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Donna Heran From: Karen Furst Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 3:02 PM To: Kasey Foley; Colleen Tracy; Dennis Ferrero; Donna Heran; Susan Demontigny; Tim Livermore; William Mitchell Subject: tire fire FYI ---Karen Furst, M.D. History Channel to showcase tire fire By Ben van der Meer Tracy Press Images that will be seen Monday night on the History Channel: towers of flames over piles of tires. A plume of smoke seen for 90 miles. Firefighters throwing their hands up at an implacable foe. Sound familiar? One of Tracy's most dubious historical landmarks will be beamed around the world Monday, when a segment on the Royster tire fire is part of the History Channel's show "The Most." Jeffrey Willerth, a coordinating producer for "The Most," said he regrets he had only 21/2 minutes to show something that happened over almost 21/2 years. "It's a huge frustration," Willerth said. "There's so much more we couldn't get into." For those to whom the Royster fire is a new concept, a primer: A pit of 8 million tires caught fire from a spark Aug. 7, 1998, on MacArthur Road south of Tracy. As the segment on "The Most" illustrates, the resulting inferno burned at thousands of degrees, shot fireballs hundreds of feet in the air and cast a gloomy pall over Tracy for days. For a number of reasons -- the sheer magnitude of the fire, a lack of resources or because doing so could make the problem worse, depending on who is explaining it -- fire crews allowed the fire to burn itself to an end. The narrator on "The Most" says it best: "It was expected the fire would burn itself out in four or five days. Then that stretched to four or five weeks. Then it became four or five months." Finally, spurred by complaints from residents and a new pot of cash to tackle such problems, engineers from the Integrated Waste Management board put the fire out Dec. 8, 2000. It was the longest-burning tire fire in U.S. history -- there's probably not much competition for that honor -- and attracted the attention of "The Most's" producers. A half-hour show, "The Most" documents the extremes in world history. Other segments on Monday's show include profiles of the Donner party and the sinking of the the USS Indianapolis. Willerth said he got most of his help from waste-board officials, including Todd Thalhamer, an 1