Witness Seminar in El Paso
Legal Aid Office
Transcript Date
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, yeah. Everybody put their names up there. Not that we don’t know you guys’ names already. Has everyone met everyone else? All three of you? You know one another? No. Okay.
José Manuel: No, actually, we started last week, but we’ve never really talked. And the gentleman I know wasn’t here last week, but we haven’t had a chance to talk.
Charlie: Well, thank you. Former engineer with 35 years total. And engineering was my department. I did a lot of in-house design work for the plant and other plants. So we dealt with all kinds of engineering facilities disciplines.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Jose, you want to introduce yourself? What your connection is with the plan?
José Manuel: Back between 2004 and 2009, I was doing a whole lot of door knocking. We were organizing the communities. And in one of those door knocks I found Daniel Arellano. He connected me with Charlie and with Efrain and Chuli. And we saw this group of workers as an important part in In this process that ASANCO was going through to try to get its air permit renewed, we wanted to make sure and elevate the concerns that this group of workers had and connect them with the concerns that the UTEP students had and connect them with the concerns that the neighbors had there around Sunset Heights specifically. And that was back under the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. And so for me and the group of people that I was working with, we saw this as an environment a health issue and we work together primarily to prevent the smelter from getting its air permit renewed and also to get the properties there around the Sunset Heights smelter to get cleaned up.
Charlie: I don’t want to contradict you on that but in 08 and 09 I was called in back by ASARCO to do an engineering study what it would cost to reopen the smelter. So I did a lot of research on that. And it turned out that it was going to be very expensive to do all this. But all the environmental issues were being discussed through the legal department and all that. So a lot of improvements were already made through the modernization projects that we did in the early 80s. And the Sarco smelter was one of the cleanest smelter in the world. Besides being built in the old days, two or three miles away from the downtown, but then the town grew and the smelter wound up being in the middle of town. So how do you comply with that? And then one of the disadvantages is smelting copper, you have sulfur as a byproduct. And sulfur doesn’t hurt you. People think it does, but it doesn’t. You compare sulfur and hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is rotten eggs that’s put out by the catalytic converters of all the automobiles that are being driven up and down the highways. And unfortunately, it has a bad smell, rotten eggs. So anyway, getting off of that, you know, everything was going to be good for the town, the economy and so forth. It would have brought in a lot of employment and the economy would have grown nationwide and internationally. But the cost that we come up with was a little under $1 billion. And we were told, scrap it. I mean, we fought to it and nailed. We got a permit for the ore handling. We got a permit for the acid. And the only drawback was the expense. But it would take, we would have to build, demo two acid plants and build one acid plant in one. That would have cost a lot of money. Plus, being a 110-year-old smelter, it was a rust bucket. So what do you do with a rust bucket? You demo the equipment and replace it. That costs a lot of money. So it was cut off at the same time ASARC was going through a bankruptcy. That was one of the biggest things that we’re dealing with. It wasn’t just El Paso, it was nationwide. You had the Glover plant, you had East Helena, Montana, the Leadville plant in Colorado. So there’s a lot of issues in there. So all that, you know, had to stop somewhere.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Well, I’m just going to take the liberty, since we’re few here and you’re new, of asking you the question. I think it was Bill Addington of the Sierra Club asked, or the point that he made, about the decision by ASARCO not to reopen in 2008 or 2009. Yeah, but it was. He said that it was because of the EPA changing hands, and his argument was that Sarko was worried what the new EPA under Obama on the federal level would do. Do you think that had an influence, or what’s your take on it from the inside?
Charlie: I think they lowered the standards on the EPA, you know, the parts per million that they were putting out or we were putting out, you know. It’s like saying one part per million in a cubic centimeter. That’s a lot. You know, you’re talking about one little dot in a cubic centimeter. That’s quite a bit. You know, it’s hard to comply with stuff like that. And we had the best modern equipment that we have ever used in the plant. The only problem is when we would have shutdowns, like emergency equipment went down for some reason, power went out. Of course, you have opacity smoke that comes up. And you’re going to get the smell of sulfur. Sulfur, like I said, that’s a byproduct of smelting copper. What’s a byproduct when you cook bacon? Let me ask this question. Okay, I don’t want to pick on none of you guys, but you can put a beautiful, huge hood on a kitchen and you can start grilling your bacon. How do you keep bacon from spreading all over the house? You don’t. You don’t. The ozone take care of that. Unfortunately, the same thing goes with the smelting of copper. Every matter of material has an odor. You’ve got to give it time, and with time it will go away. You know, one of the things that I can say is the years that I worked there, if I missed three weeks in those 35 years I was with a plant, it would have been a lot. I’m missing being ill. The only time I would get sick is when I would go on vacation. That’s funny, isn’t it? And when I would come back to the plant, I mean, automatically my body starts rejuvenating. I start getting stronger. And I didn’t get sick, you know? I mean, yeah, we all suffered with a small, the SO2, SO4, you know, that creates acid, you know. It’s like when you perspire and you have this SO3 out in the air as dust, it turns into acid. and you walk through a smoky area where there’s a lot of SO3, your tears turn into SO2.
Dra. Edna Rico: But SO3 is very dangerous. But it doesn’t hurt you? But in the brain, yes.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Oh, we should introduce ourselves, too, since I don’t know that you’ve met my coworkers here. Maybe you want to introduce yourself.
Dra. Edna Rico: My name is Edna Rico. I work for the University of Juarez. Okay. And I have been working and doing some research for my Ph.D. in . I’m a chemist and MD.
Froylán Enciso: Okay. And I’m Froylan Enciso. I’m a PhD student at the same university where Chris works, Stony Brook University. And my area of specialty is drugs, drug dealing in Mexico. No, drugs, drugs. Drugs. Drugs, yeah, drugs in Mexico. Yeah, and Chris invited me to help in this project, so that’s why I’m here, just to help.
Katie: And then, Katie, you haven’t introduced yourself. I’m from Chihuahua, Avalos. I didn’t work in the plant or anything. I grew up there. My whole family grew up in Mexico with a circle. I mean, all the way from Azaco, Durango.
Charlie: Well, you know, I’ve driven through the… This is decades and decades ago. They smelt the one going into Chihuahua. That’s not Diabolos, is it?
