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The World’s Biggest Tire Graveyard in Kuwait Is on Fire

169 points by vinnyglennon 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago
That must smell awesome and is probably really healthy. Perhaps it won't be the largest tire graveyard for long.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  In small concentrations like you'd get downwind it smells like burnouts, not great, not too bad. In high concentrations tire smoke is pretty acrid and should be avoided.
potiuper 5y ago
All that had to be done was to cordon it into zones like in the bottom left.
rasz 5y ago
Maybe they were ordered to clean up. This is a popular hazardous substances disposal scheme in EU: You rent a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing. You get paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, you stockpile until the place is full. Finally you either set the place on fire to cover your tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal. Just 2 days ago https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-naszym-regionie-tym-razem-w/ar/c1-8401231 https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-na... already mentions one from one week earlier. https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-skladowiska-odpady/ https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-sklado... Usually couple a month up to one a week, year after year for the last >10 year. Seemingly no political will to fight this scheme.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  If you only have a small amount of hazmat you find someone who's renting storage trailers and pay them cash, fill the trailer(s) and then drop off the face of the earth. If you just have tires you can make a pile visible from the road. Given enough time some teenagers with a flare gun will make them go away.
- tester756 5y ago
  this is sad
  - omegaworks 5y ago
    welcome to globalized capital, where we race to the bottom in places not considered "valuable" to the elite
    - bennybob 5y ago
      So what's your alternative to "globalised capital"? No money moves from rich to poor countries?
      - omegaworks 5y ago
        "Rich" countries should not be allowed to externalize their environmental concerns. What makes a country "poor" but the value placed on the lives of the people in it? The resource-rich countries of Africa and South America are considered "poor" because the US and Europe see their people and institutions as expendable and replaceable.
        ben_w 5y ago
        > "Rich" countries should not be allowed to externalize their environmental concerns. Morally sound, but how would you enforce that? > What makes a country "poor" but the value placed on the lives of the people in it? The value of the goods, services, business, and real estate that those people collectively control. > The resource-rich countries of Africa and South America are considered "poor" because the US and Europe see their people and institutions as expendable and replaceable. Assuming this is true, how did China shift from being poor to being not poor? Did they make their institutions unexpendable and irreplaceable, or did they do something else?
swagtricker 5y ago
So competitive for status - just had to show up Springfield by being larger, eh?( https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Springfield_Tire_Yard https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Springfield_Tire_Yard ).
tpmx 5y ago
Hmm, this (or a previous) fire is already visible in the Google Maps satellite view. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sulaibiya,+Kuwait/@29.2573457,47.6764983,1350m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x3fcf92708a4cfae9:0x4b72a44a48f05d7a!8m2!3d29.2855773!4d47.818038 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sulaibiya,+Kuwait/@29.2573... However, the tire pile arrangements look different than in the photo in the article...
- sidewndr46 5y ago
  Hmm, that is enormous. At least it looks like just one pile is burning at present. My understanding is whenever Iraq lit the oil wells on fire they just pumped up seawater to help with extinguishing the blaze. I wonder if that sort of thing could work here? Basically just flood the area with seawater.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    USSR nuked a gas well - an inferno was raging for 3 years and nothing elae could stop it. "On that cold autumn day in 1966, an underground tremor of unprecedented force shook the [ground] with a sparse grass cover on white sand. A dusty haze rose over the desert. The orange colored torch of the blazing well diminished, first slowly, then more rapidly, until it flickered and finally died out. For the first time in 1,064 days, quiet descended on the area. The jet-like roar of the gas well had been silenced"
    - sidewndr46 5y ago
      Actually they did that around six or so times from what I understand. All those were underground, so it probably is a net win for environment.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    Maybe I'm misinterpreting the photo, but I saw the path as a firebreak, like they were using the vehicles to separate the burning tires from the rest of them.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
Fires at tire recycling plants are all too common. There are good techniques for recycling tires. May not be profitable, but they work.[1] When looking at YouTube videos of tire recycling operations, take a close look at the throughput. If the beginning is a front-end loader dumping in a load of tires, that's good. If it's one guy lifting a tire onto a conveyor, they're not serious about it. [1] https://youtu.be/UWyLzXHqJSs https://youtu.be/UWyLzXHqJSs
- ksaj 5y ago
  I went to a high school where the running track was part tar and part ground up auto tire. It was by far the best track I ever ran on.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Miraculously, the smoke was blown away to the direction of the sea, and not inland. That actually seems like the worst outcome. According to the satellite photo in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28131932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28131932, it looks like Kuwait City is between the landfill and the sea. Inland looks like it's mostly desert.
- _Microft 5y ago
  The wording also suggests that polluting the sea would be more acceptable than polluting land area.
  - Joker_vD 5y ago
    Well, the ocean dillutes whatever you dump into it to much lower concentrations than the rivers do when you dump something into their drainage basins.
    - _Microft 5y ago
      I think we unsuccessfully conducted a similar experiment with the atmosphere already.
      - userbinator 5y ago
        There's a huge difference between things like global CO2 emissions, and this single fire which is probably a tiny insignificant fraction of that.
        _Microft 5y ago
        The attitude that the oceans are huge and that it is just a minor event here or there that could not possibly affect the sea a lot is exactly the source of the problem. A fire here, a garbage patch there, some mercury from gold mining, ... it just adds up.
flerchin 5y ago
How can the World's Biggest Tire Graveyard hold only 7 million tires? Presumably they go through that many tires roughly every every year or two in Kuwait.
- flerchin 5y ago
  Let alone the entire world.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Either there are many tire dumps, many are recycled, or a combination of both.
