Posted on 04/23/2009 10:44:18 AM PDT by Paleo Conservative
CORPUS CHRISTI — A tire cleanup in Hazel Bazemore Park has turned into a bigger job than expected after workers discovered a lot more than tires.
Commissioner Mike Pusley said the county has discovered that the park has been used as an illicit dumping site for years.
“None of us had any idea this existed,” Pusley said.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality ordered the county to remove mounds of old tires that had been used for erosion control at a ravine. The tires were placed there more than 20 years ago, by most estimates, and numbered in the thousands.
But workers for the county found, among other things, sheet metal, construction debris, the back-end of an old Chevrolet, and more old tires.
Nueces County now is expected to hire an environmental engineer to map out a plan to clean the site, and the workers have stopped removing tires until the county has a plan to deal with the other trash.
“One of the things we have to be concerned about is safety,” Pusley said. “We’re going to have professionals take over.”
Pusley said there’s no indication at this time that any of the debris is hazardous, but environmental workers may take soil samples.
“We just don’t know enough information,” Pusley said.
There’s no word on how much a cleanup will cost.
The county had originally set a deadline to have the park cleaned up by Aug. 26. That date is likely to change.
Susan Clewis, regional director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said her office will meet with county officials next week.
“What they’ve gotten into is different from what they thought they had,” Clewis said. “We really don’t know what the extent is, and it could be a fairly dangerous approach if not handled in a different manner.”
The county’s project of removing tires dumped in a ravine at Hazel Bazemore Park
to control erosion has gotten bigger. Workers for the county have found, among
other things, sheet metal, construction debris, the back-end of an old Chevrolet,
and more old tires.
The 10 Rules of Bureaucracy
1. Preserve thyself.
2. It is easier to fix the blame than to fix the problem.
3. A penny saved is an oversight.
4. Information deteriorates upward.
5. The first 90 percent of the task takes 90 percent of the time; the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent.
6. Experience is what you get just after you need it.
7. For any given large, complex, hard-to-understand, expensive problem, there exists at least one short, simple, easy, cheap wrong answer.
8. Anything that can be changed will be, until time runs out.
9. To err is human; to shrug is civil service.
10. There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over.
Firestone to help with dumped tires
Dumping tires in a ravine to stop erosion seemed like a good idea 20 years ago, but the Environmental Protection Agency frowns on that kind of stuff now. That put Nueces County government in an expensive bind.
The EPA told county leaders that they had to clean up a ravine near Hazel Bazemore Park where hundreds of old tires were dumped decades ago. Counting the cost of dragging the tires out, some of them huge truck tires, and transporting them to be properly disposed of, the county leaders were looking at a possible cost of as much as $20,000.
But Firestone rolled up. The corporation told county leaders that it would pay to haul the tires away to approved tire recycling centers. The county will use jail inmates to pull the tires out of the ravine and Firestone will take it from there. Firestone's offer could save taxpayers up to $10,000. ROSES to Firestone for its generous offer.
I can imagine those inmates levitating out of there when some six foot diamond back rattler whizzes out of that tire pile.
If this was in New Jersey they would probably find the remains of a few missing mobsters and those that crossed them.
Bring the cannoli!
Maybe if they had checked this site out earlier; they would know.
I was thinking the same thing. No telling what other critters are there too.
Easy solution.
Tire Fire in honor of Earth Day.
Butt....Isn’t that an animal habitat now?
Oh the humanity!!!!
Don’t count us out... we have the Mexican Mafia in Robstown, Corpus is the home of the Baditos... just saying...
Thanks for spelling it all out.
I don’t remember that park from when we lived in Corpus.
But I sure could use those tires to plant my potatoes now!
But I sure could use those tires to plant my potatoes now!
It's a county park not a city park. It's not too far from where I-37 and US-77 intersect along the Nueces river.
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