Katie: No, Avalos was away from Chihuahua. I think Chihuahua’s grown up to Avalos.
Charlie: What about the one that was close to Chihuahua as you’re going into it? There used to be a… That is Avalos.
Froylán Enciso: That is Avalos.
Charlie: You see that Chihuahua? Yeah, that’s right. It’s on the edge. Okay, all right. You know, Avalos had the same blast furnace that we had here. The same type of blast furnace. Water cooled. We used blast air. We used blast air that was produced in the power plant for blowing. It was a high volume, low pressure. And that would blow into those tuirs that they had there. And the tuirs, they had a natural gas injected in there mixed with the blasting material. So that would create agitation inside the furnace. And then the furnaces, they were charged from the top, and they had those hoppers out there. And they had a flue right through the middle of the blast furnaces. They would suck in the gases and they would convey to the bag houses where they had bags made out of Dacron. And they would filter it. And people think that that’s something that was invented yesterday. No, that thing goes back in time, you know.
Dr. Chris Sellers: The bag houses?
Charlie: The bag houses. And then we had the catrells, the electrostatic precipitators. The contrails were electrically charged. The gases would be sucked in through the baghouse first, which is a filter, just like a vacuum cleaner. And then it would go into the contrails, which had corrugated plates. These corrugated plates, they had the wires strung down with counterweights at the bottom. And they would run the gases through there, and all the metal was electrically charged, and they would discharge it to a collecting hopper. And that hopper had a conveyor belt, sort of like a screw conveyor or a drag conveyor. So that material that they recovered as impurities, they would reprocess that through the system again.
Dr. Chris Sellers: So the control, okay, you brought this up. I want to ask you this. I understand the control precipitator, I’ve looked at it, that the reason, at least given in the papers for this, was because of the pollution, the cutback on pollution.
Charlie: Well, pollution is there, no matter what. When you’re smelting, you’re going to have opacity, airborne fugitives, dust, smoke, and all that. It’s hard to capture everything, you know. But the major part, you recover that.
Dr. Chris Sellers: And that was one of the principles of the Cottrell Precipitator.
Charlie: Yeah. Was there one in Avalos? I can’t speak for Avalos.
Dr. Chris Sellers: I haven’t been able to find record of it or people who remember it.
Charlie: I donated all the drawings, majority, to UTEP’s library. The drawings of… El Paso, and also the museum in Sacaton in Arizona. Right, okay. They have all these drawings on the blast furnaces and all that.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Do they have the drawings of Alamos here?
Charlie: I wouldn’t, I can’t say that.
Katie: Alamos, when they went into the zinc is when they remodeled a lot of it. Right.
Charlie: You know. But the thing is, the blast furnaces were identical, what Avalos was using in here. I think Avalos goes further. It’s older than the El Paso smelter. Much older.
Katie: And Monterey’s the oldest, because that was the first one.
Charlie: That design was just duplicated, you know, throughout different plants and all that. The same thing goes in East Atlanta, Montana. They had blast furnaces over there. They were doing the smelting for the lead. And then you have Leadville in Colorado. It was the same thing. So all that was lead. But the thing about lead is you have a lot of impurities. You have silver, nickel. You have zinc, cadmium, all that is in the impurities. All that has to be extracted.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Well, I think we’ve already started to broach the Avalos case, what went on there. And so I wanted to start now with, now that we’ve heard a little bit from you yet, some… description about what has happened with us in Avalos. This is a part of, this is a series of seminars coordinated with a similar group And so just this past Saturday, we had a similar meeting to the one that you guys were at the previous Saturday. So I want to give you a little report about what happened. I think it was quite different in tone and in sort of composition of people.
Charlie: When you had Cork and Villalobos here? He’s a metal or just well, he’s a Baker, you know, I’m
Dr. Chris Sellers: thinking about the 1 in Avalos as compared to the 1 we had here that, you know, unfortunately, you were not there for good reason. But I wanted, let me just tell you a little bit about that. And I have some clips about what happened. Well, we had. We had our initial speakers, you remember we did this exercise where we had four people to talk a little bit at the first. It was a little bit more extensive, the initial speeches were, than here. And in fact, we had a whole lecture by our health expert who had done the lead studies of the soil and ground plan. And so, you know, the dynamic I think was a little different too once we got to the discussion. There was, we had a good number of former workers in the plant, a couple of former managers or engineers. including Senor Rodriguez and then on the other hand we had we had about we had an ecologist Arturo Limon and we also had and we also three of the health scientists or environmental scientists who’ve done some of the studies for the government. And so, after the CNN talk in particular, what unfolded in the discussion was a quite heated debate about whether or not the contamination was real, whether or not the workers in particular, we’re talking about the Avalos session, so whether the workers in particular were in danger. And with many of the former workers as well as managers insisting that there was not that much danger for workers, that a lot of them were not sick, people lived long, and all this kind of thing.
Veronica: And of course, people were— Just a few cases of lead poisoning here and there. What? Just a few cases of lead poisoning here and there.
Dr. Chris Sellers: here and there i mean and they also talked about how when people were uh they they measured people’s blood lead and when that lid got up beyond a certain point they would put them elsewhere
Charlie: yeah well the same thing here in the smelter yeah so and
Dr. Chris Sellers: on the other hand the people uh sanin and some of the other health scientists were arguing that their measurements had shown that the area around the smelter was was extremely lead and you know and she actually went into her charts with all you know kind of a scientific presentation.
Katie: And so— Workers didn’t like it, huh?
Dr. Chris Sellers: They didn’t like it. And so they—so there was—let me just give you a little sense of what happened there, if I could find this right. So to read this—okay, this is the debate we had. And let’s see, is the sound working here? You should connect that. Oh, it’s not connected. Sorry. Now why is it not working?
Dra. Edna Rico: Not connected. Not connected.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Not connected. No, that’s not the right one, the connection. Maybe I turned it in.
Froylán Enciso: By the way, Arturo Limon sent…
Veronica: He was part of it?
Froylán Enciso: Yeah, he was part of it and he told me to give his greetings and give you a hug. I’m going to give you the hug later.
Veronica: Thank you, he’s wonderful. I haven’t seen him in maybe 10 years.
Froylán Enciso: Not just a couple. I think that he has like
Veronica: 20 books or something. Okay, so here they are. They’re debating.
