Every community has its share of old tires piled up in dumps and ravines and off in the woods.

The Roanoke region got rid of close to half of its tires in short order seven years ago this month.

Some 3 million of them in a pile off Starlight Lane in South Roanoke County burned in a single, reeking conflagration that smoldered for a month in 2002.

That's not how Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality wanted to dispose of that many tires. Nor did it come close to solving the widespread problem of tire piles in the area.

But seven years and several million dollars later, state officials will announce at a news conference Tuesday that they are close to ridding the region of every tire covered by the state's tire pile cleanup program.

"After all these years, we've almost completed everything we know of in the Roanoke area," said Allan Lassiter, the DEQ's tire pile czar, more formally known as the manager of the Virginia Waste Tire Program.

Yes, those are the piles they know of. Lassiter's program identifies 10 to 15 new piles a year in Virginia. And these are only the piles that accumulated before the advent of tire recycling in the state in 1993. Subsequent piles are classified as illegal dumps under state law.

But, after clearing more than a dozen piles just in the past two or three months, the cleanup has caught up with the curve in the Roanoke region.

The area is now rid of 128 mounds of mosquito-breeding blight on the countryside that also present a fire hazard and, if they burn, a hazardous-waste issue to boot. That's 3.6 million tires removed at a cost of about $6.25 million, Lassiter said.

The region benefited from a new approach taken by the waste tire program. Lassiter divided the state into several regions, and focused money and effort on one or two regions at a time.

The Roanoke area was the first on the list, Lassiter said, because it had proportionally more tires and sites left, and less work had been done in this region.

The cleanup program dates back to the start of Virginia's tire recycling effort. Prior to that, Lassiter said, tire dealers or garages or dumps just piled tires here and there, which was legal at the time.

With the start of recycling, the state instituted a 50-cents-per-tire recycling fee on new tires sold in the commonwealth to fund the cleanup of the old piles.

In 2003, the General Assembly doubled that fee to $1 per tire. The Roanoke County fire, started by an apparently troubled teenager, was the catalyst.

To date, Lassiter said, the program has cleaned up 433 piles containing 21.5 million tires at a cost of $21 million. The tires are taken to 10 different recycling plants in Virginia.

That doesn't include about 1.7 million tires cleaned up by landowners at their own expense. Nor does it include the 3 million tires that burned in Roanoke County. That mess was cleaned up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

It's been a long, three-steps-forward-and-two-steps-back kind of journey. Piles are cleaned up every year, and yet, piles dating back 16 years or more continue to turn up.

"This is a national problem," Lassiter said, but one that he said he's finding can be tackled permanently.

"Some of the places we've cleaned up, we were fearful people would keep dumping tires there again," he said. "That hasn't happened."