Day by day, rusty structures disappear, piles of twisted metal grow and are loaded into strings of beat-up railroad gondola cars. The 62-year-old Geneva Steel today looks more like a bombed-out site from World War II than the once-thriving steel mill that helped win that war.

Curtis followed his father’s footsteps through the mill gates, and today he is the plant manager at Geneva in Vineyard.

“I worked my way up over the 25 years,” Curtis said. And now he’s overseeing the dismantling.

“It’s pretty difficult actually,” he said. “It’s quite disheartening, to tear down perfectly good buildings and equipment.”

But it’s something he cares about, and he said he would rather do it than stand back and watch someone else do it.

“I have a hard time turning my back on it and walking away,” Curtis said.

U.S. Steel, which had built and operated the plant, bought it at the end of the war and ran it until 1987. It turned out as much as 2 million tons a year at its peak. The plant was sold to Basic Manufacturing and Technologies of Utah Inc., which changed its name to Geneva Steel Co. The company became Geneva Steel LLC in January 2001 as a result of bankruptcy reorganization.

In January 2002, Geneva filed for bankruptcy again. The plant shut down operations for good in November of that year. Bankrupt owners now are selling off some of the plant’s assets, under the direction of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

A friend and former co-worker at the plant recently invited Blaine Frazier, 73, out to see the place.

“There’s no way I could go out there and see it all torn up,” Frazier said. “It was my life.”

Parts of the plant already are gone, Curtis said. The most visible was the coke plant, which turned coal into coke, the solid residue of impure carbon and a key ingredient in steel making. A lot of smaller structures are gone.

But the massive main buildings are substantial and difficult to bring down. Their foundations are larger and steel structural members thicker than other buildings of similar size. When the plant was built by the government during the war, cost was no object.

It took 10,000 workers 13 months to build the original plant. Since then, improvements and modification have added to the complexity of taking it all apart. In addition there are some hazards, such as asbestos, that have to be removed properly and a substantial electrical system still hooked to Utah Power.

Among the 10,000, Tony Pickering’s father was the 61st, and he worked at Geneva 35 years.

“My dad helped build that place,” said Pickering, of Springville, who himself started as a laborer in August 1967 and stayed 34 years. He worked his way up to the job of “scarfer,” cutting defects out of the steel with a large torch. It was a hard, back-breaking job, but it was one of the highest paying.

“It was a good living for me,” Pickering said. “It paid for my home, and it raised my kids.”

The shift work was hard, but the people he worked with were good. Pickering, who suffers from cancer, retired for medical reasons just before the plant shut down in 2002 — but not without some bitterness.

He stayed with the plant when it was shut down and then sold by U.S. Steel. He lost 40 percent of his pension as a result.

“That leaves a bitter taste in my mouth,” he said.

And the plant still might be operating and making a profit if the new owners had run it right, he asserts.

Rolling hot steel

Blaine Frazier started working at Geneva Steel when it still was owned by U.S. Steel, less than a month before his 20th birthday in 1952. He started as a statistical clerk in the masonry department — basic warehouse work, keeping track of the brick used to line various furnaces.

He later transferred to a job as a production clerk in the rolling mill. He worked his way up through the ranks and in 1967 moved into management, eventually becoming supervisor of rolling mill maintenance.

Over the years, he and his crews dismantled every piece of machinery in the rolling mill and put them back together — several times, Frazier said.

In 1987, when Joe and Chris Cannon and Robert Grow bought the plant, Frazier became manager of purchasing. He retired in 1994. He stayed on as a consultant for another three years helping with mill modification projects.

He now runs the Freedom Gallery in downtown Provo.

“I never got tired of going to work,” he said. He enjoyed the visual spectacle of glowing steel being rolled out into slabs or coils. “It’s spectacular to watch.”

The steel starts out almost white-hot, 8 to 10 inches thick. It goes to bright orange as it moves through a series of rollers like old-fashioned wringer-washers, changing to pink and then back to black as it is rolled out into ever thinner steel — the thinnest less than one-tenth of an inch.

The steel mill was built to make structural steel and steel plate for ship building during World War II. It could turn out plates up to 11 feet wide and three-sixteenths to 3 inches thick.