Dr. Chris Sellers: And a lot of the debate… There’s Oscar Rodriguez. And a lot of the debate is over… One of the things that happens, just to give you a sense of how heated the debate got, is that a lot of the workers were saying that they didn’t get sick, and most of the people they knew were healthy and lived long. And so this woman, who is one of the scientist people… Rosario. Rosario Delgado. She started talking about a worker family she knew where the worker had actually gotten cancer, lung cancer I think it was. And then all the other people in the family. All the family, the whole family. And so this is the other manager guy. He comes over, and he wants to talk with her. He actually stands up, walks all the way around the room, and wants to find out who this person was who actually got sick. And he’s saying, is it this person? He’s showing her the picture. Is it this person? I know this person. And they’re not dead. They’re still living. And so he wants to sort of refute her, all of this kind of individual testimony, people remember this and that, but her memory that she was talking about contradicted what this guy believed. So you can see, you know, we had to get him to sit down. Things got a little heated on this front. I can imagine. Yeah, you guys can probably imagine given what happened here with all the debate. So we had a lot of that. Now, we did have engagement with you guys’ tape. And we showed, after what went on, we showed like four segments from the seminar here. It was a little bit awkward because the language for one thing and we didn’t really have the video synced and so on. But we do have some video here and audio to give you some of the response and I just wanted to start with that. The response to, how they responded to the discussion here the previous Saturday. So we started off, I think I’m just going to play the audio because that’s the clearest. I’ll show you this fella who gives the first response is Mr. Soto. No, this is the same one. discussion after videos. This is immediately following the video. So this is us watching or listening to the sound of the video. And she’s reading the translation of what people said. And the first response comes from Jesus Soto, who is there in the corner, a former worker. And let me just get what he said. And I’m going to play in Spanish since most of you, I believe, know Spanish. And we don’t have to really translate, do we? I mean, gosh, we have the translation ready. But you are just… I speak Spanish. Yeah. Very well. We understand everything, Katie. Okay, so let’s just play this.
Jesus Antonio Soto: I think that in the U.S. there are more possibilities of work. Maybe that’s why they didn’t close the plant. What I see is that those were bad comments from the company to what we have indicated. They can work in agriculture. I don’t know if, if also, this, if, for example, the question of, of, well, if they wanted to go up, it wasn’t an economic question to take the product back. But also, what I was seeing is that they wanted more technology or they had more technology for less work and more productivity. but the majority of people got used to working heavy and they decided to stay with that type of environment, to work heavy and not produce. As here when the synthesizer was put on, many people commented that they were going to work with this white bag that had white errors and brought white errors and some of them came out of nowhere.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Did you guys get that or some of it was kind of unclear?
José Manuel: It sounded to me like he was saying that perhaps it was more opposition to the smelter because the workers would have more options. So the economic opportunities here are so that you can’t complain or… O sea que te cuesta menos quejarte porque tú puedes buscar por otro lado.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Yeah, that’s basically the translation to everybody. I don’t need to go through that, I guess. So it’s an argument that was the first to come up, and I think, you know… Just to, I think, you know, it was also, go ahead.
Froylán Enciso: You guys want to add something? Maybe, because we presented your segment, and they was really, really happy to hear that you had such wonderful memories of Avalos. And then we presented three segments that were really critical about the plant because of environmental and health issues. And upset the workers. And the first reaction they had was, all right, yeah, these Americans, they are complaining because they can have many other jobs. They can have better payment. That was the first reaction.
Dr. Chris Sellers: So go ahead. So that was the first reaction.
Froylán Enciso: Do you have commentaries on this argument or anything to say?
Charlie: When you go apply for a job, it doesn’t matter where you go. It could be a mine, it could be a smelter, it could be a refinery, it could be a construction site. There’s hazards on every job. And the laws in those days, back then before the flood, there was no environmental issues back in those days. People just got a job and they worked. Unfortunately, the companies didn’t have the expertise, the end results of some of the products that they were manufacturing until environmentally starts getting studies. It’s like the MSDS. You heard of that, right? That’s the sheet with all the hazards on it. Right, right. In the old days, they didn’t have that. Yeah, there were some certain things that you cannot mess around with this chemical because it’s bad for your skin or for your eyes or whatever. But things have changed. Some of the things that when you was hired in a job, you know, they probably thought this is a dangerous place and, you know, we follow certain safety procedures that we like to practice. But a lot of them ignore those safety procedures, you know. They just did what they wanted to do. Unfortunately, a lot of them got hurt. Some of them got sick because they weren’t told, you know, they didn’t practice the hygiene that they were supposed to do, you know. You know, when you get dirty and everything you’re supposed to wash your hands clean before you go and consume any food that you take in. And then, of course, lead was one of the major products that existed back in those days. Lead was the number one thing they used for everything. They used lead for the fuel that they used for gasoline. They used lead for soldering plumbing. They used lead for lead pipes, lead for lead weights. They used lead for ballast for ships. So there’s so many things involved in that. So you have to stop and think, where do you draw the line on this? And of course, management is gonna say, hey, if you like the job, you can work as long as you want. But if you don’t like it, you’re gonna complain. There’s the door.
José Manuel: And I would take issue with, was that Mr. Soto?
Dr. Chris Sellers: Yeah, it was Mr. Soto.
José Manuel: Yeah, I would take issue with that. I think that here in El Paso and probably in many other places where ASADCO has an operation, probably the economic opportunities are as broad or as limited as they would be in Chihuahua or anywhere else. So I don’t think that’s a factor. What I’m curious about is the labor organizing that was happening there versus here. I wonder how much of that culture, Ed, when, I mean, obviously you bring that today, right? I mean, you have your arguments and you have your data and you make it and you present it. That was obviously part of what the workers grew up in in the cycle to defend the plant, to defend themselves, their job. But at the same time, There was organizing that was happening in the plant, and I wonder how much of that contributed to the culture so that after the plant is shut down, that attitude to want to defend yourself, to want to continue to participate, to protect yourself, is still around. I see that as an example of maybe why that is. The workers… After 99, continued to do their organizing, but I don’t have anything to compare it to because I don’t know what it was like in Avalos.
Katie: It was great. I mean, you’re not going to hear anyone put it down because as far as we were concerned, we grew up there, we went to school, they gave us, I didn’t know what medical insurance was as long as I was there.