- traeregan 5y ago
  Great question. TIL that most disposed tires, in the US at least, are used for all sorts of things; some are even burned intentionally for "pyrolysis". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_recycling
- tpmx 5y ago
  https://www.treehugger.com/americas-tire-mountains-percent-are-gone-thanks-to-recycling-programs-4868546 https://www.treehugger.com/americas-tire-mountains-percent-a... Excuse the source, but it seems factually correct. It's a problem that was solved 30+ years ago in relatively high-functioning countries.
korethr 5y ago
A small request from those of us more prone to breathing issues than average. Please stop setting large fires like this. The smoke crosses continents and oceans, and many of us miss being able to go outside with starting to cough after an half-hour.
age_bronze 5y ago
I don't know why Arabs intentionally burning tires is a thing, but in Israel, there's an issue of Arabic villages regularly burning tires. As long as you live near a village, you're going to smell burnt tires every month or so. It's disgusting and unhealthy and it always comes from Arabic villages. Seems like they just don't care about neither the environment nor the health of everyone.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  It's for protesting. This article talks about it occurring in Lebanon but also some of the history behind it, and that it's fallen out of favor with some due to environmental impact. https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-fire-releases-our-anger-tire-burning-becomes-hallmark-of-lebanon-protests/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-fire-releases-our-anger-ti...
  - hourislate 5y ago
    He's trolling...
    - pugworthy 5y ago
      Yea I know - tried to craft a non-political response to a politically charged comment.
- mikestew 5y ago
  I don't know why... Do you really? Or just don't care enough to look? Because I took the next part of your sentence, "arabs intentionally burning tires", plugged it into duckduckgo, and the first link explained it well enough for even this ignorant American to understand.
djrogers 5y ago
FTA: “ You may wonder why such flammable and hazardous material is stored in a place where weather conditions exceed 50 degrees Celsius” Not to be too snarky, but if you wonder this, you don’t have much of a grasp of how fire works. This wasn’t spontaneous combustion, and tires burn just as well at 2* as they do at 50*…
- JPKab 5y ago
  I thought the same thing. Looking at the last 18 months of utter and complete quantitative illiteracy on display in journalistic institutions covering COVID, I'm not surprise at this absurdly simplistic thinking on other subjects. Edit: You weren't being snarky, and have every right to complain about ignorant, non-analytical people being given a platform to write foolish statements like "it's hot there so fires start easier".
- version_five 5y ago
  The article read like it was written by GPT, I don't think we can read too much into any "analysis" it makes, it's just filler to get to a word count.
- aaron695 5y ago
  The Sun thinks the same - "Many have questioned the wisdom of storing such combustible materials in a country where the temperatures brush 50C." - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15778161/worlds-biggest-graveyard-fire-smoke-space/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15778161/worlds-biggest-gravey... So does the Australian government - "The higher the temperature the more likely it is that a fire will start or continue to burn. This is because the fuel is closer to its ignition point at high temperatures and pre-heated fuel loads burn faster." - https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bushfire https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bus... I think to prove they are wrong is complicated. What they say is true. Intuition also makes people think it's true (anyone who's started a fire on a hot day knows it rips). You have to simulate this effect is orders of magnitude lower than the other effects. Of which it's still hard to know which one that counts. Is it wind speed or the missing moisture or are they the same order of magnitude? But one shouldn't complain about an article that thinks tires tires get executed when they are old, that's cute - "filled to the brim with executed car tires"
mymythisisthis 5y ago
We need to chemically dissolve old tires. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/GC/C9GC03545A https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/GC/C9GC0...
AareyBaba 5y ago
Documentary showing the Kuwait tire facility. Close up view of the yard including the boss wearing a business suit and tie in the middle of the desert. https://youtu.be/y0ah6QZpI3M?t=44 https://youtu.be/y0ah6QZpI3M?t=44
JPKab 5y ago
This is horrific, and so is the "journalism" on display in this article. How did this tire fire start? Zero information written. What are the 4 companies? Zero information written. How realistic is the "plan to recycle 95% of the tires" and "replace them with sustainable housing". Zero. What efforts are being undertaken to put the fire out? Zero info. I could be forgiving if it didn't come off as so aggressively lazy and unprofessional.
- gkanai 5y ago
  Look at the author of the piece: "Aya is an aspiring journalist who is into everything related to culture. A curious explorer and traveler, she graduated from the faculty of Arts with one mission in mind: experience everything. She is interested in filmmaking and scriptwriting and hopes to one day write her own feature film." can you expect "journalism" from someone who is not a journalist?
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    We expect middle-schoolers to address "who what where when why and how" when writing stuff. I think we should be able to expect the same from paid journalists whether or not they're professionally trained.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    You are correct she is absolutely not a trained journalist. I hope I can be forgiven for thinking she was considering that the article is under the news section of a website claiming to be a source of journalism.
blamazon 5y ago
Allegedly there is a problem with thieves burning these piles to get the steel belts inside the tires which hold some value.
watersb 5y ago
I used to live in a tiny town with a huge pile of tires out in a lot next to the airstrip. It caught fire and burned all month. They couldn't extinguish the flames, and we lived with heavy black smoke asphalt air for weeks. You could pile dirt on it until the fire ran out of oxygen, if we had autonomous earth moving equipment that could take the intense heat. Or you might try to shock it to smother it, but at scale that would have to be an air-fuel blast that would have wiped out the whole village. The town was especially good at blowing stuff up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetic_Materials_Research_and_Testing_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetic_Materials_Research...
neurostimulant 5y ago
Someone posted this video [1] on reddit [2] last week. The fire seems smaller. So the fire has been burning continuously for weeks? [1] https://gfycat.com/knobbylimitedcormorant https://gfycat.com/knobbylimitedcormorant [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/owccqc/the_worlds_largest_tyre_graveyard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/owccqc/t...

