There are neighborhood nuisances — a lawn that's never cut, a house with too many parties, the fat guy who never wears a shirt when working in the yard, the lady who's unnaturally obsessed with gnomes — and then there are Neighborhood Nuisances — like a pile of 45,000 discarded tires.
WKSU reports on one such behemoth of trash in Ashtabula County. It all started earlier this decade after John Colucci, who died in 2007, began discarding and cleaning his collection of 90,000 tires which he had accumulated in his closed scrap yard. A collection that monstrous and potentially hazardous tends to draw attention. He got about halfway through before his death, leaving 45,000 tires behind, conveniently hidden from public view by a fence.
There were some strong storms this spring, if you'll remember, and one of those storms tore down the fence, leaving the bequeathed mountain of rubber on full display.
The Ohio EPA and Ashtabula, with the help of an $80,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, will begin cleaning up the remains in July.
And you thought your grandfather's incessant hoarding of mason jars in his basement was going to be hard to deal with.
