Steel, p.11
Steel, page 11
Unlike Biblical quarries, this one was not aswarm with chisel men countless as maggots, or yoked bearers in twisted ant lines. A few men and some big machines did the job, though at the time the mine was deserted. Drong bounced the pickup to a forty-foot drilling tower, stopped, and disembarked. Pointing to fifteen-inch-diameter holes the tower’s bit has augured, he said they were forty feet deep. “Our guys have blasting down to a science,” he said. “They’ll throw a hundred thousand tons right or left as they please. I’ll show you how they scoop it up.”
We walked two hundred yards to an idled power shovel. Like all new shovels, this one ran on electricity, not steam, and dragged behind it a sled with a coiled power cable as thick as your wrist. “Big,” said Drong as we approached. “Everything in this industry is big.”
The shovel’s mobility owed to tank treads, the upper portion of the tread loop was about chest-high off the ground. Above was a lazy-Susan gear seven feet across. The main body, as large as a small house, sat on top. A steel arm angled up from this rotatable house to forty feet above the mine floor and guided cables that moved the shovel’s bucket. This rugged construction scooped up 380 cubic feet of exploded rock at a single dip. Drong and I climbed a twelve-foot ladder to go inside, first into the vast engine room powered by the immense electrical cable, then into the diminutive cab for the operator. I sat in the vinyl seat. There were three pedals and two joysticks. “The whole thing shudders when the teeth of the scoop grate on hard rock,” said Drong. “They have to replace the teeth every other shift at a few hundred dollars a tooth. Whole machine cost three million.”
When working, the scoop drops its load into the beds of immense yellow dump trucks. These can hold one hundred tons at a time, and the top of their rim walls are sixteen feet off the ground. The engines are diesels that power electric motors between the rear wheels, which resemble auto tires but stand higher than a person can reach. When the bed is tilted for dumping, the top arcs to over three stories high. In the manner of brutes, the big yellow trucks strive for simplicity; they have only two gears, forward and reverse. Unfortunately, when they back up they can handily squash pickup trucks—a foreman was nearly killed at the Keewatin mine by a reversing big yellow not long before I visited, which is why every pickup there jiggled a scarlet pennant from its twelve-foot antenna.
The big yellows haul their loads of taconite rubble to a shed with two large openings on opposite sides. Each truck backs up to one of the openings and raises the bed to dump. The rock parts fall down sloping sides to a central hole, called a gyratory. Its outside is a steel-lined cone descending nine stories, narrowing with depth. Rising from the middle is a slender eccentric bell, shaped at the top like the nose of a propeller airplane but bigger around than two people joined hands to feet in a circle. The bell turns at a leisurely pace and wobbles like a drunk but is stronger than a tank, and any rock that tumbles in the top is splintered to no more than six inches across as the bell, in its eccentric rotation, forces rock rubble against the circular sidewall. The gyratory masticates a truckload of taconite rock in about a minute.
Drong and I tossed our hardhats onto the seat of the red pickup and bounced back first along the mine floor and then the switchback that led to the surface. Our dirt road followed the half-mile-long elevated and covered conveyer belt that caught the rock chunks below the gyratory and then conveyed them out of the mine, across a wide stretch and into a storage shed beside the expansive pellet-making plant where we were headed. The shed was a tenth of a mile long and thirteen stories high, enough to pile up plenty of rock chunks in case one of the shovels shorted out or the gyratory wobbled itself into disrepair.
The taconite pellet-making plant was, appropriately enough, taconite colored—that is, a medium blue-black gray. It rose eleven stories to a flat roof, stretching three hundred yards in one direction and one hundred in another. Drong said we’d follow the whole process from rock chunk to taconite pellet, pushed through a steel door, and bounded up four flights of yellow-painted steel stairs.
