Conservation a Tiring Effort in Santa Clarita : Garbage: Workers who fished hundreds of tires from Placerita Canyon wanted them hauled away. That isn’t what happened.

Before it skidded out of control, the saga of the 550 used tires was rolling smoothly into the annals of environmental success stories.

Young conservation workers last month fished the tires out of a remote Santa Clarita canyon, where they had been dumped. Heaped six-deep on Placerita Canyon Road east of the Antelope Valley Freeway, the gritty pile was a testament to Southern California’s mounting litter problem and efforts to chip away at it.

Then the story took an unforeseen, and, well, tiresome, detour, according to all involved.

Instead of being promptly hauled away, the tires sat there. Residents of a nearby affluent neighborhood called the Sheriff’s Department to complain about the eyesore.

Suddenly, the Santa Clarita Valley found itself dealing with its very own version of the infamous New York garbage barge, albeit on a much smaller scale. Three years ago, a bargeful of garbage from the Big Apple was towed 6,000 miles, rejected by six states and three nations, before meeting a fiery death in a Brooklyn incinerator five months later.

No one wanted the 550 tires either.

“They’re a real pain,” said Bill George, recycling coordinator for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. “If you bury them in landfills, they trap air and pop up to the surface like little Cheerios. We’ve tried shredding them and using them for roadbeds instead of crushed rock, but it’s like playing with Velcro. The stuff just balled up and wouldn’t spread evenly.”

Landfills will take tires, but fees range from $3.30 to $10 for each whole tire.

The California Environmental Project, a Van Nuys group that organized the Santa Clarita cleanup, didn’t have $1,815--the minimum amount necessary--in its coffers, said Scott Mathes, the group’s executive director.

It was counting on the help of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, another private, nonprofit group that participated in the cleanup.

The group planned to eventually pick up the tires, but workers were busy elsewhere, said Bruce Saito, LACC’s program manager.

Meanwhile, scavengers known as “tire jockeys” took more than 200 of the least battered tires from the side of Placerita Canyon Road to recap and sell. Vandals rolled about 30 back down the canyon.

The area was in danger of becoming an illegal dump site, said Carla Van Dyne, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service.

Because the tires were found in Angeles National Forest, the Forest Service finally hauled them late Thursday to the Tujunga ranger station, where they are being stored in a parking lot.

Van Dyne said the federal government cannot afford to pay a landfill to take the tires, so she persuaded a local tire shredding company to take 30 tires a month for free.

At that rate, it will take about 10 months to get rid of them.

Airport Tires of Tujunga usually charges tire dealers a hauling and disposal fee, but wants to help clean up the forest, said owner Alberto Caballero.

This chapter of the tire saga may have a happy ending, but Van Dyne said she expects the problem to bounce back. People keep dumping tires in the forest, perhaps because violators are fined only $50 under federal regulations.

Once there, the tires attract rats and trap water, becoming habitats for mosquitoes.

“It’s really sad,” Van Dyne said, “but the public is going to see more of this kind of thing in the future.”