"Frustrating:" Restaurant must pay for cleanup of hundreds of tires dumped near Lake Michigan

KENOSHA COUNTY -- An illegal dumping ground in Kenosha County is turning the lakeshore into an eyesore. Neighbors speculate that the person behind it was trying to make a quick buck, and now they're stuck with the cleanup.

Neighbors told FOX6 News at first, it looked like a procession of orca whales out swimming in Lake Michigan. It was actually dozens of tires floating on the water.

"It's frustrating. Just frustrating," Kara Wunderle said.

Guests of The HobNob, on Sheridan Road near 1st Street along the lakeshore in Kenosha, first noticed the pile behind the supper club in mid-March.

"They had seen tires floating down the water. Not exactly lazy river territory," Wunderle said.

Then, it happened again.

"We're estimating a good 150 or so and there were a couple of dozen that floated into the water," Wunderle said.

It appears someone drove into the supper club's parking lot and rolled the tires down the hill toward Lake Michigan.

It is now up to restaurant officials to clear them away -- and pay for the cleanup.

"It'll take some man hours to get the tires up and we'll have to haul them to a recycling facility," Wunderle said.

"There are pockets of them along the shoreline further down. Accumulations," Allen Sowinski said.

Some of the tires have washed ashore onto Sowinski's property.

"I'd like to see them cleaned up. I'm 70 years old. I don't feel like hauling tires up and down here," Sowinski said.

Neighbors have speculated that the person responsible for dumping the tires collected money from an auto shop to recycle its tires, and then dumped them into Lake Michigan instead.

The HobNob didn't have security cameras when the dumping was done -- but there are cameras now.

"We contacted the sheriff's department to see what, if anything, we could do, and because we didn't have any witnesses or any video of the exact truck or van that dropped the tires off, all they could really do is report it as littering," Wunderle said.

HobNob officials say the DNR is trying to use the tires' serial numbers to track down the original purchaser. HobNob officials were told there have been similar dumping grounds discovered in the area.

Employees will clean up the tires, sometime in the next couple of weeks.