José Manuel: And how about the union organizing?
Katie: The union was really strong.
Dr. Chris Sellers: It was strong. And in fact, we heard for various reasons. Not only did we hear more after the testimony from El Paso, not only did we hear more acknowledgement that the plant was dirty, that the work was dirty, and it was dangerous. And I could, you know, one guy said, well, we weren’t making cake. But there was also a good, because we were talking about the benefits, we also got onto that. we began to hear more sort of division between the workers and the manager people. And in fact, the worker, the union leader was arguing that a lot of the benefits that they did get came from union pressure. And, you know, we got the sense too that, I mean, we didn’t have any discussion actually here of unions. I mean, we heard from the ex-workers, but Not a whole lot, you know, looking back at the conversation, there was not a whole lot of mention of unions.
Katie: But there was a lot, actually. Maybe it was the composition of the group there, too, where we had… No, the unions are strong because they could call a strike and shut the whole plant down in no time. I mean, just like that.
Veronica: Is it the same here?
Katie: Yeah.
José Manuel: Did the steel workers go on strike here that you can remember?
Charlie: A bunch of times. It had to do with the contracts that they would write. It probably went for five years or three years, something like that. Things change depending on the union stewards and their rules of regulations that they had. There’s always grievances on the many issues that Nguyen raised against the company because some of the practices, either they were fair or they were not unfair. So, you know, it’s just, to me, I recall it was about every five years from what I can remember.
Dr. Chris Sellers: I think they were saying it was every year that they renegotiated.
Charlie: Every two years. Yeah, I’m talking about the union rulebook that they come up with. Because I remember that it kind of spanned within three to five years or something like that. And conditions have always changed. And one of the biggest things that we had against the union is The workers, they were told to do different jobs that they were supposed to be compliant with, like a boilermaker, do boilermaker work, a carpenter, carpenter work, and so forth. One of the issues that they would raise is if you had a timber and there was a piece of angle iron bolted on the timber, none of them wanted to touch it. You know, the union workers would say, we don’t want to do that because it’s got an angle line that belongs to the boiler maker. The carpenter said, no, we don’t want to touch that because it belongs to the carpenter. I mean, there are so many issues. So what the company would do is they would go out for contracts. Outside contractors would come and do the job. I mean, I’m just using that as an example. Or you wanted a handrail made out of pipe. for safety, well, the first thing, they’ll raise issues, you know, union graves. No, we don’t want to build that because that belongs to the iron worker. And then they say, no, it belongs to the pipefitters. So where do you draw the line on that? Issues like that, you know, we would get all the time.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay. You want to introduce yourself, sir?
Michael Wyatt: Certainly. Yes, I’m Michael Wyatt.
UNKNOWN: Okay.
Michael Wyatt: And I might have received a phone call from you or two. Yes. Sorry I didn’t have a chance to get back to you. I was out of town all last week and just actually picked up your messages today and just got off work. So I would have been here earlier. I’m far from a labor historian, but my – thinking about the union at ASARCO is that the original workers that populated that plant were mostly Mexican immigrants that came out of a revolutionary, what today would be a far radical union society. I mean, labor protection is written into the new Mexican Constitution in a way that it was never in the American Constitution. We don’t have anything referencing labor rights in our Constitution. Barely have it in most of our laws. But Mexican immigrants came from a society where it was revolutionary times. And they had very powerful industrial unions. And so I think that there was a more fertile seedbed in El Paso for industrial union organizing at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century than you would have seen in any other American community. Well, other communities had their Eastern European immigrants and things like that where – I mean I hate to – use the term communist and socialist because that’s what those unions were and unabashedly and very strong among the communities that they represented. And I think that that helped over time to create a strong union atmosphere in ASARCO that persisted when The other unions, industrial unions, the garment workers in El Paso were falling apart. Everything else across the country was falling apart, but there was always a very strong union ethic at ASARCO.
Dr. Chris Sellers: okay well we need to move along to the did you have matt could you introduce yourself just to or michael yeah what’s your background your connection with the we already did that with the smelter and the community
Michael Wyatt: issues i’m a lawyer i’ve been practicing in el paso for 25 years when i first moved back from law school i lived in in sunset heights which is less than a mile from the stack And in 1992, 3 and 4, they were undergoing an earlier iteration of their permit reapplication process. And I was involved at that time in fighting the permit application. And in fact, at that time, I approached the steelworkers and the other end of the – the steelworkers and whoever else I could at that time – Because I was getting my butt kicked in the application fight because they were going to have two weeks of hearings in Austin, and I was not going to be able to attend. So I was looking for some kind of a benefit, and I wanted to reach out and ask, make a settlement offer that I would withdraw my opposition to the permit if they would sign an agreement that they were going to use – Local union labor to do the new construction on site and because the unions on site were so. Pro company at that time because the jobs that wouldn’t even give me the time of day to have the discussion about trying to use union workers to build a new contact procedure plan. But through the years I had known a number of the workers and then. After that period of time, I went to work with the local legal aid office where Veronica works, and through that position, I also got involved in representing the local ACORN that Jose Manuel was organizing in the final permit renewal application that they ultimately lost or withdrew.
Veronica: And was Joe Bignon your client in the first… No, I didn’t
Michael Wyatt: have a client. I was my only client. Joe Bignon was the only other contestant in the hearing. And I don’t think his son Perry was licensed yet. I think Joe just went down to Austin on his own nickel and fought it by himself because I couldn’t do it. I was just barely trying to start my own law practice at that time. And… But I’ve got a lot of respect for Joe for what he’s been through through the years.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, well, back to Avalos. Let’s look at a little more response. Yeah, what we’re doing now, we
Froylán Enciso: had a similar seminar in Avalos, Chihuahua. Uh-huh. So we are listening part of
Dr. Chris Sellers: the discussion we had there and trying to get some feedback from… Eventually, we’re going to, very soon, we’re going to get to their answers to some of your… This is actually responding to you guys’ questions a little bit. And then we’re going to their questions from you guys. So… Let’s just look at, this is one more response, very brief, from Señor Rodriguez. Rodriguez. Yeah, see.
