Local News - The rubber meets the road in Mullica Township: Tons of tires removed from former Perona Scrap Yard
MULLICA TOWNSHIP - A birch tree could be seen growing through the middle of a worn tire, the sunlight shimmered off glass embedded in the dirt and mangled heaps of lumber and metal were scattered all about.
"It's a thing of beauty," Public Works Supervisor Peter Berenato said. "This looks 300 times better than it did when.....Continue Reading
we started cleaning up."
For decades, the former Perona Scrap Yard off Columbia Road was home to mountains of old tires. Like many other places in southern New Jersey's rural reaches, it served to store mounds of leftover rubber tires that could take millennia to decay.
Today it is still far from clean, but hundreds of tons of tires were hauled away in the past few weeks as the state pushes to finally rid itself of these unsightly and unsafe dump sites.
The Department of Environmental Protection began last year to target the hundreds of thousands of tires piled up at six locations in Atlantic, Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem counties, and it expects to finish by the end of this year.
"This is the last of the largest," DEP spokesman Larry Hajna said.
Using more than $600,000 in grant money, the tires are being hauled out and either incinerated or recycled for a variety of uses, while residents are being freed of toxic fire hazards that serve as ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
In these cases and other less egregious situations, scrap dealers removed the tires when they recycled cars for their metal. Without an easy means for reselling the vulcanized rubber, they left them to sit.
"They all had their hope of hopes that someone was going to invent the ultimate tire machine that was going to turn these tires into Astroturf or sneakers, or whatever," said Pat Dillon, Atlantic County environmental health coordinator.
There are modern methods that can turn the tires into fuels, road construction materials, covers for landfills and other uses. But, according to the DEP, the owners of the six sites in question did not have the money to do the work, did not listen to cleanup orders or abandoned the property.
Meanwhile, officials remembered fires at several of the sites that took hundreds of firefighters days to extinguish.
One of the sites, on Elmer Road in Fairfield Township, burned for 15 hours just before Christmas 2007, bellowing black smoke into the winter sky. Another site in the township on Bridgeton-Millville Pike burned for eight hours in 2004.
The Columbia Road dump in Mullica also caught fire for hours in the mid-'80s, as did a larger site on Route 30 that burned for days.
Berenato was a volunteer firefighter in Hammonton when the Columbia Road scrap yard flamed up, and he remembers running long hoses down the 1,000 feet of dirt road to where one of the largest piles sat.
On Tuesday, scraps of rubber and a variety of other garbage littered the approximate area of that fire. Weeks before, the tires were stacked so high they obscured the surrounding woods, Berenato said.
The DEP estimated that more than a quarter-million tires were removed from the location, which is barely visible from the road. Mayor Michael St. Amour said illegal dumping may have continued there until the township put up a locked gate at the entrance a mile and a half south of Nesco Road.
The owner, Joseph Perona, died in 1996, and the township has since acquired the land. There currently are no plans for the 99-acre parcel.
The township had $217,000 in recovered tax liens from its other junkyard on Route 30, and it worked with the county to use that money and a $50,000 grant from the state to finally remove the tires.
The Township Committee formally finished that project Tuesday night, approving the release of performance bonds for its contractor, Carbon Services Corp., which took the tires to an incinerator in Chester, Pa.
The company actually took the last load of tires for free, since it had already exceeded the contractual amount.
"It was just truckload after truckload after truckload after truckload," Berenato said.
While getting rid of the tires was the priority, the secluded, wooded area is still covered with trash - a couple of boat hulls, collapsed structures, a toilet here, a rearview mirror there.
"That would be a big can of worms to start digging all this up," Berenato said as he walked past what looked like a motor oil bucket that read "Mobil" on the side.
Contact Lee Procida: 609-457-8707 LProcida@pressofac.com
Mullica Township Superintendent of Public Works Peter A. Berenato, of Hammonton, points out a cleared area at an old junkyard off Columbia Road, where the township used grant money to clean up hundreds of thousands of tires.
Photo by: Michael Ein
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