Steelyard Blues
At 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, steel has no memory. Bedsprings, oil filters, baby carriages and coffee cans forget what they were, their crystalline forms obliterated by the heat, puddling at once into an atomized soup of carbon and iron and lime. Flames roil the surface. Gases pour into space. It’s a mixture straight from hell.
“OK, Pete: No carbon. Twenty-five. Two cans.” John Minech talks into his walkie-talkie. He’s a melt shop supervisor, and he’s asking for 2,500 pounds of manganese and 20 pounds of vanadium to be added to the brew. It’s the first hour of the graveyard shift at Tamco Steel in Rancho Cucamonga, a little before 11 on a Thursday night. Minech steps out of the furnace pulpit, a small glassed-in room where he directs operations, and heads down a flight of stairs to the floor, where Richard Cooper and Pedro Delgado are working.
Cooper--or Coop, as he’s known to his crew--is dressed in a silver flame-retardant suit, his copper-tinted face shield pulled up. He stands aside as Minech walks to the tapping station, a small platform protected by glass, and toggles a lever on the control panel. The furnace, which sits 40 feet above the ground, starts to tilt, and 100 tons of molten steel pour, like tea from a kettle, into a ladle the size of a deep and narrow swimming pool, suspended in space by an overhead crane. Billows of gray gaseous smoke fill the interior. The white-hot ribbon illuminates the darkened interior of the mill. It splashes over the rim of the ladle in a million tiny drops (“skeeters,” they’re called), cascading like sparks over the mill’s columns and concrete foundation. Nature itself can hardly rival such beauty.
It takes almost two minutes for the ladle to fill, and when it’s full, Minech heads back to the pulpit. The furnace rocks back, its roof slides open and a claw bucket drops the next batch of scrap inside the furnace.
“I love making steel, and I love making money,” he announces.
At 55, Minech has been working with steel since he was a kid 35 years ago, when U.S. Steel had a plant in Torrance. It’s been a love affair that has cost him two marriages. He’s on his third and still goes for the overtime. Which makes it all the more difficult to imagine--especially after a moment like this, a moment so ingrained in American life and culture--that one day it may all be gone. Tamco is the last remaining mill in the state.
Rising above the plains of San Bernardino County, Tamco Steel seems rooted to its place by the sweat of the men--and the very few women--who have worked here since 1957. The same could hardly be said of its neighbors. Near a development of Victorian-style homes and a shopping mall anchored by Wal-Mart, the plant is an anomaly in this fledgling suburbia. Dusty, aged pines and oleanders line its drive off Arrow Highway. The furnace house, eight stories high and as large as a football field, dominates the landscape.
It’s almost midnight, and another batch of steel is ready to be poured. Swarms of skeeters are soon flying, and a course of slag brims over the top of the ladle. Watching it without tinted glasses is like staring at the sun. Stand too close and it feels just as hot. “You wanna run, but you can’t,” says Dave Kiel, a foreman at the plant. He captures in a few words the allure of a place that seems to have no beginning and no end, only an appetite for more production and more work.
Kiel is known as Killer, a nickname from his barfly days, although it’s a little misleading because he’s a rather cherubic-looking 48-year-old. He has a nasty burn on his neck, though, caused by steel spilling out of the tundish, a large tub. “Like getting hit by rocks,” he says with a smile that’s missing a tooth, “and then catching on fire.” He takes a long drag of a Marlboro Menthol and nods in the direction of the latest heat. “Making steel,” he says, “is like trying to control a river.”
Snow-white steam purls from the chimney into the night sky, barely noticeable to the motorists heading north on Interstate 15, Vegas-bound. In the yard, fat-wheeled dump trucks filled with scrap metal dart across the blacktop, their reverse horns competing with the drone of the furnace.
Rancho Cucamonga is a long way from the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania but not so far from our own local Rust Belt. Just down the street, in neighboring Fontana, Henry Kaiser broke ground in 1942 on the region’s largest steel mill, a plant that dominated the West Coast war effort and, later, fueled the development boom. A victim of global competition and poor management, it shut down in 1983 and was torn down soon thereafter. Today it is the site of the California Raceway.
Tamco’s status as the last mill in California is a point of pride and fear for the men working here. Never mind that it’s 50% Japanese-owned. Cooper, a relief foreman with eight years of experience and the son and grandson of two Tamco employees, talks without apologies about wanting to leave what once was America’s future. “I love my job,” Coop says. “I just don’t think it’s going to be around much longer.” Last year, Coop, 32, put in an application with the state Department of Corrections. He was looking to become a prison guard. More money, more benefits, more security. He passed the physical test, but was eventually turned down.
