ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 12, 1997 TAG: 9704140028
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY THE ROANOKE TIMES
Neighborhood activist Evelyn Bethel was one of many Roanokers pleased to see city workers cleaning yards and lots before today's ``Tire Amnesty Day'' in the valley.
Virginia Brown had been waiting for a day like this for so long, she can't quite remember.
"I guess maybe I've been here 23 years and couldn't get anybody to take these tires," she said, as she pushed one Michelin after another through her front yard on Hanover Avenue. "I've got tires from my car, my brother's car, my father's car - I'm the tire lady."
All stacked up nice and neat by the back door.
Oh sure, she could have turned them in at the dealer when she got her new ones, but that costs money, now that the state has started taxing old tires to pay for the disposal costs - and tire dealers have started passing on the cost to consumers. "You have to pay $2 for them to take your old tire. Two dollars to me is a pack of cigarettes."
So there they've sat, all these years.
"I figured someday somebody would come by to pick 'em up," she said.
For her, someday came Friday.
Nancy Bailey was covered with a black oily grime. Worse yet, she was hacking and spitting onto the asphalt. "I just drank some tire juice," she explained.
But she went right back to flinging old tires into the back of a tractor-trailer parked on the edge of the Roanoke Civic Center parking lot. A few more still had dirty water sloshing around inside, splashing Bailey and her fellow workers from head to toe.
This is your city government at work - along with the law of unintended consequences. "As the cost of tire disposal has gone up, you've seen more illegal dumping," Bailey said. She should know; she's a program coordinator for the city's Solid Waste Management department.
She's also the one who came up with a solution - the Roanoke Valley's first "Tire Amnesty Day," where people can bring in tires for free to any of five pickup stations.
But that doesn't deal with the problem of abandoned tires in alleys and on vacant lots, which is one of the most frequent neighborhood complaints the city gets. So Friday, about 100 city workers and elected officials - including such high-ranking types as City Manager Bob Herbert and Mayor David Bowers - "volunteered" to spend the day on pickup duty. Police had spent the past week listing tire dumps they'd spotted on patrol, and first thing Friday morning, 20 teams fanned out across Roanoke.
Before they set out from the civic center, Commonwealth's Attorney Don Caldwell climbed onto the back of a pickup truck to exhort the troops. "We're tire hunting today," he declared, "and tire hunting is a lot of fun because there's no bag limit! It's one of the few things you hunt with your bare hands; it's you against the tire!"
Caldwell, Bailey observed, has taken a keen interest in tires. "It's a personal issue with him. He just hates the way the city looks with these tires."
So there stood Caldwell, explaining the legal do's and don'ts as they applied to stepping onto private property. Mostly the do's. "We need to be somewhat aggressive," he said.
Team No. 2 would be very aggressive.
The first haul was easy. Led by police Sgt. R.L. Arrington, the team of health department workers - Karen Chaples, Dick Tabb and Don Bower - swung by a vacant lot in Gainsboro where Arrington had seen a huge pile of tires. "Oh, they're moving the tires!" said neighborhood activist Evelyn Bethel, a frequent critic of city government, who came out to watch. "I think it's great."
They loaded all 64 into street maintenance worker Robert Bell's dump truck and were headed back to the civic center to empty the load before the last team had even rolled out. Then it was on to Hanover Avenue Northwest and a more deliberate search.
Chaples, an environmental health supervisor, has a eye for spotting trouble - in the form of tires crouched beneath honeysuckle vines or stashed behind outbuildings. She pointed 'em out, then Tabb and Bower jogged after her finds. Sometimes, Caldwell's advice to be "somewhat aggressive" won out over his admonition to knock on the door and get a property owner's permission. See that tire under the pile of lumber against that house on Madison Avenue? It looked abandoned enough to Tabb, so he pulled it out and tossed it onto the truck.
At one vacant house, Chaples waded through weeds. She stood on an abandoned refrigerator set on its side and peered into a tangle of brush beside an old outbuilding. "Yeah, there are tires in here," she announced.
"Ho!" Bower shouted when he saw the mess he'd have to tramp through. But he and Tabb did it anyway.
"Incoming!" Tabb shouted as he started hurling tires into the alley.
When health department workers see tires, they think disease. "You find a pile of tires around, and if there's food around, rats will go burrow up under the tires," Bower said. And that stagnant water inside them? A perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.
While the health workers clear out the last tires at this lot, the police sergeant ambled up the alley to make an announcement. "A lady stopped me and said she had eight tires she'd put out in front her house over on Staunton Avenue."
Virginia Brown had seen a police officer, a truck full of tires and wondered ... could it be? "I asked him what he was doing and I flew home."
Her estimate of eight tires turned out to be more like 16. "I appreciate this," she told the workers over and over. "This is the best thing you could do. Now I have space for my garbage can."
The health workers gently suggested she'll have fewer mosquitoes this summer. "Mosquitoes?" she exclaimed. "They were tearing us up last summer!"
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. VIRGINIA BROWN and herby CNBgrandson, Taz Seth, roll many years of unwanted tires to the curb
Friday morning for a crew of city workers to pick up on its way up
Staunton Avenue. 2. At left, health department employee Dick Tabb
puts some muscle into his one-day assignment in an alley behind
Gilmer Avenue. Health workers see old tires as havens for hated rats
and mosquitoes. Other officials joining Friday's citywide effort
included Mayor David Bowers, City Manager Bob Herbert and
Commonwealth's Attorney Don Caldwell, who mixed legal advice into a
pep talk at the start of the day. color.