Tires piling up in Danville

A good-looking cityscape may be the latest victim of a shaky economy with old and worn tires becoming landscaping additions to many parts of the city.

For a number of possible reasons, the city and state officials have had to contend with an increasing number of illegal tire dumpings, officials say. Not only is a huge pile of trodden down tires blight, it can be dangerous and end up costing a lot of money.

“Tire dumping statewide is increasing,” Rick Drazenovich, director of public works, said.

“We clean these up constantly, but we get hundreds of tires a month,” Drazenovich said. “Our litter crews find them in ones and twos and sometimes whole piles.”

In Danville, he said, piles are popping in mostly “out of the way locations,” and that it seems that there’s a “significant problem of folks … stopping on the off-ramps late at night and rolling them off the guard rails and into the bank.”

A pretty penny

Aside from just looking ugly, the heaps can be hazardous to the environment and residents health.

“They become a mosquito haven,” Drazenovich said. Pools of stagnant water can build up in tires because of the way they lay, he explained. “They really really breed mosquitoes continually.”

The issue reached a peak this January, when officials found nearly 2,000 tires at once along the U.S. 29 bypass, said Edmond Giles, Virginia Department of Transportation Pittsylvania county maintenance operations manager.

Cleaning that up cost $7434.54 all told he said. VDOT worked with the state police and Danville sent equipment and prison inmates to help with the actual hauling away.

But the city and state aren’t the only ones paying for heaps of tires. Unsuspecting property owners are liable to find themselves paying for other people’s littering habits as well.

“The city code does not allow illegal accumulation of debris; it’s the property owner’s responsibility to keep it clean,” explained Mike Crawford with the VDOT.

If one morning a law-abiding resident happens to wake up to a pile of tires on their property, they’re legally obligated to clean it up. And that could cost them $37 or $38 per ton, Chris Doss, a code enforcement official with VDOT, said.

Blame the economy?

While officials across various state and city departments agree that it’s a problem, they offer a couple of speculative reasons as to why the problem has been increasing in recent months. Likely, though, they agree it has to do with either cost-cutting or dollar-getting.

Drazenovich said he thinks that with rising fuel prices, people who might normally have driven their old tires to a proper processor are now just dumping them on the side of the road.

Another reason might be due to the increase in the going rate of recycled steel. Recycling plants will take scrap metal from cars, but they won’t take the cars with tires or gas tanks, said Crawford.

“A combination of tires on rims and rims dropped off with (tanks) tells us that these scrappers…are taking them off and illegally dumping them,” he said Wednesday.

Crawford also said it’s possible that entrepreneurs, knowing that people don’t want to drive out to a processor, might be going around town collecting old tires for a few bucks and then just dumping them off. This could explain why some sites seem to accumulate large quantities of tires.

Lt. Mike Mondul, of the Danville Police Department, said it might just be a matter of people not following the rules.

Solving the problem

City and state agencies are working together to solve the problem, and have implemented a number of surveillance measures, including cameras.

So far, one Danville resident, Charles Donald Earles, has been arrested for illegal dumping. The court decided to dismiss charges as long as Earles helped clean up the mess he made, which he did in January, said Mondul.

A number of Danville tire retailers will take old tires from individual car-owners as long as their purchase theirs in return. Goodyear distributors will take them in for $3 apiece, and Sears Auto Center, Expert Tire, and Crane Tire will all take them for $2.

• Contact Sarah Arkin at (434) 791-7983 or