The tire cutter that Wrangell shares with the rest of Southeast has returned to town early.
The Public Works Department is trying to complete a construction project that requires reducing the pile of old tires at the town’s waste transfer site, so the communities on Prince of Wales Island, which were next in line to receive the hydraulic-powered cutting machine, have agreed to let Wrangell have an extra turn.
The pile needs to be significantly reduced before a permanent loading dock can be constructed at the solid waste transfer station. The machine will chop each tire into manageable pieces for packing into a closed-top container and shipment out of state by barge, clearing the land around the station for the construction work.
In January, the borough accepted a $250,000 grant from the Denali Commission for the almost $500,000 loading dock project, which officials said will make the trash disposal process cleaner, safer and more efficient.
As it stands, sanitation staff have to drive a forklift up an icy, precarious steel ramp to load trash into containers for shipment off the island. The process “has brought up some significant concerns with our staff safety,” said Public Works Director Tom Wetor.
Transferring trash using a loading dock is “how it’s done in most places,” explained Wetor. “In Petersburg, they have three loading docks. We don’t even have one.”
The Denali Commission grant stipulates that the loading dock project must be completed by September 2024, but work can’t start until the tire pile is reduced to a more manageable size to make room.
The project will include regrading the ground leading up to the loading dock and creating a new roadway. However, since the transfer station is hemmed in by bedrock cliffs, the roadway will have to go right through where the tire pile is now.
Last time the tire cutter was in town, Public Works staff used it to clear about a third of the community’s massive pile, which contained an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 tires. But since the chopping machine left in February, the pile has returned to its original size.
“Channel Construction operating in Wrangell and the amount of junk cars that were disposed of seems to be a primary reason,” Borough Manager Jeff Good wrote in a report to the assembly for their April 25 meeting. Tires had to be removed before the scrap metal dealer would accept a vehicle.
The Southeast Alaska Solid Waste Authority bought the machine for $56,700 in fall 2021 using a grant from the Southeast Conference. Since Wrangell suggested this purchase, it was the first community in line to receive the machine. It had last been in Petersburg before returning to Wrangell about two weeks ago.
“We’re going to try to get as many hours out of (the shear) as we can … while we have it,” said Wetor. He doesn’t plan to hire additional temp staff to operate it, but he might “see who else can hop on the thing for a day or two while it’s here to get through as many tires as we possibly can.”
Even with the equipment operating at full tilt through the summer months, it won’t be possible to fully clear the pile, since many of the tires in it are too large for the machine to handle.
“Even if we ran that thing through the entire pile, we’d only chop about half the tires,” explained Wetor. “There’s (Boeing) 737 airplane tires in there … we have no way of dealing with those. They are far too big for that little machine to be able to chop up. … We’re going to get as far as we can with the little tires and the shear.”
“We still do not have the solution for large equipment tires,” wrote Good. But he is “in contact with companies in the Lower 48 who specialize in tire disposal to get an understanding of what that would require.”
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