The first room was the largest—two football fields long and ten stories high. Inside were 3,500-horsepower electric motors and eight hollow revolving drums called grinding mills, each eighteen feet long and twenty-seven feet across, open at one end. The drums turned with malevolent slowness at about the speed of a slow roll of the eyes; bolts protruded from their cylindrical inside walls like spikes. Rock chunks and water were piped into each drum at one end. The rock chunks fell in among five-inch steel grinding balls, and the whole mess sloshed around inside. Pieces less than three-quarters of an inch across washed out the far end. Not even taconite can stand up to the punishment of the grinding mills, and eventually every large rock that enters succumbs to the continuous battering and is flushed out in pieces. With a wave of his hand—conversation being difficult in a room in which rock is being flailed—Drong gestured to the secondary grinding mills where, in a similar process, the three-quarter-inch fragments were pulverized into particles no bigger than grains of powder. The proud Minnesota rock then had no more body than ashtray sand as it moved along in a gray slurry.
Grinding mills of a taconite plant near the iron mines convert taconite rock to slush.
Drong gestured again, and we moved from the large room into a smaller one, wherein lay a trial for the taconite slush. The ordeal was performed by machines called magnetic separators and, considering their importance, violated the Drongian aphorism that everything in the industry is big. Each separator, of which there were about twenty in a line, was basically a stainless steel cylinder only a yard across and ten feet long. Each was half immersed in the slowly flowing thin slurry of taconite, and each concealed inside a rotating electromagnet. As the magnet descended below the slurry surface, iron-rich minerals rushed to the outside cylinder walls. As it ascended inside the cylinder, the iron rode up the outside. Then, safely free of the nonmagnetic silica slush it had left behind, the iron-rich minerals were washed off into a separate trough. The separators do not dislodge the iron from its chemically mated oxygen nor do they prevent silica flecks from being trapped with grains of their magnetic neighbors, so the new slurry that is formed, called concentrate, is really only about 65 percent iron. But that is good enough for blast furnaces. The silica remaining in the old slurry is piped with water several miles to lowlands, where it fills in about twenty acres a year, layer upon layer, just as it did in the shallow sea a billion and a half years ago—only this time without the iron.
“That’s half the process,” Drong said and waved us on again. “Next they turn the concentrate slurry into pellets over in the other half of the plant.”
We passed into the pellet-making half of the plant to where the watery iron-rich concentrate slurry was piped. It flowed into the troughs of disk filters, which are eight-foot-diameter, double-skinned, thin-mesh screens that rotate through the slurry making ghoulish sucks and wheezes. Each round filter was divided into ten wedge-shaped sections, so that it resembled the inside of an orange sliced along its equator, or a freshly cut pie. Each section was fitted with a tube for sucking air in and blowing it out. Dipping into the slurry, a wedge-shaped, double-skinned section sucked between the skins with a sloppy slurp. Rising out of the slurry, concentrate clung to this double skin, almost totally desiccated. Cleared of the slurry part of the trough, the wedge section exhaled, thus discharging the newly dewatered concentrate into another trough. With ten wedges to a disk, twelve disks to a trough, and six machines, the room was filled with the sounds of slurping, sucking, and wheezing.
The concentrate then resembled raw material for mud pies. The muck was ushered to conveyors, sprinkled with clay to make it stickier, and then disgorged through the center of the raised end wall of a tilted and rotating drum thirty feet long and twelve feet across. As the clay-enriched muck fell into the drum, it broke into small bits. These skittered not only partly up the sidewall because of rotation but also back down the sidewall and toward the bottom because of gravity. Little particles, so tumbling, clung one to another and grew like peewee snowballs reeling down a hill. The drum thusly gestated four hundred thousand five-gram, half-inch pellets a minute. They tumbled out the drum bottom by the thousands, then fell into a series of screens that deflected the too-large and too-small for further work. The acceptably sized rode to twenty-three descending rollers twenty feet long, down which they flowed in a kind of grapeshot ripple run; they looked like peas on parade, riding in happy concord on a 160-foot traveling grate for drying.
