- The new owner discovered a massive tire dump blocking access to his property.
- Investigators are examining possible illegal dumping and environmental violations.
- Cleanup costs could leave the homeowner facing a major financial burden.
Buying a fixer-upper usually comes with a few surprises. Maybe there’s a leaky roof, outdated wiring, or a family of raccoons living in the attic. What most buyers don’t expect is discovering what appears to be a small tire landfill spread across their new property.
That’s the situation facing Portland resident Khanh Tran, who says he purchased a 1.2-acre property in April only to discover that someone had transformed it into a dumping ground for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of discarded tires.
Tran told local station KATU that the property initially contained a relatively small pile of fewer than 40 tires when he agreed to purchase it. He visited the site again in late March and said little had changed.
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When he returned on June 6, ready to begin construction and rehabilitation work, the situation was dramatically different. Massive walls of tires, some reportedly stacked six feet high or more, blocked access to large portions of the property. One area had even been fashioned into a makeshift room complete with furniture. Tran believes the tires accumulated in less than 90 days.
“I didn’t know the disaster that was going to come with it,” he said. The scale of the problem has triggered investigations by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, local health officials, regional government agency Metro, and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
Tran and a neighboring resident suspect someone may be posing as a tire recycling service, collecting used tires from businesses before illegally dumping them on the property. So far, however, no suspects have been publicly identified.
Metro says its crews removed more than 14,000 illegally dumped tires from public property over the past year alone, including 5,600 in May by itself. For now, Tran is left staring at a sea of rubber and wondering how he’ll ever make it disappear. To that end, he’s started a GoFundMe in hopes that donations will help him manage the cost of disposal.
