Huge Smelter Stacks Come Tumbling Down In Northern Idaho

SMELTERVILLE, Idaho - With a puff of smoke, a boom and an agonizingly slow 15-second drop, the tallest smokestack ever demolished in North America crashed to the ground yesterday.

Explosives blew out the base of the 715-foot-tall smelter stack on Bunker Hill, and it fell its full length to the ground seconds after 2 p.m. At the same time, three other stacks on the federal Superfund site were demolished.

Phil Peterson of Nampa won a raffle to press a plunger signaling a demolition expert to trigger the charge. Peterson said it was an incredible sight.

"Physically, it was not much of a task," Peterson said. "The boom was delayed, and then it starts to go down like a ponderosa pine."

The slender, gray concrete stacks that dominated the skyline of this narrow mining valley in northern Idaho almost appeared to withstand a blast of 240 pounds of dynamite. But then they toppled like trees and raised a huge cloud of dust upon impact.

Thousands of people lined the hillsides to watch the symbolic end of the region's former smelting industry.

"With the toppling of these stacks, a new Silver Valley emerges," said Shirley Mix of the Idaho Division of Environmental Quality.

"The industry produced new materials to allow our nation to win two world wars," said Tim Olson, director of the Spokane-based Northwest Mining Association.

The stacks fell into shallow trenches, where they were to be broken into smaller pieces and then buried in place. Minneapolis-based Engineering Demolitions Inc. handled the project.

Anna Chong, company president, said she became a bit anxious when the largest stack took so long to fall.

"I was hanging on to my seat," she said.

The three smaller stacks measured 610 feet, 202 feet and 200 feet.

The stacks, built in the mid-1970s, held little sentimental value in the scenic valley. When the smelter complex closed in 1981, more than 2,000 people were thrown out of work, and the area has never recovered economically.

More than 100 buildings have already been demolished at the former zinc and lead smelter, part of one of the nation's largest Superfund sites at 21 square miles.

The site contains lead, arsenic and other hazardous contaminants left behind from decades of mining and smelting. Cleaning it up is expected to take until 1998 and cost an additional $65 million.