WASHINGTON — Community groups discovered a mountain of tires illegally dumped in Anacostia Park. Now, the National Park Service (NPS) is working to clean them up.
Ward 8 Woods Conservancy's Director, Nathan Harrington, said he discovered the tires under a southbound portion of I-295 the week of Christmas.
Since then, he's been working to coordinate cleaning them up and finding out who is responsible.
The National Park Service has jurisdiction over that area, so they told WUSA9 Friday that they are organizing a cleanup.
Originally, volunteers with Ward 8 Woods were hoping to help clean up, but the group shared a recent update saying for safety reasons, the NPS is asking the public to let them handle the cleanup.
Instead, Ward 8 Woods said they need volunteers to clean up other sites.
Harrington posted that NPS said they will remove them by the end of the month and as early as this week. As of Monday morning, the tires were still piled under 295.
“This is just a particularly dramatic and appalling example of the environmental racism that's affected the Anacostia River Corridor for decades," Harrington said. "And what we have still continuing today is illegal dumping. People who want to dispose of things cheaply. And they have a lack of respect for this community. They think they can get away with it.”
He is standing with the group named Friends of Anacostia Park to say they can't get away with it.
The NPS said they are working with Park Police and Metropolitan Police Department to investigate the dumping.
These two groups think the public support they received on their post about the tires likely helped elevate this cleanup on the priority list.
"Because when you do have that, that community mouthpiece, when you've got the voices of residents being elevated in this conversation, it can actually light a fire and create a sense of of constructive urgency that I think gets projects like this done faster than they otherwise would," Richard Trent, executive director for Friends of Anacostia Park said.
Harrington said tires present a unique problem, because they can’t be burned in the incinerator and landfills don’t want them, because they don’t compact properly.
He said that they can be recycled, but that can be inconvenient and expensive – so that’s likely a contributing factor to illegal dumping.
On top of that, he and Trent said people need to better respect the land and the people who live on it.
"I think the the teachable moment here is where possible, empower and deputize community members and local residents to be active participants in this work, and in the planning process, because otherwise, things like this will keep happening over and over again," Trent said. "This is really a result of folks being cut out of the process for too long. And so the thing I'd like to see change is more organizations really creating bureaus and departments or committees that empower residents to have a seat at the table."
Police are still investigating how the tires were dumped, but Harrington believes there's a good chance a truck used the wide shoulder on this section of I-295 southbound to dump them over the edge.
He said this is one egregious example, but the daily cleanup continues.
"This dumping has been going on in neighborhoods east of the river. For decades, Ward 8 Woods has been working to remediate and undo that, but it's an ongoing process," Harrington said.