It’s not clear who, exactly, began stockpiling worn-out tires on the east edge of town.
What’s known is that some enterprising person had the bright idea to charge 25 cents to haul away bald tires on rented land that used to be the city’s landfill. He apparently planned to sell the tires for industrial boiler fuel.
By 1984, as many as 4 million tires had been piled in a massive heap on the 10-acre site along the Snohomish River.
As it grew, people started calling it Mount Firestone.
Twenty-five years ago today, someone put a flame to Mount Firestone.
What’s unclear is how four million tires ended up there in just seven years. The thing took months to burn out. For some reason I remember seeing the Mount St. Helens eruption, but not this.
h/t: heraldnet.
I remember it quite well, but that’s probably because I used to live in Vancouver and drive down to Seattle once a month, and when I met my ex-wife was driving down here every week, and before that would see it when we were driving an Army convoy down to the base.
The fire was a big thing. But the dust from Mt. St. Helens covered areas of Eastern Washington for many many months so it sticks in your brain a lot longer.
Throw in a crazy shotgun wielding cat-lady and you have Springfield.
Is Springfield in Kentucky?
I remember it. You could smell it from Seattle.
I used to have to drive past that damned thing all the time. God, what a stench. It burned FOREVER.
Which part of Seattle? Could you smell it from Tacoma?
“1980s America was ill prepared”!
Ha. That limey fool had no idea of the meaning of ill prepare. We showed him, didn’t we?
I was 2! 🙂
Groening spent time up here and drew a ton of Simpsons references from here. I know he was on Whidbey for a bit. Thelma and Selma were a pair of chain smoking waitresses at a bar down in Olympia he used to frequent while going to Evergreen.
I remember the tire fire very clearly. I grew up in everett and my friends and I would stare at it every day as we walked to and from elementary school. It looked like a giant black tornado..sometimes we’d pretend it was coming to get us and scream excitedly “The storm is coming!!!!!”
John McPhee wrote about tire mountains in “Irons In The Fire”. He mentions the Everett fire, but he spends more time on the fire in Tracy, CA, which burned for more than TWO YEARS. People don’t realize how many tires get discarded in the US; there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of piles with as many as 15 million tires in them. As McPhee points out, tires contain more energy than coal, and have similar emissions when they burn.
When I was going to college in northern Michigan, a local there told me about the time they shoved a bunch of tires into one of the many abandoned boiler stacks in the area and then lit them off. This particular stack was a couple hundred feet tall, so the draft must have been incredible. He said the bottom of the stack glowed red for a while, the fire was so intense.
Did they really never figure out whose pile it was? Crazy.
It’s everybody’s pile. If you drove a car or rode a bus or bought something at a store, those were your tires.
I was 3 at the time and living in Everett. Don’t remember a thing of it, but my parents do.
but who collected the approximately 1 million dollars for ‘our’ tires when they were collected and dumped? Did someone really collect 4 million tires and get paid for it and not a soul remembers who it was that took away the tires? that’s the amazing part of this story to me