WILLIAMSON, W.Va. — An annual cleanup of old tires from the Tug Fork River in Mingo County yielded just over 300 tires last week. The annual cleanup is sponsored by the volunteer Friends of the Tug Fork River. The organization partners with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection on the effort.
“We’re in our sixth year and 13,651 tires we’ve wrestled out of the waters of the Tug Fork River. It’s a challenge, we do it every year, but we’re happy to do it,” said John Burchett who heads up the effort for the organization each year.
The DEP provided the equipment and the organization provided the manpower. The combination has been a home run to remove the old tires. Some of the tires have been silted into the river bottom for more than a generation. According to Burchett, throwing tires in the river was the accepted way of disposing of them during the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.
“There was a mom and pop service station on every corner and if I would go in and buy four new tires, they’d take my old tires out back and roll them over the riverbank. It was the culture of the time and the accepted practice, but we’re having to pay for it now, the sins of our forefathers,” he said.
Fortunately tires are stable and although unsightly don’t leach very many contaminants into the water. Still, they look bad and removing them is a great way to rally volunteers into a single mindset to clean up the waterway.
The DEP provided an in-water vehicle to help lift the old tires from the depths and get them to the shore. The agency also provided other pieces of equipment to help lift the tires up over steep embankments to a staging area to be thrown away. The state also paid for the cost of proper disposal.
“DEP takes care of the disposal which is another great thing they do. They are hauled to a shredding facility and they go into a mono-fill. It’s kind of like a regular trash landfill, but the only thing that goes in there is shredded tires,” Burchett explained. “The hope is one day there’s enough demand for that shredded tire waste product we can pull that material back out of that landfill and use it.”
The Friends of the Tug Fork aren’t the only ones active. Organizations all across the state target their local river and muster similar efforts throughout the summer to remove old tires and other waste with DEP assistance.
“We just completed our annual tire clean-up on the Little Kanawha with REAP. We pulled 516 tires with 32 volunteers,” said Clayton Barnhart.
The volunteers in Calhoun County pulled tires from the Little Kanawha River in the area of Grantsville, W.Va.
Back on the Tug Fork, Pete Runyon who founded the Friends of the Tug Fork said they’ve also received a lot of help from the state of Kentucky to help cleanup their side of the river and the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has committed to helping develop river access points which has enabled them to pull tires in new parts of the waterway. Runyon said their hope is to continue the work on all sections of the river including the headwaters in McDowell County in future years.