Tired of tires

This pile represents the smallest of the piles of tires discarded on Angela Palmer’s property prior to her purchase of it, unbeknownst to her.

By Alison James

alison.james@fct.wpengine.com

When Angela Palmer purchased five acres of land with a quaint cabin outside the city limits of Red Bay, she had a vision of fixing up the cottage and building a place to store her RV when she came down from Wisconsin to visit family.

That vision has been obscured by what her landscaper estimates to be literally thousands of tires, discarded on her property, sometime in the past before she purchased it. She had no clue when she bought the property, which she found online.

“It was a foreclosure property,” Palmer said. “I had been looking at it for several months.”

Now, what was to be a vacation home that needed some work but was a doable project has become a money-sink and a headache.

Palmer hired local landscaper Raymond Randolph to get to work clearing some of the land, which is heavily wooded. As he set out to mark the property lines, he made the startling discovery – a small pile of tires, perhaps a hundred feet from the cabin. And then another pile of tires. And then another. The largest, he said, is “probably 12 feet tall and 30 feet wide. I would say she’s probably got close to 2,000-3,000 tires.”

Palmer, while not having seen the property in person, had a real estate agent to inspect it before she purchased it.

“He felt that it would be a good investment,” Palmer said. “He walked around the yard, took pictures of the front and back and sides and then reported back what his findings were.”

But Randolph said probably even the bank that sold the foreclosed-on property didn’t know about the tires.

“It was big trees, and this was all grown up,” Randolph said. “You couldn’t even see back in here.”

With little choice but to figure out how to safely and legally remove the tires, Palmer was discouraged to discover the difficulty in such a task. Tires can’t be burned. They can’t be buried.

But then Palmer learned of Alabama’s scrap tire fund.

In 2008 it was estimated that there were more than 20 million tires illegally disposed in the State of Alabama. In June 2003 the Alabama Legislature passed the Alabama Scrap Tire Environmental Quality Act – and with it, the Scrap Tire Fund – to “comprehensively regulate scrap tire accumulations and to provide for cleanup and remediation of all illegal scrap tire sites,” according to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

“If you have an accumulation of 100 tires or more on your property, and you are not

a registered receiver of scrap tires, you must do the following,” explains an ADEM fact sheet. The required actions including registering as a landowner with a scrap tire site and removing all scrap tires to a waste facility using required limited-use transporter permit. This all comes at the landowner or responsible party’s expense – unless a person can prove they are “an innocent landowner” and qualify to use the Scrap Tire Fund, which is money set aside for this purpose, funded by a fee charged of citizens when they purchase new tires.

Palmer began to research the requirements for status as an innocent landowner and believed she would qualify. A 71-page document that outlines the regulations of the scrap tire program defines an innocent landowner as one who did not know the tires were on their property, or the tires were disposed after purchase of the property without the property owner’s knowledge or consent; the owner did not receive any financial benefit from the disposal of the tires; and the owner executed reasonable due diligence before purchasing the property, among other provisions, all of which Palmer feels she meets.

But after an ADEM investigation in which Palmer replied to a letter that was sent to her, she was denied participation through the Scrap Tire Fund.

“I get a response that says I should have known,” Palmer said. “I was denied being eligible for the program. They said I needed to come up with a plan, a timeline, present the plan to them, provide photographs, and I was responsible for the cleanup of the tires.”

Lynn Battle, spokesperson for ADEM, said that because Palmer did not view the property herself, she was not eligible for assistance. In ADEM’s opinion, had Palmer examined the property thoroughly, she would have discovered the tires prior to purchase.

“She did not perform or have a third party perform due diligence at the site,” Battle said. “So it made the site ineligible for a department-funded remediation.”

Palmer was left with the burden of research, not to mention the burden of cost.

“They didn’t volunteer any information to me,” she said. “The common person doesn’t know all the regulations for scrap tires. They just expect everybody to know that you’re not supposed to burn tires and you’re not supposed to bury them and they’re supposed to be disposed of in a qualified landfill.”

Palmer, for her part, can’t understand why a program that was set up for this purpose isn’t being allowed to be utilized by those who need it.

“It should be accessible for what the fund was set up for,” Palmer said.

In the meantime, she has applied for a limited use permit, which is good for three months only and allows only so many tires to be removed per day. She is shouldering the costs of paying a contractor to remove the tires and paying the landfill per dump, plus paying the cost of the permit.

Battle pointed out that “the department is working with her to give her an opportunity to have the site cleaned up,” in that ADEM will not be checking on Palmer’s progress during the course of the six months and will not penalize her for the illegal dump site during the six month period she has been allowed to remove the tires.

In the interim, progress on clearing and prepping her land has stalled.

“These tires have snakes and I don’t know what all in them,” Palmer said. “It’s not even safe for a person to walk down there, because these tires – I don’t know how long they’ve been there.”

Although Palmer at this point is resigned – “It is what it is” – she said she’s disappointed by having to deal with the whole situation.

“It’s creating a pretty big hardship – not including the stress, the emotional stress and strain it puts on me … knowing the hazard it’s creating for anyone who even goes on the property,’ she said.