169 points by vinnyglennon 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

That must smell awesome and is probably really healthy. Perhaps it won't be the largest tire graveyard for long.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
In small concentrations like you'd get downwind it smells like burnouts, not great, not too bad. In high concentrations tire smoke is pretty acrid and should be avoided.

potiuper 5y ago

All that had to be done was to cordon it into zones like in the bottom left.

rasz 5y ago

Maybe they were ordered to clean up. This is a popular hazardous substances disposal scheme in EU: You rent a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing. You get paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, you stockpile until the place is full. Finally you either set the place on fire to cover your tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal. Just 2 days ago https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-naszym-regionie-tym-razem-w/ar/c1-8401231 https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-na... already mentions one from one week earlier. https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-skladowiska-odpady/ https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-sklado... Usually couple a month up to one a week, year after year for the last >10 year. Seemingly no political will to fight this scheme.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
If you only have a small amount of hazmat you find someone who's renting storage trailers and pay them cash, fill the trailer(s) and then drop off the face of the earth. If you just have tires you can make a pile visible from the road. Given enough time some teenagers with a flare gun will make them go away.
tester756 5y ago
this is sad
- omegaworks 5y ago
  welcome to globalized capital, where we race to the bottom in places not considered "valuable" to the elite
  - bennybob 5y ago
    So what's your alternative to "globalised capital"? No money moves from rich to poor countries?
    - omegaworks 5y ago
      "Rich" countries should not be allowed to externalize their environmental concerns. What makes a country "poor" but the value placed on the lives of the people in it? The resource-rich countries of Africa and South America are considered "poor" because the US and Europe see their people and institutions as expendable and replaceable.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        > "Rich" countries should not be allowed to externalize their environmental concerns. Morally sound, but how would you enforce that? > What makes a country "poor" but the value placed on the lives of the people in it? The value of the goods, services, business, and real estate that those people collectively control. > The resource-rich countries of Africa and South America are considered "poor" because the US and Europe see their people and institutions as expendable and replaceable. Assuming this is true, how did China shift from being poor to being not poor? Did they make their institutions unexpendable and irreplaceable, or did they do something else?

swagtricker 5y ago

So competitive for status - just had to show up Springfield by being larger, eh?( https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Springfield_Tire_Yard https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Springfield_Tire_Yard ).