Veronica: We were talking about how it was, how the behavior in the peace plant
Dr. Chris Sellers: where the people were the Americans, the majority of the Mexicans, the Montefioreans, we can’t say that we haven’t worked with them. Now, as far as the benefits, indisputably, the benefits that the company proposed, the existence of the union, the transition of the union, There’s not much of a direct response, but what he did in the course of the discussion was to say, well, since I don’t have experience with the El Paso plan, I can’t really compare. And so in a way, we kind of lost the thread of comparison. But then later on, and I’ll just summarize this story, that he told a story about his interactions with the people from El Paso. They came… to look at his zinc plant in Chihuahua. You know, he considered it his. Because it was not, it didn’t build up the kind of accretions inside. Apparently these things were building up in the El Paso plant, but they weren’t building up in the Chihuahua plant. And so he was kind of proud of demonstrating how he had really, with his use of particularly the bunker oil fuel, he was able to avoid that problem that they had faced. So the implication being that they kind of figured out the technology in Chihuahua better so that it caused less of a mess. than in El Paso, and so therefore that helps explain, I think, and he was sort of saying that helps explain why people were so upset over the pollution in El Paso, but not in Chihuahua. Let me ask a question. You mentioned zinc plant? Okay. When was that built in Chihuahua? 1952, I think, is when it
Charlie: opened. In 1950, Sarko built the zinc plant in El Paso. So just to give you a little bit of information on that. The zinc plant is a byproduct of lead slag. So that has to be fumed in order to come up with a product. They fume it. And fuming it, it comes in a dust form. And the dust form is a material that was used back in those days to make the grills on cars and everything. Before palmers were invented, I’m talking about plastic, the grills were made out of zinc and pot metal. And then they would use nickel to comb it and so forth. That was one of the things. And then also the zinc, they had two types of zincs. They had technical and commercial. Okay. The technical was used for pharmaceutical use. And it was used for food processing. They used to use the zinc tin cans. They would line them inside with that. That was a product that they used for that. And then, of course, the zinc, the commercial zinc, that was used for making bearings and what you call babbitt on bearings, you know, for industrial equipment, big fans and everything, where they can’t use bold bearings because they get deteriorated, they get abrasive, and they wear out. So babbitt is a material that comes out of zinc and lead. And that material is still being used for huge equipment and industrial. So the Zip plan in El Paso, how long did it run? We ran that one from 1950. That’s when they built it and we shut it down in 19, I said the late part of the 90s. Okay. It wasn’t like 89, 88, something like that.
UNKNOWN: Okay.
Charlie: They shut it down.
Dr. Chris Sellers: What is your reaction to his sort of implication that El Paso engineers somehow used technology, used fuel and so on in a way that was dirtier?
Charlie: Well, to operate, to run a zinc plant, you have to bring in coal. And coal has to be crushed into a powder form. And then you use a coal pulverizers that has a huge ball bearings inside the rotate. And it pulverizes the coal. Of course, coal is dirtier than hell. That’s a filthy fuel. It’s a fossil fuel, but it burns beautiful when you mix it with oxygen. That thing, you have some combustion going in there.
Dr. Chris Sellers: So in terms of the relative, skills, I guess, and techniques of the engineers in those two places.
Charlie: Do you have a sense of that? Okay, let’s get into the engineering. The zinc plant in El Paso, it was designed by Stern Rogers. That was the company that did the engineering and everything. If you’re looking for those Turn Roger drawings, you’re going to find them in San Capitone in Arizona, that museum up there. That’s where they have the drawings.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, so we can put that together. Other responses to that?
José Manuel: I’m curious if you had like joint trainings or the engineers, did you mix with the engineers here?
Charlie: Off and on, you know, they would call for problems that they were running into, you know, technically or whatever. And we would look into it. And then if we had a similar problem, we would give them a feedback. And so this is what we did. You know, we changed it a little bit and so forth. And a lot of the equipment that was purchased through industry, some of the equipment didn’t last very long. So as far as our engineering background, we would go and study the equipment and we would make it stronger. We would modify it, retrofit the thing. And then later on, the factory reps would come over and say, you haven’t ordered any parts from us. We didn’t tell them that we modified their equipment. We made it better. We found the flaws on it and we improved on them. So that information was shared between the plants in Mexico and the U.S. We shared a lot of information like that.
Katie: They also sent the workers up from Avalos. I know my dad came up here to work, to train. And I know a lot of the workers down here were sent up here.
José Manuel: And the workers here would go over there?
Katie: No. I don’t think so.
Charlie: No, they hardly did that, you know. It was a union thing.
Katie: Yeah. A union thing?
Charlie: Yes. The exchange can only go one way. Well, okay. The thing is, there’s always a counter, how can I say it? Right. You know, it’s just, they didn’t want to mix that, you know, it’s just a legal thing, you know, that they didn’t want to get into.
Froylán Enciso: Was part of this, they talk about enladrillamiento. like putting bricks together or making some part of an industrial process in the zinc plant stronger with bricks.
Charlie: No, we don’t use brick in the zinc plant. We use water-cooled jackets.
Dr. Chris Sellers: This was part of the jacket, I think they were saying.
Charlie: We used the water-cooled jackets, and we had heat sinkers. The heat sinkers are studs that are welded in the inside of the furnace. They’re welded like every square inch. What that does is when they fired up the furnace, of course, you’re pouring in the return slag that’s coming out of the lead plant. And what that would do, it would build up a slag film across the inside. And that would be the protective skin of the cool jacket. Once that thing is done, then they just start smelting the slag that was coming out of the lead processing plant. And then, of course, the slag, the zinc, it was fumed, you know. We had waste heat boilers that would pick up all the gases, and the gases, they would recover all the impurities, like I was telling you before. It would collect into a hopper. Everything was reprocessed, and all that was mixed with the powdered ice, coal, and the zinc fuel material that they used on that. After they were done, then they were making those… Like ingots, they would make powdered zinc, and they had ingots on them too. Zinc bars.
Froylán Enciso: And last question about that. What was the brick crew?
UNKNOWN: Say this again?
