I am aware of the mine under Detroit. Seen pictures of the under-ground. They are HUGE caverns! Even at that, I don’t think the salt down in those caverns is what rusts your car out. Our cars up here in Wisconsin rust out just like those in the lower P. of Michigan. When I moved from the lower P. to the upper P. I was surprised to se model A’s and 35, 36, 37 model cars. I learned that it was because they didn’t use salt— they used ‘‘stamp sand’’ left from the copper mines. TomC
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YIKEs!!!
Tailings area where I work (New Morodor in my opinion )
The Chemicals added to the mill cause things to rust so fast no one in the environmental dept would drive on the road around this because it made their cars desolve.
They use so much salt in trying to keep the roads ice free up here it takes 5- 6 years off the life of a car.
Today cars could last 15+ years with good maintenance but the bodies rust away
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That’s like when they color the Chicago river green for St Paddy’s day except this would be for maybe halloween and probably doesn’t dissipate in a couple days. For a while I lived in an area west of Dearborn Michigan where the Ford Rouge river complex is. The Rouge river was fed by all kinds of little tributaries maybe fifty feet wide and in an industrial section of the town I lived in was a large metal plating company who used to just dump their chemicals into the river. I don’t remember if it was pre or post EPA but the other people and companies along that tributary finally sued the plating company for polluting the water. It went to court and the plating company had an analysis done of the liquid in the stream proving that it was no longer chemically water. Since the suit was for water pollution They therefore were able to get the lawsuit thrown out of court. I guess this was post EPA because I know that the government gave them a cease and desist order and they had to start taking their chemicals somewhere else for disposal. Probably the Love Canal. I could tell you many stories I seen of the abuse of Mother Nature at the steel mills up and down the Detroit River but I don’t want you tearing up like the Indian in the old commercial.
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I worked in a steel mill that was employee owned.
Not some mickey mouse outfit minimill it was a large fully integrated iron and steel works.
Long story short they bent over backwards to try and rehabilitate their business and their image.
Hardest I have ever seen a company work to sincerely try and make peace with the past.
They went bankrupt…
They made a comeback last few years.
Now they are going electric in a big way with promises to make green steel.
I do confess to this day I love the smell of coke batteries from a distance.
Its awful and dirty but it smells like hope, work and prosperity.
Driving around new Mordor everyday as I do does not make me tear up so much as wonder why the gov lets them get away with this.
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In the late 1960’s the American steel companies had fallen so far behind in quality that they were becoming non-competitive. So they started making up grades including switching some operations to electric furnaces. Old BOP and BOF furnaces and the coke ovens were still exempt from newer regulations but pollution controls were required for new equipment so we built these huge bag houses that all the ash from the electric furnaces were supposed to be contained in for processing. Processing was not cheap. Many long shifts were worked in that mill and almost invariably on starless, moonless nights the bag houses would have the suction blowers reversed and all the ash was spewed back into the air. I saw it many times. I can also wax long about the many time I saw thousands of gallons of waste oils pumped into the Detroit River because of a faulty valve or operator error resulting in a 10000 dollar slap on the wrist fine for getting rid of a hundred thousand dollars processing fees for the sludge. The government officials can all be bought.
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