Scrap Tire Fire Extinguished at Cost of $3 Million

It took five weeks and $3 million, but a fire raging in a massive pile of discarded tires south of here is out. Now, the state has to figure out how to clean up the mess.

The fire, 100 miles from Sacramento near the farm town of Westley, erupted in a pile of scrap tires believed to be the nation’s largest. Six stories high, the blazing mound spewed a black plume that cast a gloomy pall over the northern San Joaquin Valley for days.

Smoke from the fire, sparked by a lightning strike, sprinkled soot for miles and left scores of residents complaining of breathing problems, bloody noses and burning eyes.

Stanislaus County officials declared a local emergency, and flashing signs on Interstate 5--which passes less than a mile west of the tires--warned motorists to keep their windows rolled up.

Initially, authorities intended to let the fire burn itself out--a common strategy with tire fires. A similar blaze to the north in Tracy, for example, has been burning for 15 months.

In Westley, however, angry residents called that approach unacceptable. And federal experts called in to assist with the disaster determined that the site’s topography made it possible to put the fire out.

A team of Texas firefighters who specialize in oil fires used a combination of foam and water to attack the blazing mountain. Because the fire was in a sloping canyon, oil drained out from under the pile--rather than remaining beneath it, igniting and causing the fire to intensify.

“Since the oil was separating out, it was only the top four or five feet of tires that were actually burning,” said Michael Feeley, deputy director of the Superfund division at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco. “So we were able to attack those upper layers and put the fire out.”

Price tag: $3 million minimum, a sum federal officials will attempt to collect from the owner of the tire pile, Ed Filbin. Filbin, who began stockpiling tires 40 years ago, made millions from tire dealers who paid him to take their discards. He once was dubbed owner of more tires than anyone else in the world.

With the immediate crisis over, state officials are now working to winterize the site, and to devise a long-range plan to deal with the 1 million remaining unburned tires as well as the grotesque mounds of melted rubber, steel and ash.

Engineers with the Integrated Waste Management Board, which regulates the state’s tire piles, already have begun building dams in the canyon’s upper watershed. The goal is to divert runoff from winter rains around the pile to prevent contamination from moving off the site, said Chris Peck, a spokesman for the board.

With the first storms already rolling in, it’s too late in the season for officials to launch any sort of permanent cleanup of the site now, Peck said.

Depending on what sampling of the melted residue shows, experts will either dig up and remove the fire’s remains or perhaps cover the site with an impermeable cap made of earth or a synthetic material.

Also remaining behind are about 3.5 million gallons of contaminated water used to fight the fire. About 200,000 gallons of waste oil from the fire has been shipped out for use as energy at a cement kiln in Kansas City.

There are about 40 known illegal tire dumps scattered in California, containing more than 1 million tires in addition to those unburned in Westley. Many of them represent fire hazards, officials say, because they lack firebreaks and their owners fail to keep fire suppression equipment on hand.