Rio Grande and Asarco

Rio Grande and Asarco

Photo: Rio Grande near Asarco in El Paso, Texas. ASARCO, originally known as the American Smelting and Refining Company, traces its origins to 1881, when Robert Safford Towne arrived in El Paso after touring the mines in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Two years later he organized the Mexican Ore Company, a small plant that sampled and graded ore from the Mexican mines. In 1887 the ambitious Towne went to Argentine, Kansas, where he secured the backing of the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company for the construction of a major smelter in El Paso to process lead and copper ores from mines in Mexico and in the American Southwest. Towne bought 1,156 acres along the Rio Grande for $3,757, and within five months the El Paso Smelter, with a 100-foot high chimney and a workforce of 250, was ready to begin processing the high-grade Mexican ore. The community that grew up around the plant was called Smeltertown. In 1899 KSARCO and several other corporations merged into the newly organized American Smelting and Refining Company, which became known as ASARCO. In 1901 a fire destroyed about $100,000 worth of the new company's property and equipment, but ASARCO rebuilt and reopened in 1902 with seven new lead furnaces and the first copper smelter in El Paso. The new facility doubled production and expanded the local payroll to nearly 900 workers. During the 1920s ASARCO was the largest mining operator in Mexico, with twenty-four different units. In 1948 slag fuming facilitators were built for the recovery of zinc from the slag produced by the lead furnaces, and in 1951 ASARCO built a 612-foot smokestack to reduce ground-level concentrations of sulfur dioxide. In 1967 the company built an 828-foot stack, designed to help alleviate local air pollution. In 1969, however, El Paso still had a higher concentration of lead in the air than any other city in Texas. In the spring of 1970, the city of El Paso filed a $1 million suit, later joined by the State of Texas, charging ASARCO with violations of the Texas Clean Air Act. In December 1971 the El Paso City-County Health Department reported that the smelter had emitted 1,012 metric tons of lead between 1969 and 1971 and found that the smelter was the principal source of particulate lead within a radius of a mile. When lead was discovered in the soil of Smeltertown, the company removed the top foot and a half of soil and replaced it with fresh soil. When lead poisoning was suspected in the children living in Smeltertown, the company bought the land in Smeltertown and removed the residents. Following a 1975 injunction requiring ASARCO to spend $120 million on modernization and environmental improvements, the company by 1978 had reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide by nearly two-thirds from pre-1970 levels. Since that time, lead and zinc operations have been closed, and the smelting of copper has become the plant's principal function. The copper, which is shipped to the ASARCO refinery in Amarillo, is 98 to 99 percent pure. In 1990 an $81 million modernization program began, involving a smelting technology that improves operating efficiency and production while capturing 98 percent or more of the sulfur dioxide emissions. In the early 1990s ASARCO plant in El Paso employed nearly 1,000 people and produced almost a million tons of raw materials per year. In 1990 the El Paso and Amarillo plants had sales totalling more than $50 million each https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dka02

Área: Central / Smeltertown

Fuente: EPMH

Cargado por: El Paso Museum of History

Comentarios

Hacer un comentario
Gracias por su comentario

Reportar esta entrada

Elige la razón más importante para este reporte

Tu nombre

Tu correo electrónico

Detalle opcional

Gracias por su reporte

Más sobre la misma comunidad-colección

Madero's Headquarters near Asarco

Madero's headquarters near Asarco. Madero may be speaking to ...

Mexican Revolution Artillery

Practicing with a fieldpiece during the Mexican Revolution. ...

Mexican Revolution Artillery

This photograph may have been taken at the Rebel Camp near ...

Stacks on ASARCO Site

The photograph shows the stacks of the ASARCO smelting site from ...

San Jose del Rio Grande Church

This church was originally named San Rosalia, and was built in ...

Boundary Marker

This is probably the Boundary Marker near Smeltertown, with the ...

SmelterTown

The beginnings of ASARCO. Photograph taken from a souvenir ...

ASARCO

60-ton Converter Crane

ASARCO

60-ton hoist block

ASARCO

70-ton wooden bridge

ASARCO

300 ton press (shaft hub)

ASARCO

300 ton press, shaft hub 2

ASARCO

500 KW Crank

ASARCO

500 KW Generato

ASARCO

610' stack

ASARCO

828' stack

ASARCO - El Paso, Texas

Photograph taken of a stack - upper platform -828' stack, ...

ASARCO

4160 Volt Switch

ASARCO

Air steam 400 turbine

ASARCO

Air lines manifold

ASARCO

Bag house ventilation

ASARCO

Bag house

ASARCO

Bench grinder

home.search_collection