Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Cops nab tire-dumpers in Giles
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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Tires are among the most insidious pieces of river trash.
They show up and then don't go away until someone pulls them off the bottom and carts them off to a dumpster.
Every river has them, but some have them bad.
Some end up there by accident, swept into the current during high-water events a few at a time over the years.
Others end up there because some people would rather litter than pay the required tire disposal fee.
That appears to have been happening in fairly big way on a section of the New River in Giles County.
Virginia conservation police officer Frank Gough has for two years been working on a case of suspected tire dumping along the river's Shumate section.
In January, he got a big break when an informant spotted a pickup truck loaded with old tires headed to the river.
Gough raced to the area and found a set of tire tracks leading off a paved road down a muddy road toward the river.
"There were tracks going in but not coming out," said Gough, who's been assigned to Giles County for 14 years. "So I knew they were still in there."
Gough set out on foot and quickly located the truck, which was still loaded with tires.
He waited. Two hours later two men showed up, the questioning started and the men started singing.
"They fessed up," Gough said of the men, who were from West Virginia.
Gough said the men told him that once a month for the past two years they had picked up a load of 20 to 25 old tires from tire shops and truck stops and had brought the tires across the state line to dump and sometimes burn them along the river.
That means the two-year total would have been around 450 tires, which Gough said appeared to be about right based on findings from follow-up searching that identified 11 distinct dumping areas.
The fee was just a few bucks per tire, the men told Gough, which means the men probably would have been lucky to clear $50 a day mucking up one of Virginia's great rivers.
The men were served with a total of seven warrants: four for illegal dumping, two for destruction of trees and shrubs and one for possession of an illegal drug.
The case is scheduled to be heard in Giles County General District Court on June 27.
In West Virginia, where the men were also charged in relation to a dump site on that side of the border, an investigation into the businesses that provided the men with the tires is under way.
Gough isn't one to seek out attention, but he's getting some anyway.
Last week the Giles County Board of Supervisors presented him with a plaque honoring his contribution to the county.
The folks with the ReNew the New River advocacy group presented him with a print as thanks for being a steward for the river.
"He's a nice man who did a really great thing," said Ann Goette, the group's coordinator.
As for those tires, they're still there.
The clean-up will be difficult because the dump sites are pretty remote.
Even so, Gough said that authorities don't plan to pursue any clean-up action until the case is legally resolved.
ReNew the New, which pulled roughly 300 tires from the river last August, would probably pitch in to help.
A better idea? How about two guys working off a community service sentence for illegally dumping tires?
"That would be great," Goette said. "Really great."
Youth score on gobblers
Virginia's youth turkey hunters apparently had a pretty decent day Saturday on the annual youth spring gobbler hunt.
Hunters reported 81 turkeys by phone and another five over the Internet. Last spring, when youth hunters and their mentors had to battle cold, snowy conditions, the phone-reported kill was just 51.
The phone and Internet totals don't tell the whole story, of course. Turkeys can also be checked in person, as were most gobblers killed by young hunters on youth day in 2007, when the kill total was 235.
Assuming the percentage of hunters using the phone or Internet doesn't change significantly, that would equate to a youth day total of roughly 400 birds. That's well over the 341 birds killed on youth day in 2006, when a good youth hunt set the tone for what turned out to be one of the state's better spring seasons.
The general season starts Saturday and runs through May 17.