Froylán Enciso: Brick screw. The brick crew.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Brick crew. We had a question from the group. So one of the… Oh, the
Charlie: masons. Well, the masons… Okay, the blast furnace, okay, the lower section of the blast furnace is made out of, they call it, let me see, how can I put that, heat resistant plate. You know, you heard of firebox plate? Okay, firebox plate and the ASTM code is called 285C, which is a temperature resistance, abrasion resistance material. That material is used to manufacture those water tank jackets. Water tank jackets like jackets on an engine, you know. That thing you have running water through the system. That water keeps them cool and keeps them from burning. Then, like I said before, in the inside of the furnaces, they would weld on studs, you know, they call them heat sinkers, to absorb the heat out of the furnace, and it would convey it into the water, and the water would send out to the cooling ponds, and then it was just a recycled thing. That’s how they would use that. Now the brake part was above the crucible, which is a structural beam, double channels, rivet and everything. They had brakes. It was a part of the shaft. That’s where the material was being stored in there. So that’s what the masons have worked on.
Veronica: So Mario, who was here last time, was a mason. And when we were dealing with the remediation of the historical site, I think last year we had a big discussion about the bricks because we thought some of them were contaminated by PCBs and some by chromium-6. So we convinced the trustee to not sell them. and they’re gonna be buried on site as part of the landfills. But there were a lot of bricks that were part of the different, the reverb furnace I think also had bricks. The reverb furnace?
Charlie: The reverb, we use a silica brick. It’s a different material. The silica brick is rated for 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a high temperature. And it’s strictly an insulation for the furnace. What protects the furnace brick is the jackets that are on the outside of the furnace. You know, they would have copper jackets with water-cooled coils in it. And then they would wrap the fire brick, which is the silica brick, on the inside of the furnace. And usually it was like eight to 18 inches, you know, thick. So all that heat that’s inside the furnace is radiating into the brick furnace. And then you have the copper jacket that picks up all the heat and it conveys that hot water. It takes it out to the cooling pots.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, so I think we’re running a little short on time, so I’m going to have to take – I may be taking the liberty of cutting people off and that kind of thing. Okay. But I wanted to get to their questions for you guys and spend some time with this because – well, let me just say one other answer that I think – Was to a pressing question for many people who are not here this time. Maybe, but has to do with the hazardous waste there, whether they burned hazardous waste and we didn’t get any message that they did in the terms that happened here, but. One guy remembered in the 80s that they drove up some, what was it, donkeys? Trucks? Trucks. And it was trucks, trucks, cameos, with jalapenos in cans, metal cans. and burned the whole thing in the zinc plant. They just threw it in there. So I’m going to suggest there was there as well a little, sometimes a casual use of the furnace for other things other than smell temperament, you know, what it was designed to do. So I know you work here with all the questions about the hazardous waste, but you’re certainly…
Charlie: That’s why we had the environmental department. Right. You know, I didn’t get involved with them. My job was the in-house maintenance, keeping the equipment running, keep it upgraded and improved it as we went and so forth, you know, but I hardly got into the environmental issue because it wasn’t. Even prior to when we think
Veronica: that Encyclopedia was sending things to El Paso, El Sarco was known to take materials from the DGA. And even local manufacturers would dispose of them through the reverb or through other locations, other furnaces at the site. I’m not sure if that happened.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Yeah, I mean, one story suggests that it did.
Katie: Uh-huh, 1985. 1985.
Charlie: Because that’s what, I think they were confiscating, you know, at the border, and then they would bring it in. Oh, the DDA. We did, uh… Customs. Yeah, we were the, what do you call it? It’s an official company. I mean, everybody used to agitate the DEAs and all these federal guys, because when they would, we had a spoon, which was picked up by the converter crane, and they would confiscate things that the government has, you know, counterfeit guns, clothing, boots, watches, you name it, they would burn them. And then when they would bring in pot, there was a reaction in the furnace because it’s a coal trunch. Have you heard of the saying, when you don’t throw coal bins on a hot skillet? Have you heard of that? It reacts. It explodes. So when you put a charge on a furnace like that, the first thing that’s going to smoke, we have all these viewports on the walls of the furnace. That thing is just like a dragon. And the guys out there are just real happy with it. I mean, they’re supposed to wear respirators, but they say, hey, I’m going to get a high legally. It happens.
Dr. Chris Sellers: One of the things, a couple of them actually wrote this as a question, and they’re real curious about why the chimney was brought down. So I know there were lots of stories, but anybody want to summarize the explanation? Why did they tear the chimney down? Everybody knows about this. They brought the chimney down.
Charlie: With a sulfuric, what do you call it? Spalding concrete.
Dr. Chris Sellers: I thought this was a, is it a technical issue or? No, no, okay.
Charlie: What happened, okay, have you looked at concrete slabs? And you have an area that’s real heavily in alkali. Have you seen how it deteriorates the concrete? It falls out, it disintegrates. So here’s a big issue for us. I didn’t get involved with it because this project navigators thing, but I did consult with them on a lot of things when I was still doing some work for them. We had two huge acid plants next to the 800 foot stack. Then we had a center plant where the lead stack was built. Guess what you get out of the center plant? You get black acid. Black acid is higher in percent than the copper acid. Copper is 93%, lead is 98%. Could you, we’re running out of time, could you bring that back to the chimney? Yeah, well, it deteriorates the concrete. So that destroys the integrity of the structure itself, the infrastructure.
Dra. Edna Rico: What is the chemical name for black acid?
Charlie: It’s just lead.
Veronica: It’s lead.
Dr. Chris Sellers: But why did the chimney, why was the decision made, and this was a political decision, not a technical decision. This is the way that one of them put it. Why did they not leave it up as a memorial to the plan and the history of the plan?
Charlie: You know, when you have the structures that are getting deteriorated through the process of smelting due to the acid contaminated areas, that structure, that foundation is not as sound as it looks. You can take a core sample anywhere and you get a good sample and say, hey, this just sounds good. But what about the area that you cannot touch, like the foundations?
Dr. Chris Sellers: So the foundation was very weak and corrupt?
Charlie: One of the biggest issues enemies… Okay, we have another opinion here.
