Cleanup Of Tire Dump To Begin This Month

A firm hired by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to complete the cleanup of a tire dump in Quarryville, NY, will begin work by the end of this month; and the job is expected to be largely completed by the end of the year.

According to department spokeswoman Wendy Rosenbach, the lowest bidder for the Quarryville project was Tulley Environmental Inc. of Flushing, which bid $816,095 for the work.

Rosenbach said the contract has not yet been awarded to the firm, but department officials met with Tulley Environmental earlier this month for a pre-award meeting and expect to complete the contracts this month.

Work on the project will begin shortly after the contract is finalized, Rosenbach said, and is expected to take 100 days to complete. But the company may need to return in the spring to reseed the site with grass to fully finish landscaping there, she said.

For more than a decade, town officials have been chipping away at what once was more than 600,000 tires left at the site of a former tire recycling plant that went bankrupt. Earlier this year, the state stepped in to finish the job.

The cleanup is part of a plan to eliminate more than 29 million waste tires at 95 tire dumps across the state. It's being funded by a $2.50 fee that was added to the price of new tires in 2003. The money is deposited in, and drawn from, the state's Waste Tire Management and Recycling Fund.

Tires gathered at sites across New York will be shredded and, under the auspices of the state Department of Transportation, used as fill for highway projects. For example, a bridge in Clinton County will be replaced with an embankment that will use about 100,220 metric tons of so-called "tire shred," equivalent to about 1 million tires.

The shredded tires are layered up to 10 feet thick, compacted and covered on all sides with soil and pavement. The material is lightweight and compact, and it drains better than the conventional gravel used on highway embankments.

The 39.1-acre site on Old Route 32 in Quarryville was a tire recycling center that later became a tire dump. The state Department of Environmental Conservation filed a complaint about the property in 1992, when it was estimated there were 600,000 tires on the property. Roughly 60,000 tires remain there now.

In 1994, a state Supreme Court justice issued a cleanup order to William Reinhardt, Mark Syska and their company, Tire Recycling Inc. The owners were ordered to post an $80,000 bond for the town to draw upon for cleanup and removal expenses. Tires were transported to Casings Inc. of Catskill, which, under a separate court order, was required to assist in the cleanup and legal disposal of the tires.

Reinhardt later declared bankruptcy, staying the court's order and leaving the town to fend for itself.

The property now is owned by Ulster County, which seized it because of unpaid taxes. Kingston (New York) Daily Freeman