Millions and millions of tyres
Within the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona, is one of the largest stockpiles of discarded vehicle tyres1 in the US - perhaps as many as 10 million individual tyres.
Despite being just south of a town called Goodyear, this is actually the work of a company called Envirotech Industries International, who have been collecting tyres here for the last 10 years.
The company used to recycle the tyres, and intended to start converting the old tyres into fuel - until the state of Arizona closed them down for multiple serious fire-code violations. Envirotech subsequently went bankrupt, leaving the State of Arizona responsible for the facility.
The imagery at Microsoft’s Live service has better resolution, allowing us to see individual tyres that have fallen from the huge piles (one of the breaches of the fire regulations was “Obstructed fire roads”).
If a fire were to break out here, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office have stated that it could “burn unhindered for over ten years”. To put that into perspective, in 1999 it took 250 firefighters 5 days to get a fire at a facility in Ohio under control - and it took a further nine years and more than $32 million to clean up the mess.
There are an estimated 3 billion waste tires stockpiled in the United States, and when they catch fire the environmental fallout can be catastrophic. Government reports stated that the pollution from the 1999 Ohio fire killed more than 10,000 fish in a nearby creek.
The Sonoran Desert National Monument is a small part of the 311,000 km² Sonoran Desert - home to several endangered species, and the most biologically diverse of all the North American deserts.
Read the full story at azcentral.com.
Thanks to kjfitz.
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Or “tires” as they’re known in the States. ↩
You’d think people would get tired of working there.
/I’m hear all day folks!
Tread lightly, Walter.
Sorry, that was terrible. I struggle under high pressure.
The images on Microsoft’s Live Service show much more tires than the ones on Google Earth. Now, which ones are more recent?
Scary…
It seems the desert is also home to a German airline, Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
I cant get Microsoft Live but for those of you who can i’m on the look out for a a tyre for a 2001 SAAB 93 2.0T - any brand will do. Can anyone see one?
Clearly, British “humour” doesn’t translate very well.
John: You mean American English humor?
(What people called tire in America is spelled tyre in Britain - The webmasters are from UK)
what IS up with the “Private Lufthansa” field!?!?
So I have an idea of what to do with all these tires. Shred them and use them to make running track, playground ground covering, and walking trails.
Question is….how many miles of trail say 10 feet wide would all these tires make?
I believe the runway is part of a school that Lufthansa runs to train pilots. There was an article in the NY Times on it once:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DD133EF932A05753C1A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
And, of course, there is a Wikipedia entry on the schoo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Training_Center_Arizona
And a website:
http://www.atca.net/
@john
I can assure you that my ‘humour’ doesnt translate in any language.
I’ve had have been trained on British humor. I’ve been forced to watch “Keeping up Appearances” and other old BBC comedies on PBS thanks to my wife. Now as for the humor of a Scotsman, I haven’t much training there.
You cannot judge British Humour on Keeping Up Appearances! TopGear, Mock The Week, Nevermind the Buzzcocks, Room101, 8 out of 10 cats and just about any other Comedy Panel Show is what British Humour is about.
But, Envirotech had a good idea there… shame it got shut down.
“Give me your tyred, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Use the Tyres… teach the homeless to
Build Earthships!!