Losing rusty cars not a crushing blow

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2002 | 9:19 a.m.

Joe Beatty, a machinist, had at least 100 cars and trucks on his 20 acres along Sandy Valley Road.

That was until Monday, when a car crusher made a visit to his property, creating scrap metal sandwiches out of the old hulks and other debris.

As Beatty watched, forklifts laid a junker between the large plates and pressed. This was followed by old sheet metal, air conditioners and other metal trash, crushed between another rusty car.

It was part of an unusual recycling program cobbled together by state and county agencies, a private company and a lot of local volunteers.

The program, called the car crushing consortium, is meant to clean up back yards in rural Nevada, pulling communities together in the process, said Barry S. Lagan, a code enforcement officer for Clark County's public response office.

The cars and other junk on Beatty's property, one of two sites used in the past two weeks for the crusher, just kind of piled up since 1958, when the 55-year-old moved to the area, Beatty said.

"I used to have the only forklift in the area, so I would bring old cars here and they just piled up," he said.

In Sandy Valley, about 50 miles southwest of Las Vegas, a teamwork dynamic between old-timers and city slickers who have arrived in recent years made the program work, Lagan said.

"A lot of people are looking at Sandy Valley and other rural areas and saying, 'This is nice, I could come out here and have five acres, some horses, some freedom ... but why's all this junk out here?' "

Chris Munhall, rural liaison for Clark County Parks and Community Services, said the newcomers have been well-received in the area.

"Folks originally moved out here ... to live the way they want to," he said.

"Now newer people are moving out here, bringing new values, wanting to see the area cleaned up. And a lot of the older folks find that they have possessions that aren't even possessions. So they're working together."

In the past two weeks the Department of Motor Vehicles, Parks and Recreation, Metro Police and Silver Dollar Recycling, a Las Vegas-based company, have gotten community members in Sandy Valley, population 1,800, to bring their rotting and rusting cars, trucks, mobile homes and buses to two sites in the area for crushing and recycling.

The consortium plans to return to Sandy Valley next year as well, since many residents found out late about the program, he said.

"Besides, what we got this year may not even be one-tenth of what is still out there," Munhall said.

The crusher Monday wouldn't get all of Beatty's collection

Off to the side, across the road from Silver Dollar's machine, spewing smoke and crunching metal, a skeleton of a vehicle lay, "Do Not Crush" painted on its side.

"That's an old International Harvester milk truck, '52, '53," he said.

"I got an old International Harvester that uses the same engine, so I'll probably save this for another year, take the engine and junk it next year."