ASCE Meeting: Geneva Steel

I attended the ASCE monthly branch meeting today. Probably the only one I will ever attend, and I lucked out on such a good one. The topic today was the CUWC District's plans to meet the water needs in the county. Which, I know, sounds completely dull. But for some reason they talked a lot about the old geneva steel plant and it was soo interesting. The guy making the presentation had worked at geneva and I think was involved in looking after the water wells on the property. There is like over a hundred of them.

I have always been intersted in the geneva steel plant. I always enjoyed drving past it when I was a child and imagining what all the machinery did. In my mind I always pictured it a very dangerous job, and wondered about the brave men that worked there. I loved the old signs all around it, the big clouds of steam, funny shaped tanks, and cool walk ways suspended in the air inbetween the facilities.

 

Even when I was older, and after Geneva went bankrupt for the 2nd time, I would take the vineyard lane around the plant to be by myself and listen to music and would hope to catch different glimpses of the buildings and structures. I loved those buildings. My sister McKay I think shares the same love for Geneva I have, and her idea was to make the old buildings and stuff into giant and jawesome theme park. The park would have a old abandonded factory feel to it, which would be cool. Rides that made you believe you were on an assembly line being manufactured into a microwave or peanut butter jar. I love roller coasters and I think having a park like that in utah county would do well.

I am sad that geneva is gone now. When I came home from my mission the whole valley looked different. I didn't even get to see the demolition process.

Anways, here are some cool facts I learned at that luncheon today:

Geneva was built in 18 months during the war. It cost 200 million dollars.

About 10,000 people were involved round the clock in building it.

They decided to build it here because they could get the iron ore easily from Iron County, and the coal easily from Carbon County. It was close to the two major rail road lines. It wasn't an easy target for bombing.

And they also chose the site because of existing artesian wells all over the property. And they made some of them deeper wells by dropping in 500 pounds of dry ice and sealing off the tops of them. And after 3 hours they would take off the tops, and the water would shoot up like 80 feet in the air (the dude giving the presentation had pictures of this, and it was jawesome).

Today almost all of the assets have been sold.

The Chinese bought 200-220 thousand tons of steel for like 40 million dollars.

A developer from Sandy bought the site (1,700 acres) for 46.8 million dollars.

Before they can develop on it, and extensive environmental clean up must happen, which will cost 42 million dollars. (why does it cost that much? frick, I'm good at cleaning, let me do it)

The clean up will take 3-4 years to complete. So around 2009 we will see some exciting things happening hopefully. I hope they do something cool.

What a funny blog, if you read this whole thing perhaps you loved geneva steel as much as me, and maybe we should talk about it.