A tire story, not a toy story
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 22, 2026
If you have driven or biked along Dockton Road or walked the beach north of Portage during the last half century, you may have noticed the tractor tire in the Tramp Harbor intertidal zone about 400 feet from the road, exposed at low tide below -2 feet. As I write this Friday, June 25, 2026, that is now a thing of the past.
This tire has been removed and will be recycled — a lost tidal gauge yet another win for our environment.
It’s really hard to imagine how HUGE the tire really is until you are right on top of it — it measures 65 inches in diameter, 33 inches wide and weighs 2,500 pounds! It took Paul Engel’s tow truck to drag it up to the road and move it after I spent three days digging it out when the tides were below -2 feet last month. After digging it out, the tides and currents moved the tire closer to shore within range of Paul’s 200-foot-long cable.
It is definitely the biggest tire we have recovered and required six people to roll it once upright. Thanks to the Vashon Rowing Club members for helping to unload it from Engel’s tow truck at Jensen Point.
Jill Prewitt and her crew of three from WA DNR spent yesterday moving lots of tires from Vashon beaches to Jensen Point using their front-loader boat. Our total for the year is now 189 tires, including eight large truck and tractor tires. We more than met our goal of exceeding last year’s total of 127 tires!
Three previous Green Briefs and a Beachcomber article by Aspen Anderson over the last year explained why we are so committed to removing renegade beach tires from Vashon Island shorelines. Suffice it to say they are eyesores, pollutants, release toxins including 6PPD-Q, which can kill coho salmon at parts-per-trillion concentrations, and are hurting the health of Puget Sound’s fragile marine ecosystems.
This two-year-running program was truly a community collaborative effort led by Vashon Rotary Club and Zero Waste Vashon, with a long list of partners including King County Solid Waste, which commissioned Friends of the Trail to transport the tires to Liberty Recycling in Puyallup; Vashon Parks Department and Vashon Rowing Club, our hosts for the beach tire staging area at Jensen Point; King County Parks, which helped with the transport of another huge tractor tire from Forest Glen Park; the Harbor School; Vashon Land Trust; Vashon Nature Center; Vashon Adventures; Washington State Department of Natural Resources; and the Vashon Beachcomber.
In addition, many neighborhood groups and scores of individuals volunteered their expertise, time, tools, muscles, sweat, boats, trucks, tow trucks and keen eyes that helped locate the half-buried beach tires that made this project so successful.
We expect tires will continue to be washed ashore in the future and hope to continue the Vashon Tire Brigade program next year. Note that this program ONLY deals with beach tires — please dispose of non-beach tires at the Vashon Recycling and Transfer Station or by other responsible methods. King County Solid Waste will only accept beach tires in this program.
So, as you walk your favorite Vashon-Maury beaches, keep your eyes peeled and let us know about your discoveries. The spring and summer are the best times for daylight low tides to locate tires partially buried in the intertidal zone.
The best way to document latitude/longitude locations for photos is to have location turned on in iPhone, and then the picture can be opened in the Photos Map view. Also, when sending a geo-referenced tire picture, send it as an email, not as a text, as the texting sometimes strips out needed details.
Contact steven.bergman@zerowastevashon.org or the Vashon Rotary Club if you have tire locations to share or any questions about the Vashon Tire Brigade program.
Steve Bergman is a member of Zero Waste Vashon and the Vashon Rotary Club, which helped lead the Vashon Tire Brigade program.
