That's a big pile o' tires...

Here in Ohio County, Kentucky we have a huge problem with people not wanting to dispose of their trash in the appropriate manner. At one time we had something like a dozen or more illegal dump sites that the state gave us 6 weeks to clean up or there would have been a $25,000 per day fine.

Our current judge-executive made sure to clean them up, needless to say.

I'm not sure why people dump trash out in the middle of nowhere. It's really mind boggling since our local landfill has a free day where you can dump all the trash you like at no cost. Instead of taking the landfill up on the free offer, several folks around here would rather load up their pickups and run a 2 a.m. stealth mission into the middle of Deliverance country and dump their garbage. And some of these dump sites are huge.

Well today I got to see the mother of all illegal dump sites. And this time it was old tires.

Once again I must explain that most every county in the state has a "tire amnesty" day or weekend where anyone can bring in their old tires and have them disposed of for free. But alas, people are stupid and they'd rather drive into the middle of nowhere to dump their tires.

This new dump site that was found was enormous. We actually had to drive into the next county and drive across a dude's farm to get to it, but when we got there it was mind boggling.

I was armed with a camera, but wasn't really able to get the scope of the site. See we were told to walk over to the edge of a bank and look at all of the tires thrown in a little valley. The kicker was that the bank we were standing on was the tire pile itself. They were running heavy machinery on top of the pile of tires. Dirt was dumped on the pile most likely to conceal it and we really aren't sure how big the pile is. It had grass growing on it and everything.

We estimated what we were standing on and could see as being a pile that was about 75 feet tall, 100 feet wide and about 300 feet long. Roughly 75,000 tires with the disposal cost being $1.04 per tire. It's going to take at least 6 weeks working 8 hours per day to get that mess cleaned up. Weather permitting. It's just insane.

Truck loads of these tires most likely came down from Louisville and some of the tires were at least 20 years old according to some dates acquired from some serial numbers.

Some people are just too stupid for their own good. If it wasn't for the fact that everyone knew that it needed to get cleaned up and gave this guy a get out of jail free card so they could get on his land to clean it up, he would be looking at a fine just large enough to kill him.

Regardless, that's a big pile o' tires.