Tracy Press

Press file photo - TAKE it AWAY:Earlier this year, crews load the final tires left over from a tire fire that burned for nearly two years on the outskirts of Tracy. A couple has bought the land on which the fire burned and, as a result, are now responsible for the pollution staining the site.

The site of the infamous Tracy tire fire, a 50-acre property on South MacArthur Drive where 7 million tires went up in smoke during a two-year rubbery inferno, sold last month in a county tax auction for a fraction of its worth.

Javier and Evangelina Jaime of Galt paid $61,000 in cash for the parcel — the amount of due taxes on the property. It was appraised last year at $900,000.

A phone number for the Jaimes discovered at the San Joaquin County Assessor’s Office was disconnected with no forwarding number, and the couple is unlisted in the phone book. Property records show the couple owns no other property.

The real estate bore liens amounting to several million dollars for cleanup work done after the fire. But by law, when a property sells in a county auction for back taxes, any other liens on it by government agencies disappear.

The state’s Integrated Waste Management Board had a $4.3 million lien on the land, said the board’s Todd Thalhamer, whose agency eventually spent $19 million to clean up the site. The agency will not get its money now.

Silas Royster owned the property before the Jaimes. He ran a business charging people to dump tires there and had accumulated about 7 million of them before the fire. For years, he had fought with the San Joaquin County Planning Commission and the waste board about mountainous heaps of tires, which violated terms of his permit specifying they be grouped into 50-by-50 foot piles separated by fire lanes.

The Stockton Record in 1984 quoted him as saying the county’s concern with fire danger was unfounded because “even setting a match” to tires won’t cause them to catch fire.

But a fire began Aug. 7, 1998 — the day after he lost his final appeal with the waste board, according to Thalhamer. Royster told the Tracy Press the day after the fire that it started after a blade from his weed whacker hit a rock while he was cutting weeds, causing a spark.

Royster had been under investigation by a federal grand jury, which was about to hand down indictments charging him with bankruptcy fraud. Prosecutors claimed he hid a large boat and $140,000 from creditors. The indictments were handed down Aug. 14, 1998, and four days later Royster died of lung and throat cancer.

The fire was allowed to burn for two years in order to protect underground aquifers from chemicals that would have been used to douse it. By about 2000, the fire was out — but a long and costly cleanup was just beginning.

Lanny Clavecilla of the waste board said that about 387 tons of debris were removed. The last truckload was ceremoniously hauled away May 3 of this year.

However, toxins from the burnt rubber had seeped into groundwater, and monitoring and remediation continued until the sale.

Now the pollution is the Jaimes’ problem.

The waste board spent $700,000 during the past year to clean up polluted dirt on the property that was fouling the groundwater. Tests show groundwater pollution levels coming down to roughly 200 parts per billion from 50,000 parts per billion of oily contaminants. The legal maximum is 100 parts per billion.

The buyers now must deal with the remaining contamination, which Thalhamer said amounts to about 110-foot wide plume.

“It’s not a huge plume heading for Tracy,” he said.

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