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A fire broke out early this morning at Castle Tire Recycling just northwest of the St. Johns neighborhood after an unknown source sparked a pile of shredded tires there, Portland Fire & Rescue said.
Castle Tire Recycling is co-owner of the shuttered grain elevator on the Willamette River next to the Steel Bridge, where another pile of tire shreds caught fire repeatedly in May. Castle shreds old tires at its facility on North Harborgate Street, then trucks the chunks to the Willamette site, where they are loaded onto freighters and shipped to Asia and used for fuel.
Firefighters responded to the North Portland fire at around 5 am this morning and put it out, Portland Fire spokesman Rick Graves said.
“It was a large pile of chips on the yard,” Graves said. “It’s extinguished, but we will be cycling back throughout the day.”
Tire piles are notoriously flammable and are prone to restarting if not snuffed completely. Castle’s tire pile on the Willamette caught fire May 25, spewing acrid smoke and disrupting road and rail traffic. Fire crews doused the pile, but internal heat stayed high enough to reignite the pile days later.
Castle Tire Recycling has been in business since 1982 and is Oregon’s largest recycler of used tires, according to its website. The company is run by Chandos Mahon. Mahon’s LinkedIn profile describes a varied background: A Columbia University MBA, he raced motocross for five years before working in the television equipment business. He then joined his family’s business in 2015 as managing partner of Castle Capital, an affiliate of Castle Tire. He took over as CEO of Castle Tire in 2017.
Mahon didn’t return an email seeking comment on today’s fire.
Mahon teamed up with Beau Blixseth to buy the vacant Louis Dreyfus grain elevator on the Willamette in 2021. Blixseth is the son of Tim Blixseth, a Roseburg timber baron who went on to start the ultra-luxe Yellowstone Club in Montana before losing it in a bitter divorce just before it went bankrupt.
Last month, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality fined Mahon and Blixseth $13,600 for storing tons of shredded tires in open-air piles on the river without a waste-tire storage permit. On June 3, DEQ told Blixseth and Mahon that they must either remove the tire shreds or apply for a permit, giving them until June 19 to do one or the other.
As of today, Mahon and Blixseth had done neither, DEQ spokesman Harry Esteve said in an email.
“DEQ has received a request for a contested case hearing regarding the enforcement action for improper storage of tire derived product” at the grain elevator, Esteve said in an email. “DEQ issued a civil penalty and an order to submit a permit application or reduce the amount of Tire Derived Product to below 200 cubic yards. As of mid-last week, the respondents have not complied with the order. However, DEQ has met with the respondents and they have indicated they intend to submit a permit application.”