It was a disappointment made all the more bitter by how tough working at the mill has become lately. He grossed $53,000, almost $8,000 less than the year before, which is quite a hit when put against a $1,000 monthly mortgage for a home on the other side of the Cajon Pass, $750 a month in child support and two car payments. But Coop was lucky. Tamco laid off 80 workers, out of 350, in 2001. For most it was a four-week hiatus as a new casting machine was installed; for others it was longer as the company looked for ways to save money.
The cost of running an electric-arc furnace doubled from $1 million to more than $2 million a month last year, during the year of the Great California Electrical Crisis. It’s a running joke that once the furnace gets going, the lights in the communities where Tamco gets its power momentarily flicker.
The roof of the furnace has closed over another load of scrap. Three electrodes, looking like red-hot Popsicles, swing into place and descend through holes in the roof. It’s quiet, and then Robin Gondeck, sitting in the pulpit, flips a switch on the control panel and--bang-- the arcing begins. White light dances across the ceiling, and flames begin leaping out of the edges of the furnace. The pulpit shudders from the explosions of the scrap collapsing into itself. “It’s poetry in motion when everything is working,” says Gondeck, who’s been at Tamco since 1979. He has worked in the steel industry since getting out of Vietnam in 1970, where he was posted as a lance corporal just above the DMZ.
While the cost of electricity has put the squeeze on Tamco, the company is not alone in its fight for survival. Between 1998 and 2001, nearly 30 steel mills in this country filed for bankruptcy. It’s a complex problem that’s creating a situation comparable to the early years of Reaganomics, when the term Rust Belt first took hold. No wonder talk in the pulpit so easily shifts to politics.
“The government has turned its back on us,” says Gondeck, who, like most of the men at Tamco, is proud of what he does--steel from Tamco helped built Staples Center and the Alameda Corridor--and indignant that the work is so poorly understood. “Steel is this country’s defense as much as oil is,” he says. “Yet no one in Washington seems all too concerned about domestic steel production.”
At least not until four months ago, when President Bush imposed tariffs of as much as 30% on imported steel. Gondeck says the tariffs will help. So far they’ve had no effect, but, like many steelworkers, Gondeck is hoping for additional action that will secure the pension and health-care plans of retired workers.
But that discussion, once making the rounds in Washington, has fallen silent.
“OK. Blast and cast.” Minech signals his approval after analyzing the composition of the latest batch. The crane lifts the ladle to a resting station six stories above the floor of the mill. A silicon and graphite plug at the bottom is blasted out of position, and the steel pours into the tundish. From there five pencil- thin streams drop into 5-inch-square molds where molten steel backs up against the steel that’s slowly solidifying in the spray chamber, where jets of water--500 gallons a minute--cool and shape it.
Afterward, it emerges from the mill in a long, continuous orange strand. In the yard, acetylene torches spark their way across the surface, cutting the steel into ingots, 29 feet long, 1 ton net, which are then taken to the rolling mill to be heated to 2,100 degrees and pushed through a machine that turns them into rebar, the wiry skeleton inside concrete. It’s a common refrain around here that making rebar in the earthquake capital of the world is good business.
Southern California was once one of the largest, most diversified industrial centers in the world. But in the early 1970s, life changed. Blame the Air Quality Management District, blame the cost of doing business in the state, blame imports and the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the lights in Los Angeles factories began to go out. Minimum-wage positions replaced top-paying, union-protected jobs, and slowly the middle class began to shrink. In Los Angeles County alone, manufacturing jobs have fallen from nearly 1 million in 1979 to a little more than a half million in 2001.
“We’re a dying breed,” Minech admits. Dying, he explains, on account of foreign steel and NIMBYs who would rather kick steel mills out of the country than deal with the problems and pollution they cause. When it comes to Bush’s tariffs, Minech is circumspect. He knows for sure, however, how much it bothers him to find foreign steel selling at Home Depot, something he checks out whenever he’s in the store.
For now, though, there’s little time to consider such things. With summer upon them and electricity still an expensive and capricious commodity, the crews at Tamco are eager to work as many hours as possible. It may be 100 degrees outside and more than 130 degrees inside, but sweat and a little discomfort are a small price to pay when the alternative is the idleness of a shutdown.
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Thomas Curwen’s last piece for the magazine was about suicide.
