Point Ruston today has a near permanent “resort” vibe. Once again, a few people with a vision took a forlorn site that held much promise and many complications and made it something unique and remarkable. It sat abandoned, as one of America’s most polluted superfund sites, for years. Bricks came loose, dare-devils and protesters climbed it and the accumulations of grime, salt air and heavy metals corroded the stack until it was finally demolished in 1993. (1*)Īnd then time, and other thieves (as Joni Michell put it) did their work. The Pierce County Health Department and the Washington Department of Ecology have done numerous studies on the smelter’s lingering air pollution effects. Smelting ore requires continuous intense heat, and except for those rare days of repairs or maintenance ASARCO operated 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.īesides the molten slag being continually poured into Commencement Bay, a near-constant ash/dust combination fell on the surrounding area.ĪSARCO provided free car washes to local residents once a year, to make up for smelter ash damage. The smelter and its supporting facilities, spread across 67 acres, was one of Pierce County’s largest employers for many years.įor most of its years in operation, it provided about 40% of Ruston’s tax revenues. Defiance near the Tacoma Yacht Club (named Dune Peninsula) is made entirely of toxic industrial waste – 23 acres total.Įven now, studies of the track of air-borne emissions find high levels of arsenic in the soil around the smelter site, North Tacoma, Vashon Island, Gig Harbor, Federal Way, and many other areas. Yes, that means that the new 11 acre corner of Pt. If you know any Tacoma old-timers, they might remember seeing the red-hot slag sizzling as the workers dumped it into the bay. If you see it, imagine it molten and bubbling at several hundred degrees – and saturated with toxic metals like arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc which flowed into the soil, air and bay. If you see any exposed, it is immediately recognizable – it looks like volcanic lava. The landfill and peninsula began to be created in the 1940s, as molten slag by-products, by the ton, were dumped into Commencement Bay. It was an engineering accomplishment – made of 2.5 million bricks and about 5,000 tons of mortar (and yes, it was virtually all hand-made).įrom 1890-1912, lead was smelted and refined at ASARCO, then they switched mainly to copper smelting until the smelter closed in 1985. Defiance, the current site of Point Ruston. This photo from about 1910 shows the ASARCO smelter on the edge of Commencement Bay and Pt. The stack, erected in 1917, the highest in the world back then, rose 571 feet above its base. Gone now, except in photographs and a few memories, the ASARCO smelter, at its peak, refined one-twelfth of the world’s copper and for most of its existence smelted 60,000 ounces of gold and 450 ounces of silver annually. Others are gone at one level, but their presence, for better or worse, lingers.īut each one contributes a strand or two to the ever-changing fabric and texture of our city. Some historic sites, like the Top of the Ocean, are gone forever and live on only in myth and legend. Tacoma, like any urban palette, is always continually reworked and reformulated.
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