us food”, but the doors remained closed. In some places cannibalism was rampant. It was arguably the craziest period of China’s history, but maybe not the craziest, because the Cultural Revolution was comparable. Anyway Mao is definitely responsible for the death of about 80 million Chinese, as a moderate and conservative estimate.

[ghunter]

I don't know what to say about this.

[calendria]

I don't know what to say about this.

Which one?

I'm reading things like this every day on Quora.com!

[Work2hard]

Maybe is just people.

[calendria]

 

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-greatest-instance-of-Well-that-backfired-in-all-of-history?q=Well.%20that%20backfired


Heather Hernando
Answered August 9 · Upvoted by Magdalene Blake, B.A. Humanities & English Literature (2001)

In the Middle Ages, devil-fearing Christians killed cats, which carried the unintended consequence of increasing the rat population and the spread of the Black Death.


The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, spread across Europe between 1346 and 1353. It is widely believed that the plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.



In the 1400s, the plague wiped out about 1, 000 villages in England alone and the population was perhaps half what it had been a hundred years earlier. It is estimated that 25 million people died from the plague during the Black Death, which was one-third of Europe’s people.

This bacterium is commonly present in populations of fleas carried by rodents. It spread through the Mediterranean and Europe from Central Asia when sailors reached Crimea in 1343. At that time, black rats were regular passengers on me … (more)

[tjshorty]

Interesting articles.  Humans are real good at destroying nature.

[linderlizzie]

Both interesting and terrifying the power that humans can have over their environment.

Epic failures. Too bad and too sad.