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Dan Kegley/Clegg Williams takes a water break from the hard work of cleaning an illegal dump on the south side of Nebo Mountain last week. The regional project involved litter control groups from Southwest Virginia, invited by Williams who is Smyth County’s representative to Keep Southwest Virginia Beautiful as well as a county’s zoning administrator.

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Targeting illegal dumps

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

For at least 30 years by one estimate, people have tossed tires, appliances, household trash and other refuse down a slope of Nebo Mountain overlooking the beautiful Crawfish Valley in northeastern Smyth County. The resulting cascade of trash below the mountain road was the result of behaviors that starkly contrast to efforts to preserve the roadless scenic and wild qualities of the valley below.
Last week, a significant portion of that illegal dump was cleaned up in an effort that was as much a symbol of the future of environmental reclamation, regionalism, resource sharing and innovation as it was a hard day’s work. There was also a nod to Earth Day, April 22.
That future is embodied by Keep Southwest Virginia Beautiful, an Abingdon-based non-profit affiliate of the national Keep America Beautiful program, and the Southwest Virginia Litter Control Task Force. Both have representation from all of the two cities and nine counties west of and including Smyth and Tazewell and other groups and authorities working.
That hard day of work is being replicated across Southwest Virginia where hundreds of illegal dumps are mapped and targeted for cleanup. Toby Edwards has mapped 600 just in Buchanan, Dickenson and Russell counties in the jurisdiction of the Cumberland Plateau Waste Management Authority that he directs.
“We deal with it on a daily basis,” Edwards said as workers from the task force and KSVB and others worked on the mountain side. Load by load, the refuse came back up the slope in spurts as though the mountain were vomiting tons of refuse after three decades of ecological indigestion.
The mountain’s feelings went unspoken but perhaps expressed by proxy. “This does my soul good,” said Mike Evans, a federal law enforcement officer based in the Jefferson National Forest and the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area who observed last week’s cleanup.
The others at work this day and other days across the region were probationers whose sentences include twice-monthly roadway cleanups in the region’s Assign-a-Highway program. Like several waste control initiatives, AAH began in the coalfield counties, with Buchanan County leading the way. Dickenson, Russell, Wise, Lee, Tazewell, Smyth and, a bit to the east, Giles, have implemented the program.
“They got pretty serious about litter in the coalfields,” said Clegg Williams, Smyth County’s zoning administrator who is the county’s representative to KSVB and who initiated and participated in the clean-up last week.
The highway assignments are recorded in court papers and ultimately monitored by probation officers. In between the officer and the probationer in most of the KSVB counties are litter control officers, another part of the future of solid waste management, who directly check assigned roads and report to probation officers whether they have been cleaned.
Non-compliance with the court-ordered cleanups earned delinquent probationers a warning that they are flirting with probation violations. That can lead to jail time. And a job especially well done can lead to a reduction of the probation term and commendation in court before other probationers, program literature said.
“With the help of Judge [Issac] Freeman, everyone on probation is assigned a section of road and they have to clean it every two weeks,” said Williams, who administers the probation program in Smyth. Inspectors in William’s department check assigned roads in lieu of a litter control officer. In the KSVB region, only Smyth and Tazewell counties and Bristol have not hired litter control officers, according to Edwards.
Buchanan was the first county to add roadside cleanups to the punishment for probationers, Edwards said. The county lost at least one prospective industry when its leaders refused to locate in the county because of roadside trash, he said. Now, according to Edwards, Buchanan is honored as the cleanest county in the region.
Williams invited the regional clean-up crew to the Nebo Mountain site and worked with them last week. “I was really pleased,” he said of their progress. “I really wish we could have finished up. I’d say we got 80 to 85 percent if it. Six to 10 guys hauling trash could finish it.”
That works out according to his numbers to about 10 tons of trash – 5.5 tons of tires, 4.5 tons of everything else people pitched over the road’s shoulder.
Tazewell County sent a roll-off bin for the tires. That county grinds them up for landfill covering, Williams said, saving Smyth a $120-per-ton bill for hauling them to the regional landfill at Bristol.
Smyth handled the metal recycling and disposal of the other trash, Williams said.
The volume of work in a day by a handful of people suggests more is new in trash pick-up than soliciting the help of petty criminals. One of the physical innovations aiding big-site cleanups is a wheeled sled a Buchanan County crew built from old road signs. Rolled down the slope at the end of a cable, the sled can haul back up several bags of trash and an appliance or two per trip.
Workers threaded a black rubber necklace of discarded tires on a looped logging chain, and a dozen or more could be dragged from the rubble almost as easily as they had plunged into it.
A maneuverable loader with jaws that looked made to order grabbed the tires like a tot clutching Cheerios and dropped them into Tazewell’s mobile bin parked nearby.
After the sled was pulled back up to the road each time, workers spilled its contents for the loader to pick up.
“We’ve honed our technique over time,” said Bobby Justus, state Assign-a-Highway coordinator.
Nebo Mountain isn’t the only place in Smyth County with illegal dumps to clean up. Williams said he and an intern traveled all of the state roads in the county and mapped “60 to 75 sites, ranging from those that would fill a pickup truck to multi-ton deposits of trash.
More cleanups will be planned for the fall after snakes have taken to their cold-weather dens, according to Williams.
One of the group’s district-wide goals, Williams said, is to convince the remaining three localities without litter control officers to hire at least one each. That’s one of the written recommendations from the litter task force, recorded in a December 2005 document. In fact, it heads the list of recommendations directed at local governments, followed by complete mapping of illegal dumpsites, seeking Department of Environmental Quality funding for litter officers, and implementing a civil damages ordinance for enforcing litter laws.
Edwards said normally littering is pursued as a criminal offense, requiring proof in court of the accused person’s criminal intent. But under ordinances like a model adopted in Dickenson, Wise and Buchanan counties, littering brings a civil suit from the locality against the accused.
“In civil law,” Edwards said, “that person owns the trash. A civil court can make them pick it up or they have to prove they didn’t dump it. That makes it easier to prosecute.  It’s illegal in Virginia to dump, but it’s hard to prosecute without a civil suit.”
Buchanan is hearing its first civil littering cases now, and Wise has even set up an environmental court “that hears nothing but environmental cases,” Edwards said.
Wise, he added, is seeing a 100 percent conviction rate in dumping cases.
Evans, who patrols the National Forest, said he hopes Smyth will one day follow the other counties that have hired litter control officers. An officer, he said, could partner with him in surveillance and in charging those who spoil places like the woods on Nebo Mountain.