I was going to save this for later this afternoon, but everybody and their mom has a copy of it in their e-mail, so, here goes:
Update: Now YouTube clip.
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I was going to save this for later this afternoon, but everybody and their mom has a copy of it in their e-mail, so, here goes:
Update: Now YouTube clip.
Related Articles
Jack Kroehnke
Bidding to clean the Hurley smokestacks, at least when Kennecot owned them, was active because the smelting also produced a layer of silver and gold in the stacks that made the cleaning/recovering process worthwhile.
Cleaning usually was done in July when it was a given that the Kennecot miners’ contracts came up for renewal. The International Mine, Mill and Smelters Union, with clout from its tough-but-won battle for indoor plumbing and otherwise liveable company-provided quarters against Empire Zinc in Hanover NM (see the movie “Salt of the Earth”), generally shut down Kennecot midsummer operations until some sort of agreement was reached.
That new-gained clout included shutdowns by the BLF&E (Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen), the BRT (Brotherhood of Rai;road Trainmen) and the IBE (International Brotherhood of Electricians), which effectively left Kennecot with no way to transport coper ore to the smelter even is they could have found fill-ins to mine it. No idea how things went after Phelps-Dodge bought out Kennecot, but suspect not much.
Ed Rousseau
I worked at Chino for 10 years during the ’60s, though in the concentrator and not in the smelter. The copper produced at the smelter had an insignificant gold content and was so low in silver that it was not economic to electrorefine it to separate the silver. Fire refined copper, which left the silver with the copper, was the product of choice.
I do not believe that the smelter stack concentrated gold and silver and I never heard of cleaning the stacks, not in the summer nor in the winter.
The connection between Empire Zinc and Kennecott was only due to the fact that the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union had a Local for each company and they operated out of the same union hall.
The ore was hauled from the mine at Santa Rita to the concentrator at Hurley and the concentrate was hauled from the concentraor to the Hurley smelter by the Santa Fe RR.