Michael Wyatt: I was involved in the effort to try to save the stacks, and we paid $50,000 to an engineering firm to send three guys up there with hammers and rappel down, and every 10 feet, you know, check the density of the concrete and everything. And it was sound, and we had engineering reports on the foundation. The reason it came down principally was a lack of vision or community support of keeping it up, which would have created an ounce of liability that would have to be absorbed by somebody. And having the structure still up there. Someday it’s going to come down either by an act of God or by destruction. Who’s going to take responsibility for it? And Project Navigator put some fairly – hard-to-meet restrictions on who it would allow to become the recipient the owner in the future in the city of El Paso UTEP Various entities were in discussions, but the whole discussion got truncated by the time demands of the schedule. He wanted to have it buried on site by a certain date so that they could start putting the top on the entire site. And we just ran out of time in trying to meet the – Our opinion is we met all of the requirements that he had placed on us, but they kept moving the goalposts. And I think it was just a lack of vision. He didn’t have the ability to see that this could ever be an economically interesting or community-supported monument or anything valuable to the community. And frankly, you know, there wasn’t a big community swelling support either, so… It was just easier to take it down than to have the discussion.
Veronica: And there’s an issue, too. There were environmental questions. Right. The marketability of the site. I mean, the trustee’s obligation is to sell the property. And what he would say publicly was that it was an easier process.
Michael Wyatt: future sale if the stack was not in the way? He had no data to support that kind of, I mean, he was making that up because it was easier to tear it down. There’s a lot of economically viable uses for that stack, including just being a monument to the workers, which was our position. But so he did have a lot of arguments that were not, I don’t think, founded in any sort of evidence.
José Manuel: And I don’t think it was a political decision. I think it was more an economic decision than anything. It did seem to me that the political establishment here, those leaders, I think were all aligned with what Michael was saying. I think that probably the community did see some dissonance there where at first a lot of people were saying, no, close the thing, contamination. And then for another group to say, well, you know what, yes, but leave the smoke stacks up might have created kind of some cognitive dissonance there. And maybe that’s why we didn’t see that ground swell that we saw, for example, in the permit that was coming up.
Dr. Chris Sellers: You know, where do they get this $14 million to maintain?
Charlie: I’ll be honest with you. We didn’t spend a dime in keeping up the stack at all. The only problem that we were very concerned is the acid that has percolated into the soil because there’s a lot of sand and dirt. But that does, it heaves up foundations big time. And acid and sand doesn’t mix. It’s like hydraulic action. You know, just like water, when it freezes in the hose bit, it breaks steel. It breaks brass. It’s so strong that it just breaks anything. And this is one of the issues that they were contemplating on, you know. And of course, when I started to work there in 1969, once a month we used to survey the stacks. We had four inch pipes all the way down to the footings. And it would take elevations on that to see if there’s any settlement on that. Guess what? The 800 foot stack never settled. It was heaving up. It was rising. From the original time that it was built in 1966 to 99, that thing has raised about almost 12 inches. You know, a lot of people don’t know that.
Katie: What happened to the slag though? Huh? What happened to the slag though?
Charlie: It’s still there.
Katie: To me, that’s more dangerous.
Charlie: Well, you’ve got iron slag. You have a small percent of copper in it. I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t get involved with that. So I’m sure they’re going to crush it and sell it. Right now, what’s the name? Rio Tinto, the group, the family, Ayups. They’re the ones that are buying some of this impurities because they have a customer, China.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, let me just, a couple more questions.
Veronica: When the stacks came down, I think that it was clear that the trustee didn’t do a lot of work. There are issues that happened with the way the stacks came down. And there are some pretty horrific pictures of the stacks coming down, and aquatics especially getting one last huge dose of pollution from the stack.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Yeah. Okay, let’s, we have very little time left, but I do want to get, at least address a couple more questions. What happened to the workers after the plane shut down? This is from someone who also noticed that there was, when it shut down in Chihuahua, that a lot of the workers remained underemployed or unemployed. And so was that the same? Was that the same thing?
Charlie: I mean, they, I got laid off, you know, after… You know, 99. So I had to go look for some work. You know, I had to go start doing some freelancing, which I did. I even, I lucked out. I got a job with NASA, designed a hydraulic test tent for the orbiter space shuttle for them. They used it. It was something that was designed in the late 50s and early 60s, so I got to work on that. And they have it now at the Hawaii Census testing facilities. You know, that’s one of the things that they wanted was a…
Veronica: Anyway…
Charlie: Anyway, that’s it. I did all kinds of jobs.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Well, okay. One other question. This is a big one, but maybe we can answer it a little bit. What environmental measures were considered and applied during the plant’s operation, and when did each of them start? So, I mean, one of the things I think, for me, is looking at the chimneys and the difference in the chimneys, and that one in Avalos is only 328 feet high, That’s short. That’s short. But they’re, you know, they talk about, well, this is a way to avoid pollution. So, and I think it even goes back to the 40s or the 30s, that chimney. What were the technologies and other environmental measures? Just in brief, if you could summarize.
Charlie: They had short stacks on the lead department. The last stack they had was 225 foot. It was octagon shaped brick.
Veronica: That was for the lead.
Charlie: It was for the lead. But in 1950, right after the Second World War, they decided to improve the plant’s production. And the blast furnaces, the smoke or the gases that were being conveyed from the furnace, they run them through the contrails and everything. But that 225 foot step was not tall enough. It couldn’t handle the CFM. And that thing, they had to use a forest fan to be able to bring it out. But there again, they had the opacity elevation that they had to reach in order to dissipate some of the gases. So they built a 610 foot stack to be able to handle that. For the lid.
UNKNOWN: For the lid.
Charlie: So that was one reason they built that stack in 1950.
Dr. Chris Sellers: But they didn’t do that for Avalos, did they? Well, I don’t know what Avalos
Charlie: did, you know. That’s another… Can you answer that? We don’t have… They put out a lot of stuff for it. And then the copper stack, we used to have a 400-brick stack. That was built in 1917, you know. To make the story short on that one, the same thing. They increased production. Before they built the river, they used to have copper blast furnaces. They had lead blast furnaces and copper blast furnaces. So that was very different. But then they decided to build reverberatory furnaces right at the turn of the century. which is 25 by 125 feet long. That thing can handle more tonnage of molten copper, so copper started to be a demand back then. Anyway, they had to build a bigger stack, and they used to call that brick flue, the R&R flue, which was a reverb and a wedge roaster’s flue. So in 1966, when they built up the 828-foot stack, that one was the same thing. It carried the fugitive smokes and opacity. It flew all the way up to the lower valley and so forth. So that was a response too, I’m understanding. It was part of the emission, and that really cured the problem there. We weren’t putting up as much smoke as we used to, so the gases that were being captured before it hit the stack, it went into a control, electrostatic precipitators, and then from there it went into the scrubbers, back scrubbers, and then it went into the precipitators, the lead, all that, so they start extracting the byproduct, which is called sephiric acid, which is 93%.