In reality, the pellets were approaching their fiercest trial. This was the journey through the great rotary kiln. An entire wing was built for this gigantic, slowly revolving funhouse barrel walk from hell. The kiln was two stories in diameter and half a city block long; a seventy-foot-long golden flame shot from the lower end. Into the upper end, the pellets tumbled by the thousands, flopping all the way down, turning and roasting to two thousand degrees, so that by the time they reached the bottom, under the jagged flame, they were hard as musket balls, perfect for transporting and for blast furnace food. Then they dropped onto a cooling conveyer where they released much of their heat to be recycled back for roasting their successors.
Like two pellets, Drong and I, slightly flushed, spurted from the plant. We bounded into the tomato-red pickup again and drove along a dirt road beneath conveyors that conducted the still-warm and slightly steaming pellets first to a storage area and then to a hopper beside a railroad track. There, a 140-car train moved at a slow walk beneath the hopper, which every twenty seconds opened for eight seconds and let fall eighty-seven tons of pellets into a car; the hopper loaded a full day’s work of pellet-making per train—twelve thousand tons. For as far as the eye could see, the identical and freshly painted black railroad cars created a pleasing symmetry in their curve past the hopper, like a necklace of rectangular onyx beads. The hot black pellets emitted twists of vapor into the cold air as the cars inched along the track, vanishing into the dark forest as they made their way toward Lake Superior.
I needed to beat that train to the docks if I were to catch the ore boat I’d scheduled to ride down the Great Lakes. Drong and I shed our hardhats, transferred to his station wagon, and began to motor back through forest toward Hibbing, where he wanted to show me the famous Hull-Rust mine. Now a town of twenty-one thousand, Hibbing began as any wood-shack mining hamlet in the days of the rush started by the Merritt Brothers. Many such towns along the range have disappeared, but some, like Hibbing, grew to a respectable size. Even then, it was a near thing—in 1917 the mining companies determined that the ground on which Hibbing stood was more valuable than the town itself. They offered to haul all the buildings south to get to the ore and as incentive offered to build the world’s finest high school. Hibbing agreed. The mining companies moved the town and laid a rail line to the site for the new high school, hauling in such amenities as marble walls, European chandeliers, and plush velvet auditorium seats. This was where Drong went to high school. So did Bob Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan, a near neighbor. They were close enough in age to have gotten into a fight one day, a scuffle Drong shrugs off as youthful cussedness. He bore Zimmerman no ill will.
We passed through Hibbing and then stepped out onto the rim of the largest iron mine in the world—four miles long, two miles wide, and five hundred feet deep. In the haze we could not see the far side, only part of the bottom and the brown-and-red steps of the near walls. The pit was idle except for a corner where Drong said they were carting away part of the Laurentian Divide, the ridge that separates the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds. A billion tons have come out of this hole. Twentieth-century America came out of it and victories in two world wars. Fill it back in and you have America of the 1880s, no automobiles, hardly a skyscraper or a long bridge to be seen anywhere. Drong threw in a rock and it disappeared before we could see it hit bottom. He said that when he looks in this pit he sees history in reverse—the top layers are the oldest, where men chipped with picks and loaded mule-hauled wagons. The middle layers are the 1920s, with smoke-belching steam shovels. The bottom is the 1950s, with electric shovels and diesel trucks. But that day the pit was quiet. Drong left for his office, and I to a highway that paralleled the rail track of the taconite train groaning toward the head of Lake Superior.
When pellet trains leave the taconite plants, they roll through hardwood forests to any of half a dozen ports on the lake. Most go to the very head of the lake where two cities—Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin—share a natural harbor and the largest iron-ore handling facilities in the world. The freshly roasted pellets, now in the care of the Burlington-Northern Railroad, roll across the Saint Louis River to the little city of Superior.
I beat the train into Superior and met up with Hanna’s man, Jack MacLean. He was forty-nine, amply built, and full of the friendliness of the North Country. A native Canadian, he had worked at Hanna sites in other countries and was their quality control and rail coordinator in Superior. He knew that the boat I was to ride, the George A. Stinson, had been delayed by another boat in front of her, and so he offered to show me the Burlington-Northern receiving yard two miles inland. We drove there in MacLean’s brown Chevy Impala.
