Tuesday, April 09, 2002
The wheels of due process turn slowly, Roanoke County officials say
Tire tactic: Tread lightly

Roanoke County was scheduled to sign a cleanup contract March 25. The tires caught fire March 23.

By TIM THORNTON
THE ROANOKE TIMES

   The question keeps coming up: Why wasn't something done about W.J. Keeling's tire piles long before this latest and biggest fire began?

    "I want to find out exactly what happened," said Rhonda Conner, a Roanoke County resident who is encouraging residents to attend the board of supervisors' meeting today at 3 p.m. to talk about the tire fire that began March 23 on Keeling's land in southern Roanoke County. She wants to know how long Keeling continued to haul tires to the site and why he wasn't stopped sooner.

    "I think they should have stayed on him," said Ruth Moseley, a 76-year-old county resident who blames county government for the problem.

    Officials knew Keeling was hauling tires to the site years after it was illegal, long after a court ordered him to stop. In Moseley's eyes, not enough was done to enforce that order. "We've got to stay on top of these things when they happen," she said.

    Rick Weeks, regional director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, said his agency and the county did stay on top of things.

   "I don't think there is anything more we could have done in the enforcement area, or that the county could have done," he said.

    The federal government didn't get involved until the fire began.

    "This is a state-centered responsibility," Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said during a stop at the tire fire command center Monday afternoon. The "sovereign states," he said, are the people's principal protection. "I'm sorry somebody didn't get on this tire dump earlier."

    There are about 2 billion used tires in piles across the country. More than 270 million are scrapped each year. At the same event, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, said they are a national problem the national government can't solve. "There are so many," he said, "to address them all is a budget-busting problem."

    Warner said, "They are sitting bombs. It's just a question of who lights the fuse."

    Since the early 1970s, Keeling's tire pile has violated local ordinances and state regulations. The county and state issued warnings and notices of violation beginning in 1975, but nothing much happened.

    Finally, in 1986, the county cited Keeling for illegally operating a landfill, unlawfully disposing of rubbish and maintaining a public nuisance. Keeling was convicted on all counts, fined $1,600 and sentenced to six months in jail. All of the jail time and $500 of the fine were suspended. The court ordered him to stop hauling tires onto the site. Keeling appealed, but didn't show up in court. He spent a night in jail for that.

    Many people have asked why Keeling hasn't spent a lot more time in jail. Roanoke County Attorney Paul Mahoney has consistently given the same answer: "That doesn't clean up a single tire."

    He counseled supervisors against trying to seize Keeling's land and clean it up, Mahoney said, because, "We're not a bunch of Nazi storm troopers who burst onto your property. We have things called due process of law."

    Besides, he said, if the county took control of the property, it would be financially responsible for the cleanup. In addition to tires, Keeling had old machinery, pallets, rusting storage tanks and scrap of all sorts on that land. Mahoney worried the re might be something even more troublesome than old tires among the rubbish.

    In 1987, the circuit court ordered Keeling to spend at least $1,000 to remove tires. Three months later, Keeling claimed to have hauled at least 4,000 tires from his property. He presented receipts showing he had spent hundreds of dollars on the effort.

    While that got some tires off the property, Keeling continued to bring tires to the site at least until 1996, according to the DEQ. He offered to haul tires from one dealer in 1998.

    "We discussed the possibility of parallel enforcement action: DEQ and the attorney general's office on the civil side, Roanoke County and state police on the criminal side," Allan Lassiter, manager of the state's waste tire program, wrote in a 1996 memo. But county and state officials opted for "restraint." They feared that putting pressure on Keeling would lead to arson.

    So the county continued to work with Keeling to try to get him or some other private party to dispose of the millions of tires stacked and buried on his land.

    "The county was trying to act as a broker, a middleman," Mahoney said. The aim was to find a business that could use the tires, could recycle them into something useful. "The economics just wouldn't pay for that."

    The state will pay $50 per ton - 50 cents per tire - to clean up tire piles. That works well when the tires are relatively clean and easy to get to, Weeks said, but most of the tires on Keeling's property aren't either of those things. Dealing with similar, though smaller dumps, Weeks said, has cost as much as $5 per tire.

    Despite that, many people thought they could clean up financially by cleaning up Keeling's mess.

    "Poor Paul Mahoney," Lassiter said. "He's talked to every waste tire snake oil salesman there is."

    A parade of people and companies thought they had the solution. None of the plans worked out, but evaluating each one used a little time, time that passed without a solution.

    Finally, in November, Keeling, the DEQ and the county reached an agreement. The government agencies could come onto his property and remove the tires. Finally, taxpayers' money - $1.4 million of it - was committed to the cleanup. No one thought that was enough, but it was all the DEQ had. On Monday, March 25, the county was scheduled to sign a contract with a company that would begin the process. The tires caught fire March 23.

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