Load of dirt after load of dirt have been brought in from around the county in an effort to put out the fire that still burns a day later.

"Anywhere from 2 to 400 loads of dirt right now to smother the areas that we haven't been able to obtain yet," said McCreary County Emergency Management Director Rudy Young.

Twenty loads of dirt alone from the Highway Department arrived while we were on site.
But it's a process that Young says is necessary to keep the potentially harmful smoke out of the air.

"Chemical changes with the tires, there is a possibility of them being carcinogenic," Young noted.

And that's still a major concern for people living in the area, like Hobie Strunk.

"Everybody here, people in the neighborhood that's all they talked about. It would be any day this place would be on fire," said Strunk.

Strunk, a former employee of King's Tire Recycling, points out the soot from the tire smoke, and tells us this isn't the first time the tires have caught fire.

"It's caught fire a couple times," said Strunk.

The fire resulted in families being evacuated from the area. They returned home today.

"We're very thankful that it was no more than four families. Four is too many, but we were thankful that everyone was ok as far as we know," said King's Tire Recycling Co-Owner Gina Phillips.

Phillips has since spoken to the workers on hand yesterday, to find out what might have happened.

"They had left it idoling from what I understand. Left for a little break, for ten minutes or whatever. When they came back from the break they saw smoke, and the fire was already started," said Phillips, referring to a piece of machinery used to grind up tires.

Phillips tells us the company lost around two million dollars in equipment in the fire, and an official involved with the cleanup tells us cleaning the area could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Phillips says the silt pond near the recycling center appears to have caught the harmful runoff.

"We will be hiring a contractor to come in and clean that out and do water quality testing and monitoring so we can be safe," Phillips said.

Phillips adds that a policy change could happen soon to make sure workers are around the equipment at all times.