Famous Tacoma Stack Coming Down Sunday

TACOMA - For much of this century, boaters on Commencement Bay have been told to look for the 562-foot smokestack that rises through the fog in Ruston to guide them to safe passage.

For environmentalists, the old brick monument, built in 1917, was a lightning rod that symbolized industrial pollution.

And for the hundreds of former workers of the Asarco smelter plant, the towering stack stands for better days. Ashes of sulfur dioxide strewn by the stack might have burned lawns and exposed people to carcinogens, but they said it also meant steady work.

Since dwindling copper markets and piling environmental regulations forced Asarco to close the plant in 1985, the old stack has been weakening and bulging at the sides.

Sometime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Sunday, the smokestack's 2.5 million bricks will be blown apart.

"There will be some tears shed," said Chuck O'Donahue, a burly man who worked for 22 years at the smelter. He tends bar at the VFW post near the plant, where the smelter workers' union once met.

He was the business manager of United Steel Workers, Local 25, when the plant closed and 570 people were laid off.

"Some are still trying to find work," he said. "When the stack comes tumbling down, it's going to mean the end of their hope that someday the smelter's going to reopen for them."

For others, destruction of the stack will symbolize the turning of a page of the nation's industrial history, from a time when the bottom line outweighed the environment and lives.

The smelter was shut down because of concern over arsenic, a carcinogenic smelting byproduct, in the stack.

According to a University of Washington study, scientists found higher-than-normal levels of arsenic in some young children in the area. In 1983 and 1984, its final two years of operation, the smelter released 157,000 tons of the pollutant sulfur dioxide into the air, the study found.

In December 1991, Asarco agreed to pay for the cleanup, which includes demolishing the stack and 16 waterfront buildings.

For many who lost their jobs or grew up near the plant, there's a lasting bitterness against the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which declared the plant a Superfund site as one of the most polluted areas in the United States.

"What this means is that the environmentalists have won," said O'Donahue.

Catherine Dickens, 71, who grew up in a house a few blocks from the smelter and moved to another house on the same block when she married, said she remembers what the ash would do.

"When the wind hit us right, it would come down and burn our lawns," she remembered. "We'd have to run out and water them, or else it turned yellow."

"But everybody survived," said Dickens, who doesn't believe the smoke hurt anyone.

Gary Reese, a librarian at the Tacoma Public Library's historical archives, said if people still feel nostalgic about the smelter, it's because the town of Ruston grew up around the plant.

When Dennis Ryan opened the original smelter at the site in 1887, the town was cut off from Tacoma by dense forests, he said.

As a result, the community was tight-knit - a company town, Reese said, "where you saw the people you worked with at the store, or at church or the lodge.

"The company built the homes, the credit union in town was the company credit union, and they had their own school district."

Ruston is named after William Rust, who took over the company in 1896. He sold it in 1905 to Asarco and the Guggenheims who at the time were competing with the Rockefellers to buy smelter plants.

Jean Gillmer, also a librarian at the archives, said she'll be sad to see the stack come down.

"It's a symbol of this area's history. It's what brought a lot of the people here."

In about eight seconds Sunday, it'll all come tumbling down. --------------------------------------------------------------- Goodbye smokestack

Demolition time: Sunday sometime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Organizers cannot tell exactly when the demolition will occur because of the complexity of the operation. Placing the explosives is complicated, organizers said, and people living within 1,000 feet of the stack have to be evacuated.

How: Detonation experts will place explosives at strategic locations around the diameter of the stack to cause it to fall inward. A winner of a raffle will push down a T-bar, prompting experts to set off the explosives.

Where: The stack is near North 51st Street and Baltimore Street in Ruston. But the area within a 1,000-foot radius of the stack will be evacuated and closed off.

Best viewing places: No special viewing areas have been established, but organizers say Commencement Bay, the waterfront along Ruston Way, Vashon Island, and some parts of Point Defiance Park will offer good vantage points. But get there early because large crowds are expected.

Cost: The stack cost about $209,000 to put up and will cost about $500,000 to blow up.