Dr. Chris Sellers: I don’t think they had a sulfuric acid plant.
Charlie: No, we didn’t. But our first customer was the Chevron refinery. Because you have to use sulfuric acid for refining gas.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Oh, so you’ve got another byproduct. Yeah.
Charlie: But now the refineries has another byproduct, which is called Palmers, which is plastic. So this is where the top of where all this plastic has come up with.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, just one more wrap-up question. Do you think that in Arsarcho’s vision, as carried out in El Paso and Chihuahua, the human element, human needs, circumstances, the people involved, was not sufficiently considered? A little bit general a question, but, you know.
Charlie: I think the economic market threw a big monkey wrench on the copper, lead, everything, you know. The Asian countries stockpiled copper like crazy, and they went and unloaded that into the international, and this is what brought the price down on copper, you know, and everything, and they shut down a lot of operations. They curtailed. they start cutting back and before you know it the whole united states is a lot of smelters out of operations and they reopen it up you know they start back again on it but that did an impact on the economy not just the u.s but international
Dr. Chris Sellers: price so what others of you have a feeling about this one
Michael Wyatt: The owners were humans, too. Their needs were, I mean, the question should be whose needs were taken into consideration, not were the human needs taken into consideration, because all of the decisions were to benefit a certain group of humans. And I think you could look at any decision that was made, and it was made with a very specific set of interests in mind.
José Manuel: I think that that’s right. Just last week and some of the interviews that were being done with the workers, I think one of the things that came out of that is just how insufficient a retirement package came out of the… Insult? Yeah, well, you know, I mean, that’s…
Dr. Chris Sellers: Out of the bankruptcy and so forth?
Charlie: Well, no. The employees are protected through a government thing for retirement. But unfortunately, like here, in 99, I got cut off. At that time, I was 55 years old. So my retirement was 50%. That’s it.
Michael Wyatt: 55 years old. And then…
Charlie: When I turned to Social Security benefits, they offset that. They cut me off 25%. So they leave me out. Oh, that sucks. It hurt, you know? So, you know, everybody went through that, not just hourly, but, you know, salary. Everybody went into that. We all, we had to take a cut. So what’s left? Go find a job.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Do you guys have other commentary? We have to quit. They’re going to kick us out.
Froylán Enciso: I think you had something to say about this thing and the human element. The human element in this art.
Katie: My dad died in the colony in Navalos. He was 52 years old. My mother got a settlement from the company, period. It wasn’t very big or anything, just enough to get us out of Chihuahua to El Paso. No retirement, no nothing.
Veronica: What year was it?
Katie: About 55, 59, he died in 59. But he died in Mexico, so.
Froylán Enciso: Is there anything you want to say to the guys in Avalos? Anything else? Anything else in general, like a year? Yeah, we can record that and show you that. Is there anything you want to say?
Katie: No, I do. I miss them a lot. Growing up in Avalos was great. I don’t care about the pollution. I don’t care about anything else. It was fantastic. We were little. We could do anything we wanted. Climb trees, drive a car, steal somebody’s apples.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay, well, I, I thank you for coming and we had a different group this time, but I think we certainly filled the time with a lots of interesting commentary and lots of stuff to bring back to the folks in. You know, I think. I want to get contact information from each of you so we can give you maybe a little report about the final situation. And if you have any questions you want to write for them, any further questions, I think that you feel free to take a card and write it after we’ve talked a little bit. Okay. Do you have my email? Yeah. So a lot of you do anyway. I don’t know if Mr. Wyatt knows.
Charlie: I did a blue one in the last one. Oh, you had hoppers. You had brick boots and water-cooled jackets.
Dr. Chris Sellers: Okay. That’s your copy.
UNKNOWN: Okay.
Dr. Chris Sellers: All right. They’re really wanting us to get out of here in about three minutes.
Seminar conducted August 12, 2013, in the El Paso Public Library.
Seminar Highlights:
- Environmental Justice: Discussed efforts to prevent the El Paso smelter air permit renewal.
- Operational Challenges: Highlighted engineering issues, sulfur by-products, and upgrade costs.
- Health Debate: Conflicting views between scientists and workers regarding pollution severity.
- Labor Issues: Influence of strong industrial unions, labor disputes, and job compliance.
- Economic Factors: Impact of copper prices and the decision to demolish the smelter stacks.
(starting 0:03:44)
Introduction and Participant Introductions:
Former Asarco engineer discusses background.
Community organizer describes involvement.
(starting 0:06:05)
Discussion of Asarco Operations and Environmental Issues:
Debate over pollution and environmental impacts.
Explanation of smelting process and byproducts.
(starting 0:12:00)
Comparison of El Paso and Avalos Seminars:
Description of heated debate at Avalos seminar.
Showing of video segments from El Paso seminar.
(starting 0:21:00)
Responses to El Paso Seminar Discussion:
Former worker’s argument about job opportunities.
Discussion of workplace hazards and safety procedures.
(starting 0:29:00)
Labor Organizing and Union Involvement:
Comparison of labor organizing between plants.
Discussion of union strength and benefits gained.
(starting 0:35:27)
Union and Labor Issues:
Strike discussions, Union rulebook and negotiations.
Job demarcation issues.
(starting 0:37:01)
Engineering and Plant Operations:
Discussion of zinc plant operations.
Technical details of furnaces and materials.
Comparison between El Paso and Chihuahua plants.
(starting 0:41:30)
Environmental Concerns and Hazardous Waste:
Brief mention of hazardous waste disposal.
Burning of confiscated goods.
(starting 0:45:00)
The Chimney/Stack Controversy:
Reasons for demolition and efforts to preserve the stack.
Community and political aspects of the decision.
(starting 0:54:00)
Technical Details of Plant Operations:
Discussion of acid effects on concrete.
Explanation of black acid and its properties.
(starting 1:00:00)
Economic and Environmental Considerations:
Marketability of the site and costs associated with the stack.
Future plans for the site and materials.
(starting 1:08:30)
Workers’ experiences after plant shutdown:
Human element and worker considerations.
Closing remarks and plans for future communication.