You Can Burn Rubber On This Stretch Of Road Shredded Tires Used As Fill Have Smoldered And Burst Into Flame, Prompting Closure

Despite the cold and snow, there is one Garfield County road where ice is not a problem.

The fact that the road occasionally catches fire is a problem of its own, however.

County officials have closed the roadway near Pomeroy. Nervous state ecology officials plan to call in a federal transportation expert after pieces of recycled tires in the roadbed started to smolder and burn.

“There’s a lot of steam coming out of it, and there have been a couple of times when there have been flames coming out of it,” said Larry Bowles, Garfield County sheriff.

Mike Selivanoff, a county engineer, said the 55-foot-high roadbed’s warm banks create something of a tropical oasis.

“The grass was growing great and it still is, in the dead of winter, because of the heat it’s putting out,” he said. “We have birds visiting the spot all the time. One of the residents said he scared up a deer that was lying there the other morning, lying there and staying warm.”

Ecology officials say the burning appears to be caused by shredded steel-belted tires salvaged from the Maak tire pile near Airway Heights and used to fill in a ravine that the roadbed spans.

While they are also monitoring another hot roadbed near the coastal town of Ilwaco, Wash., officials say there is no danger of fire when recycled tires are used only to resurface a road.

Garfield County used the 6- to 8-inch tire chips as fill late last spring when it cut off a hairpin curve on Falling Spring Road, a gravel farm road running north of U.S. Highway 12.

Last fall, the road started to settle and steam. Earlier this month, it began to burn.

To be sure, this is not some Pennsylvania coal mine destined to burn for decades. For the most part, it just steams, particularly on cold mornings, said Selivanoff.

“It kind of reminds you of going down to Yellowstone,” he said.

When it’s really cooking, it will put out flames 12 to 18 inches high, “kind of like a small campfire,” he said.

The county fire department has been called out to throw foam on the flames several times. County road workers also visit the site regularly to put gravel fill on the settled spots.

County officials were so worried the 350-foot stretch of road might collapse they closed it two weeks ago and diverted traffic onto the old road.

The problem apparently started when a culvert beneath the roadbed was clogged during a storm in August, said Mike Hibbler of the Department of Ecology.

Hibbler theorized water saturated the roadbed and began to rust steel belts in the tires, producing so much heat in the chemical process that “eventually it gets the tires hot enough to where they start to cook.”

To nail down the cause of the fire, Ecology officials are analyzing air and soil samples from the roadbed and will view the site next month with a Federal Highways Administration consultant.

Options include smothering the fire or digging up the site, said Jerry Gilliland, an Ecology spokesman.

The tires were recycled from the Maak tire pile - once one of the state’s largest tire dumps - under a program paid for by a $1-per-tire tax on new tire sales. The program has recycled 8.5 million of an estimated 11.3 million used tires in the state, but the Garfield County fire may jeopardize their future use as road fill.

“We’re certainly worried that it might preclude the use of these chips in roadbeds,” said Gilliland. “… We’re going to have to dispose of these tires some way.”

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