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Jonsered
     
location:
Back in New Mexico where I belong
Gender: Male
Dressed for a scarecrow ball.........
 |  |  |  | Attn: Climbers - Last call for historic smokestacks
< on 8/7/2006 8:40 PM >
|  | | | I would have just given the link, but it requires a subscription.
Sunday, August 6, 2006
Nostalgic Residents Will Miss Hurley's Iconic Copper Smelter Smokestacks
By Rene Romo
Journal Southern Bureau
HURLEY— Paris has the Eiffel Tower, Seattle the Space Needle and this little mining town has its smokestacks.
Residents of Hurley, a one-time company town southwest of Silver City, cherish the two concrete giants rising 500 feet and 625 feet above the closed Phelps Dodge copper smelter here, dominating the landscape for miles around.
But just as locals had to adjust to closure of the Hurley smelter in 2002, they are trying to accept the idea that, sometime in the second half of 2007, Phelps Dodge will send the two smokestacks toppling sideways to the ground.
"It will be a long time before people get used to them not being there," said Hurley Police Chief Robert "Bobby" Ruiz.
Ruiz was raised in this town of roughly 1,500 residents and his brother and father worked in the local mining industry. "I grew up here, and they always stood there, and they will always stand there in my mind," he said.
The two stacks are so synonymous with Hurley that, in 2003, Ruiz commissioned a new police badge incorporating their images.
The 500-foot stack— nearly as tall as the Washington Monument (555 feet)— was built in 1939 by the Kennecott Copper Corporation, whose name is still painted vertically on the structure.
The 625-foot stack— which could overshadow the Space Needle (605 feet)— was built in 1967, said Richard Peterson, spokesman for Phelps Dodge, which acquired Kennecott in 1987.
The stacks vented sulfur dioxide produced by the smelting of copper ore.
No longer needed
As much as many locals would like to see the towering icons remain standing after the smelter and surrounding structures disappear, it's just not practical, Peterson said.
The shorter stack has not been used in more than a decade, and the taller has been quiet since 2002. But the stacks still require maintenance, they must remain lighted at night under FAA regulations, and they are taxable, Peterson said.
The smelter itself is already being dismantled. Peterson called it "an aging industrial plant that is now obsolete to our needs and no longer serves a purpose. We just ran out of a need."
Locally mined copper concentrate is now sent to either a smelter in Arizona or to a facility at the Santa Rita copper mine pit for processing. Meanwhile, Phelps Dodge is building a new concentrate leach facility, which produces copper more efficiently than smelting, in Morenci, Ariz., Peterson said.
Smelters are being phased out all over the country, Peterson said. In 1982, there were 15 smelters operating in the United States; today, there are three.
Before it shut down, the Hurley smelter employed about 300 workers.
Phelps Dodge is also in the process of dismantling its Hidalgo smelter near Playas. Its 1999 closure put nearly 400 employees out of work. The 600-foot-tall smokestack at the Hidalgo smelter is tentatively scheduled to be toppled in the first quarter of 2007, Peterson said.
But the Playas townsite, where Hidalgo smelter workers and their families lived, has since been converted to an anti-terrorism training site, and its passing will not be noticed as much as that of the Hurley stacks.
Silver City Museum director Susan Berry said the demolition of the Hurley stacks next year will be the exclamation point on "the end of an era," when copper mining was more dominant in Grant County.
Hurley, a town with a single restaurant, bar and a handful of other businesses, and whose government employs about one dozen workers, simply cannot afford to preserve the stacks, even if Phelps Dodge handed them over, said Mayor Ray Baca.
"There's no way that Hurley could maintain them," Baca said. "We barely make enough money."
A beacon home
The distant sight of the stacks has long signaled to residents driving north on N.M. 180 to the Silver City area from Deming that they were nearing home.
At night, lights flashing on the stacks provide a beacon to both motorists and airplane pilots.
"If you are coming in from the south, from Deming, and you get the mountain background, it really looks nice," said 56-year-old Hurley resident Frank "Tykie" Lucero, who, like his father before him, worked for Kennecott. "You know you are coming home when you see the stacks."
Seventy-six-year-old Manuel Carreon, who has lived in Hurley since 1937 and worked for Kennecott and Phelps Dodge, said, "Anytime you look around, they are there. They are like clouds in the sky. You get used to them ... It's a nice view."
For many residents, the stacks also represent a decades long history of family involvement in mining.
Hurley resident Barbara Choate, whose father worked at the smelter for 30 years, said when the stacks tumble to the ground, "It's my history going down, too."
"Generations are represented by those stacks— blood, sweat and tears in that industry," said SaVanne Kilgore, chairwoman of a nonprofit group called Hurley Pride, whose father worked in the industry for years.
But not everyone will miss the stacks.
"I think they (the stacks) are an eyesore," said Diane Padilla, the 58-year-old operator of a Bayard beauty salon who spent summers with relatives in Hurley. "I have no love for the smelter. None at all."
Padilla said she associates the smelter with the health problems of two family members and some Grant County customers, though she has no proof.
To ease the transition to a new community identity, Phelps Dodge hired a Missouri-based consultant to help Hurley develop a new town logo.
In May, Peterson presented the results: five sample logos that incorporated another visual landmark, a ridgeline northeast of the smelter known as Geronimo's Mountain. So far, the town council has not voted to adopt any of the logos.
I have changed my personal exploring ethics code. From now on it will be: "Take only aimed shots, leave only hobo corpses." Copper scrappers, meth heads and homeless beware. The Jonsered cometh among you, bringing fear and dread.
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Ethics