Mountains of illegal trash dumped along a remote Sacramento road threatens Dry Creek

Ryan Hanson’s eyes trained on the speeding white van as it banked the corner along a remote road straddling the border of Sacramento and Placer county just before 11 p.m.

“Oh, door’s open,” said the California Department of Fish and Wildlife warden, hidden in the dark and peering through binoculars, watching as the van’s side door quickly slid open not far from Gibson Ranch.

It happened in a flash: Two tires chucked out the side door onto the littered road, the van still moving. It was what Hanson and his team had been waiting for all night. He radioed his fellow officers, who pounced on the illegal dumpers within minutes.

It’s been a perennial problem along Dyer Lane, and the nearby Kasser and Tan Woods roads — the rural area’s reputation for supposed ghost hauntings may only be surpassed by its renown for the mountainous piles of illegal garbage and waste dumped daily along its ditches and roads.

Long considered a public nuisance and blight issue, the state’s natural resources agency over the last two years been working to crackdown on the illegal activity.

Officials say the hazardous chemicals from junk and debris dumped along the roads — buckets of used oil, cans of paint thinner, rusty appliances — are leeching into the soil, putting the nearby Dry Creek in jeopardy. The state identified in 2015 that pollution was a major threat to the creek, a spawning habitat for fall-run chinook salmon that ultimately flows into the Sacramento River.

“It happen every night, some nights it’s just tires, some nights it’s gallons and barrels of oil and products,” said Department of Fish and Wildlife Lt. Joshua Nicholas. “All this stuff gets in the environment.”

After receiving a rash of complaints from residents two years ago, the department began nighttime stakeouts and investigations to catch offenders in the act. Since the beginning of 2018, officers have made 34 citations and three felony arrests in the Dry Creek area, said agency Capt. Patrick Foy.

“In 2019 we hit pretty hard in the wet season, and we were noticing we kept striking out, we’d have five-hour details with no dumpers and we’d notice that the length of time between the roads staying clean and new dumps was extending,” Hanson said.

But patrolling on a recent Friday night, the situation had deteriorated significantly, said Hanson, the lead investigator with the department’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response.

“We haven’t done a detail like this in three or four months, and its bad,” he said. “It’s like, daily new dump spots.”

‘Easy to dump it and go’

Sometimes it’s everyday household items: Cleaning products, trash bags, food waste. Frequently, bulkier items are discarded along the road: Mattresses, concrete blocks, microwaves, couches. Even an old boat was once was abandoned, said Placer County Supervisor Bonnie Gore. Wildlife officers have witnessed during patrols people shooting guns in the nearby fields, and even stopped a fire that sprung from a dump site.

During one nighttime detail near Dyer Lane, wildlife officers saw an SUV stop in the middle of the road, its lift gate open and close, then speed off. Hanson found the driver had abandoned two dogs in a ditch with a 50-pound bag of dog food. One that still had a muzzle on it. Another officer detained the driver, Jerrid Story, who ultimately plead guilty to felony cruelty to animals.

Although one dog had to be euthanized because of its extreme health condition, the other dog survived and was adopted a few months later. That story had a bittersweet ending, Hanson said, but illegal dumping persists, and too often wildlife officers aren’t present to catch bad actors.

“It’s more remote, you can do it and get away with it,” said Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost, whose district includes Kasser Road. ”Nobody’s there, it’s just easy to dump it and go.”

To keep up, Sacramento and Placer counties have crews regularly picking up dumped items.

Sacramento County enlists the Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps to pick up trash along Kasser Road every other week, said county spokeswoman Laurie Slothower.

Gore, whose district includes the blighted area, said Placer County’s road department cleans up trash along the roads about once a week.

But the piles just keep coming.

“It costs the taxpayers of Placer County to have the roads department come out and clean it up and haul it out, and those are tax dollars that could be used else where,” Gore said. “It’s a shame that people don’t think about the bigger ramifications of their actions.”

The area near Dry Creek frequently floods during the rainy season, meaning all kinds of chemicals can start to seep through the soil, moving much the same way water would move through the earth, said Ann Willis, a researcher at UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences.

“Then it all accumulates in the stream,” which flows into the Sacramento River, Willis said. “Those chemicals have real implications for everyone who might be using that water.”

Streams part of Sacramento’s ‘natural rhythm’

When California Department of Fish and Wildlife officers pulled over Bruce Rhoads’ white van on their recent Friday night stakeout, he and his passenger, Edward Gallagher, soon admitted to illegally dumping eight tires along the county roads.

Gallagher, who had worn fingerless black leather gloves as he tossed the tires out the side door of the van, was cited for illegally dumping waste on the road. Rhoads was cited for driving without a valid license and causing refuse to be dumped on a road.

“We just do stupid mistakes,” Rhoads, 62, told officers when asked why the pair from Rio Linda decided to illegally dump the tires. The pair were eventually released by the officers, and doubled back to retrieve the tires they intended to dump earlier in the night.

Each tire could lead to a fine of $50 to $100, Hanson said. The maximum fine for littering in California is $1,000.

Dropping off the eight tires at the North Area Recovery Station in North Highlands would’ve cost $22. It would’ve cost $26 at the Western Regional Sanitary Landfill in Placer County.

“We have resources where people can bring stuff to dump legally, but they just leave it on the road,” Frost said.

There may be a day when used diapers and cardboard boxes no longer dot Dyer Lane and Kasser and Tan Woods roads.

Over the next 20 years, the rural areas near Dry Creek will be transformed into a massive residential and commercial development as part of the 5,230 acre Placer Vineyards specific plan.

At full build-out, there could be up to 14,132 new homes and nearly 33,000 new residents populating the area — and when there’s a more of a “suburban nature” to the streets, “you’re not going to have people utilizing that areas a dump space,” Gore said.

When that happens, it’ll be all the more important to ensure the nearby watershed is protected, Willis said.

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment reported in 2015 that pollution runoff from construction sites, as well as the Roseville rail yard and nearby golf courses have been “problematic” to the creek, and linked to a variety of toxic chemicals entering the water system.

“When Sacramento was established, it kind of destined itself to be an area all about water, located at the confluence of major rivers in the state on one of the biggest marsh lands and flood lands,” Willis said.

“We kind of forget how deeply ingrained these rivers and streams are to the natural rhythm of Sacramento.”