tpmx 5y ago

Hmm, this (or a previous) fire is already visible in the Google Maps satellite view. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sulaibiya,+Kuwait/@29.2573457,47.6764983,1350m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x3fcf92708a4cfae9:0x4b72a44a48f05d7a!8m2!3d29.2855773!4d47.818038 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sulaibiya,+Kuwait/@29.2573... However, the tire pile arrangements look different than in the photo in the article...

sidewndr46 5y ago
Hmm, that is enormous. At least it looks like just one pile is burning at present. My understanding is whenever Iraq lit the oil wells on fire they just pumped up seawater to help with extinguishing the blaze. I wonder if that sort of thing could work here? Basically just flood the area with seawater.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  USSR nuked a gas well - an inferno was raging for 3 years and nothing elae could stop it. "On that cold autumn day in 1966, an underground tremor of unprecedented force shook the [ground] with a sparse grass cover on white sand. A dusty haze rose over the desert. The orange colored torch of the blazing well diminished, first slowly, then more rapidly, until it flickered and finally died out. For the first time in 1,064 days, quiet descended on the area. The jet-like roar of the gas well had been silenced"
  - sidewndr46 5y ago
    Actually they did that around six or so times from what I understand. All those were underground, so it probably is a net win for environment.
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  Maybe I'm misinterpreting the photo, but I saw the path as a firebreak, like they were using the vehicles to separate the burning tires from the rest of them.
- mistrial9 5y ago

Animats 5y ago

Fires at tire recycling plants are all too common. There are good techniques for recycling tires. May not be profitable, but they work.[1] When looking at YouTube videos of tire recycling operations, take a close look at the throughput. If the beginning is a front-end loader dumping in a load of tires, that's good. If it's one guy lifting a tire onto a conveyor, they're not serious about it. [1] https://youtu.be/UWyLzXHqJSs https://youtu.be/UWyLzXHqJSs

ksaj 5y ago
I went to a high school where the running track was part tar and part ground up auto tire. It was by far the best track I ever ran on.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Miraculously, the smoke was blown away to the direction of the sea, and not inland. That actually seems like the worst outcome. According to the satellite photo in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28131932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28131932, it looks like Kuwait City is between the landfill and the sea. Inland looks like it's mostly desert.

_Microft 5y ago
The wording also suggests that polluting the sea would be more acceptable than polluting land area.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  Well, the ocean dillutes whatever you dump into it to much lower concentrations than the rivers do when you dump something into their drainage basins.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    I think we unsuccessfully conducted a similar experiment with the atmosphere already.
    - userbinator 5y ago
      There's a huge difference between things like global CO2 emissions, and this single fire which is probably a tiny insignificant fraction of that.
      - _Microft 5y ago
        The attitude that the oceans are huge and that it is just a minor event here or there that could not possibly affect the sea a lot is exactly the source of the problem. A fire here, a garbage patch there, some mercury from gold mining, ... it just adds up.

flerchin 5y ago

How can the World's Biggest Tire Graveyard hold only 7 million tires? Presumably they go through that many tires roughly every every year or two in Kuwait.

flerchin 5y ago
Let alone the entire world.
kube-system 5y ago
Either there are many tire dumps, many are recycled, or a combination of both.
traeregan 5y ago
Great question. TIL that most disposed tires, in the US at least, are used for all sorts of things; some are even burned intentionally for "pyrolysis". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_recycling
tpmx 5y ago
https://www.treehugger.com/americas-tire-mountains-percent-are-gone-thanks-to-recycling-programs-4868546 https://www.treehugger.com/americas-tire-mountains-percent-a... Excuse the source, but it seems factually correct. It's a problem that was solved 30+ years ago in relatively high-functioning countries.

korethr 5y ago

A small request from those of us more prone to breathing issues than average. Please stop setting large fires like this. The smoke crosses continents and oceans, and many of us miss being able to go outside with starting to cough after an half-hour.

age_bronze 5y ago

I don't know why Arabs intentionally burning tires is a thing, but in Israel, there's an issue of Arabic villages regularly burning tires. As long as you live near a village, you're going to smell burnt tires every month or so. It's disgusting and unhealthy and it always comes from Arabic villages. Seems like they just don't care about neither the environment nor the health of everyone.

