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Monday, April 01, 2002
Frederick County officials think the project could have been completed much sooner and much more economically if the EPA had never gotten involved.
By TIM THORNTON
On Halloween night in 1983, 75-foot-high flames leaped from this meadow. Smoke billowed 4,500 feet into the air, spreading a noxious, oily cloud 100 miles from this rural northern tip of Virginia into West Virginia and Maryland. Nine million tires - a 4-acre pile 70 feet high - were burning. The blaze lasted eight months. The cleanup has lasted nearly 20 years. The Rhinehart fire and its aftermath may give Roanoke Valley residents an idea of what to expect once the tires on W.J. Keeling's south Roanoke County property have burned themselves out. Like Keeling, Paul Rhinehart had a plan to turn old tires into something useful. Rhinehart built a furnace meant to generate steam that would heat a row of greenhouses. He planned to fuel the furnace with tires. "Rhinehart was a super guy, except he believed he had a mission from God to take these tires and stack them up," said Sam Lehman, who built a house and a lake two miles from the Rhinehart farm more than a decade before the fire. "He was planning this incinerator where he claimed he was going to burn them without pollution. It was pure baloney." But Rhinehart kept collecting tires by the trailer-truckload, charging up to 50 cents for each one he put on his farm. "The minute I saw it, I knew it was going to burn," Lehman said. "It was a pile of petroleum sitting there." When the fire started, the little wet-weather stream downhill from the biggest tire pile began running black and green. The Environmental Protection Agency quickly built a pond to catch the runoff. The pond collected more than 800,000 gallons of the oily residue that seeped from the burning tires. That was refined into more than 700,000 gallons of fuel oil, which was sold to industries. Lehman remembers seeing a plume of smoke shooting above the treetops. It looked as if a giant steam engine was chugging through the forest. But the source of the smoke wasn't going anywhere. Two weeks after the tire fire started, a gentle rain put acid into his lake. "Half the fish died," Lehman said. "I got them all cleaned up, buried them, dug a hole, you know. Just when I was finished, came another gentle rain. More acid into the lake. It went to pH 3." That's the same acidity as vinegar. "Everything died," Lehman said, "the frogs, the turtles, the rest of the fish. The lake was just bereft of life." In the eight months the tires burned, Lehman calculated, Frederick County got 30 years' worth of acid rain. But it didn't take 30 years for Lehman's lake to recover. That happened with the first rain after the fire burned out. Ten years after that, Lehman had fish in his lake as big as the ones killed by the tire fire's poison rain. There's still work to do at the Rhinehart place, one of roughly 1,200 sites on the EPA's Superfund priority cleanup list. Last week, workers were burying some of the 1 million tires that remained on the farm after the fire. The EPA should be finished at the Rhinehart farm by September, according to Andrew Palestini, who has been in charge of the project for the past two years. Frederick County officials think the project could have been completed much sooner and much more economically if the EPA had never gotten involved. "I don't want to speak ill of the EPA, because they're a great organization," said Frederick County Administrator John Riley. But he believes their operations "tend to be a little bit prolonged." Ed Strawsnyder, director of Frederick County's Public Works Department, was less diplomatic. "I don't believe there's an agency in the United States that can spend more money than the EPA and get less for it," he said. "The EPA does what it wants, when it wants, regardless of what it costs." The EPA received permission Wednesday afternoon to enter Keeling's Roanoke County property to assess the damage and prepare for the cleanup. If the EPA cleans up the Keeling fire, Strawsnyder said, it will mean "20 years of misery." The EPA's Palestini offers a different perspective. "I don't want to make it sound like we always did things right and we always did things fast and we always did things cheap," he said. "Over these 20 years, the Superfund program has changed drastically" for the better. Besides, he said, no one knows if the Keeling site will ever be on the Superfund list. The first step toward getting on the list, he said, is scoring high enough on a series of questions about the nature and severity of pollution at the site and the number of people affected by it. If the score is high enough, Palestini said, the EPA will officially propose the listing and ask for public comment. After that, the EPA would develop a risk management plan, conduct a feasibility study, propose a cleanup plan, ask for public comment, select a remedy and design the operation. Then the cleanup could begin. On the other hand, Palestini said, the state Department of Environmental Quality may decide to clean up the site on its own. The Rhinehart cleanup has outlived Rhinehart himself. It's also outlived the court-appointed receiver of the Rhineharts' assets, the man charged with seeing that those assets were used to pay for the cleanup. There are still tires scattered around the farm. They lean against trees and poke their treads out of the water in the EPA's retention pond. A water treatment plant and what's left of Rhinehart's furnace stand between the pond and a hillside coated in concrete to hold the fire's residue in place. All of that, except the ruins of Rhinehart's furnace, is supposed to be gone or underground by September. "I think they're about finished," said Riley, the county administrator. But he's seen EPA deadlines pass before. "I don't know if they'll ever be finished."
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