The yard covers 130 acres and was built in 1966, then expanded in 1973. Each train, carrying twelve thousand tons of pellets, pulls up to a shed at the west end of the yard, and the locomotive is uncoupled. Inside the shed, a steel arm protrudes between two cars and advances the whole now-pilotless train until three cars rest above two underground bins. The arm stops the train and holds it in position while three smaller arms protrude, and knock bolts on the three cars, opening their trapdoor bottoms. While these cars drain their pellets, the first arm retreats three car-lengths to advance the train again. In this manner the harmonious toe-to-tail chain of cars empties in three hours.
From the underground bins, the pellets fall onto a conveyer that lifts them to a transfer building where they are first misted to suppress their dust and then cascaded onto another belt, more than a mile long looped, that bears them farther into the yard. There the pellets can be diverted to a stacker that makes mountains of them—the common practice during winter, when the lakes are closed to navigation—or ushered to another belt that starts them on a two-mile journey through the Allouez neighborhood of Superior and over US Highway 53 to the ore silos on the docks.
In the fading light of the cold October evening, MacLean and I slipped into a Superior watering hole within sight of the elevated conveyer that was hauling pellets overhead to the docks. MacLean used to be a bit of a nightclubber, and they knew him in this place. Jean, a dark-haired woman behind the long and deserted bar, bored with the television hung in a corner, cheered when she saw MacLean and started chattering to him about friends. MacLean, now reformed, ordered a 7-Up, and I took a beer to wash back the taconite dust. MacLean refused my offer of copayment, plunked a few bills down on the bar, and even slipped Jean a couple of dollars so she could “have a drink for herself.”
Outside, the temperature had dropped again, and the fog had thickened so that we could only see a couple hundred yards. MacLean swung his brown Impala down the road that paralleled the elevated conveyor, marked by two lines of spaced lights fading into the fog, and then turned onto the dirt road of the dock. Rising out of the haze were eighteen pairs of silos lined top, middle, and bottom with points of white lights.
After a few bumps through ruts and red-water puddles, MacLean said, “There’s the Stinson.” But on the water side of the silos, all there was to see was a two-and-a-half-story rust-red wall of steel. MacLean steered the Impala to the land side of the fog-diffused silos and splashed through potholes for another two tenths of a mile, then rounded the far end of the silos and braked. When we stepped out of the Impala, there was the same steel wall, but here it was topped by a white five-story superstructure resembling an apartment building. This was the Stinson’s stern and it was connected, MacLean assured me, to the wall we saw in the fog two tenths of a mile back.
MacLean strolled up the gangplank and through a portal in the rust-red wall. We took an elevator to the deck and walked to the crew’s lounge. There MacLean found some of his friends and told them about conditions in Superior, then joked with a cook that one day he really would ride a boat down the lakes, which, after twenty-eight years with Hanna, he had never done. He introduced me around and then went back on shore. From on deck I watched him step around puddles rouge red from iron in the soil and then bend into his sedan. He motored away, leaving the dark and foggy quay empty, save the tall and slim wife of Carl Jamison, the new chief cook for this voyage, standing in the glow of high-pole quartz lights beside the family station wagon, waiting for a last word from her husband.
Iron ore boats take on loads of taconite pellets at the docks of Superior, Wisconsin.
Some of the crew were helping with the last half hour of loading pellets into the Stinson’s holds. The man in charge was First Mate Don Rajanen, who supervised on deck from between Hatches 18 and 19, there being thirty-six hatches in all. Rajanen was in his fifties, wore tortoiseshell glasses on his round face, was bundled against the cold with wool shirts and an olive drab jacket, and sported an FM radio transceiver across his chest. The loading was in the “topping off” stage, and Rajanen had to perfect three conditions—draft, list, and hull linearity. At the beginning of each voyage, the Cleveland office radios Rajanen the draft, based on Coast Guard reports of water depth in locks, rivers, and harbors; he must comply to the inch. He also has to load the boat so that it is balanced port to starboard, and for this he eyes red and green trim lights on the bow and stern. Finally, he must load the boat so that the hull does not imperceptibly warp over its thousand-foot length, a condition that would make it vulnerable to splitting open in a storm.