pugworthy 5y ago
It's for protesting. This article talks about it occurring in Lebanon but also some of the history behind it, and that it's fallen out of favor with some due to environmental impact. https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-fire-releases-our-anger-tire-burning-becomes-hallmark-of-lebanon-protests/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-fire-releases-our-anger-ti...
- hourislate 5y ago
  He's trolling...
  - pugworthy 5y ago
    Yea I know - tried to craft a non-political response to a politically charged comment.
mikestew 5y ago
I don't know why... Do you really? Or just don't care enough to look? Because I took the next part of your sentence, "arabs intentionally burning tires", plugged it into duckduckgo, and the first link explained it well enough for even this ignorant American to understand.

djrogers 5y ago

FTA: “ You may wonder why such flammable and hazardous material is stored in a place where weather conditions exceed 50 degrees Celsius” Not to be too snarky, but if you wonder this, you don’t have much of a grasp of how fire works. This wasn’t spontaneous combustion, and tires burn just as well at 2* as they do at 50*…

JPKab 5y ago
I thought the same thing. Looking at the last 18 months of utter and complete quantitative illiteracy on display in journalistic institutions covering COVID, I'm not surprise at this absurdly simplistic thinking on other subjects. Edit: You weren't being snarky, and have every right to complain about ignorant, non-analytical people being given a platform to write foolish statements like "it's hot there so fires start easier".
version_five 5y ago
The article read like it was written by GPT, I don't think we can read too much into any "analysis" it makes, it's just filler to get to a word count.
aaron695 5y ago
The Sun thinks the same - "Many have questioned the wisdom of storing such combustible materials in a country where the temperatures brush 50C." - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15778161/worlds-biggest-graveyard-fire-smoke-space/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15778161/worlds-biggest-gravey... So does the Australian government - "The higher the temperature the more likely it is that a fire will start or continue to burn. This is because the fuel is closer to its ignition point at high temperatures and pre-heated fuel loads burn faster." - https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bushfire https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bus... I think to prove they are wrong is complicated. What they say is true. Intuition also makes people think it's true (anyone who's started a fire on a hot day knows it rips). You have to simulate this effect is orders of magnitude lower than the other effects. Of which it's still hard to know which one that counts. Is it wind speed or the missing moisture or are they the same order of magnitude? But one shouldn't complain about an article that thinks tires tires get executed when they are old, that's cute - "filled to the brim with executed car tires"

mymythisisthis 5y ago

We need to chemically dissolve old tires. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/GC/C9GC03545A https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/GC/C9GC0...

AareyBaba 5y ago

Documentary showing the Kuwait tire facility. Close up view of the yard including the boss wearing a business suit and tie in the middle of the desert. https://youtu.be/y0ah6QZpI3M?t=44 https://youtu.be/y0ah6QZpI3M?t=44

JPKab 5y ago

This is horrific, and so is the "journalism" on display in this article. How did this tire fire start? Zero information written. What are the 4 companies? Zero information written. How realistic is the "plan to recycle 95% of the tires" and "replace them with sustainable housing". Zero. What efforts are being undertaken to put the fire out? Zero info. I could be forgiving if it didn't come off as so aggressively lazy and unprofessional.

gkanai 5y ago
Look at the author of the piece: "Aya is an aspiring journalist who is into everything related to culture. A curious explorer and traveler, she graduated from the faculty of Arts with one mission in mind: experience everything. She is interested in filmmaking and scriptwriting and hopes to one day write her own feature film." can you expect "journalism" from someone who is not a journalist?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  We expect middle-schoolers to address "who what where when why and how" when writing stuff. I think we should be able to expect the same from paid journalists whether or not they're professionally trained.
- JPKab 5y ago
  You are correct she is absolutely not a trained journalist. I hope I can be forgiven for thinking she was considering that the article is under the news section of a website claiming to be a source of journalism.

blamazon 5y ago

Allegedly there is a problem with thieves burning these piles to get the steel belts inside the tires which hold some value.

watersb 5y ago

I used to live in a tiny town with a huge pile of tires out in a lot next to the airstrip. It caught fire and burned all month. They couldn't extinguish the flames, and we lived with heavy black smoke asphalt air for weeks. You could pile dirt on it until the fire ran out of oxygen, if we had autonomous earth moving equipment that could take the intense heat. Or you might try to shock it to smother it, but at scale that would have to be an air-fuel blast that would have wiped out the whole village. The town was especially good at blowing stuff up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetic_Materials_Research_and_Testing_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetic_Materials_Research...

neurostimulant 5y ago

Someone posted this video [1] on reddit [2] last week. The fire seems smaller. So the fire has been burning continuously for weeks? [1] https://gfycat.com/knobbylimitedcormorant https://gfycat.com/knobbylimitedcormorant [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/owccqc/the_worlds_largest_tyre_graveyard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/owccqc/t...