In later years, the plant also began making strips up to 7 feet wide and from less than one-tenth to a half-inch thick. Workers used X-ray machines and computers to maintain a consistent thickness in the rolled out steel, Frazier said.

“Geneva workers made Utah Valley what it is today,” he said.

One of those workers was Fred Baird, who Frazier called “the idea man,” for his many sensible suggestions that helped make Geneva a better place to work.

When Baird, now 81, came back from the war in Europe where he fought as a machine gunner in the Battle of the Bulge and other places, he went to work at Geneva. It was 1946, and he was 22.

He had a small farm but he also had a new family and needed to make some money. He started as laborer and later got into maintenance. His experience working with farm machinery made his move to millwright natural, when the opportunity arose.

He’s not really sorry to see the plant go.

“I think it served its purpose,” he said. “I think there’ll be bigger and better things done with that place.”

It served its purpose well, he said. The plant put food on the table for many families in the county. It also bought a lot of homes and cars, Baird said.

“It was a tremendous blessing for the county,” he said.

He retired in 1980 after 34 years at Geneva Steel. He started Baird’s Cleaners in Orem, he had a real estate license and he kept the farm.

“I’ve always had a piece of ground,” he said.

Toxic legacy

Even as the buildings disappear, another legacy of years of steel making remains in the soil. It, too, must be cleaned up.

The lingering contamination includes lead, nickel, zinc, arsenic, various organic solvents and hazardous petroleum products, as well as acids and other byproducts.

Some of these contaminants are in the groundwater beneath the site; others linger in the soil — some at levels that require cleanup. Some are poisonous, some can cause fatal diseases and some may cause cancer.

State law requires that these hazardous chemicals be cleaned up to reduce potential human exposure to below acceptable levels.

Tests of groundwater monitoring wells around the perimeter of the site found 11 contaminants in the groundwater in excess of state water quality standards — three of those significantly above the standards.

Arsenic showed up above federal water quality limits in 22 wells. Ammonia showed up in 10 wells and benzene in four. But the wells don’t show how far beyond the perimeter the contamination has reached.

The groundwater beneath Geneva Steel flows into Utah Lake.

“We’re still looking at that,” said Allan Moore, section manager with the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste.

The level of cleanup depends on what the future land use would be.

“We really don’t know yet the specifics of what they want to do with the property,” Moore said.

A new hazardous waste permit was issued for the site about a year ago, listing U.S. Steel and Geneva Steel as responsible parties. The permit identified contaminated areas — some used by both, some by Geneva and some by U.S. Steel.

The permit divides responsibility for cleanup according to which company used the area and for how long.

Other former steel mills comparable to Geneva Steel have been cleaned up and redeveloped. Parts of such plants may have to be closed to public access, other parts have been turned into business parks, shopping centers with fine restaurants or residential areas.

Proposals for the Geneva Steel property include a gas-fired power plant, a business park and a residential development.

End of an era

Plant manager Mike Curtis is sad that the valley is losing jobs that supported families and sent children on missions and to college. When he started at Geneva he was one of 5,600 employees. Over the years modernization and improved efficiency pared that down.

The plant was making more steel with 2,000 employees before the plant closed three years ago than it did in 1980.

The disappearing jobs have been hardest on workers who are between 45 and 55. That’s not the best age to start on a new career, said Curtis, 51. He has had a couple of offers, but isn’t tipping his hand. There are still a couple of years to complete the demolition.

“My plan is to stay and see it through,” he said.

But the dismantling of Geneva is indicative of the erosion of industry in this country, Curtis said. Changes in the economy are shipping jobs overseas, and now Geneva is selling $38 million in steel-making equipment to China.

“They will use it to make steel and then sell it back to us,” he said.

The 36,000 tons of equipment, including caster equipment and the rolling mill where Frazier worked, are being packed up and shipped to Qingdao Iron & Steel Group Co. Ltd. in China.

Curtis said he’s sad to see it all go.

“That’s industry to me. That’s progress,” he said. “It’s what built this country.”

And the equipment that can’t be sold or reused will get cut up into scrap.

Smoke stacks will come down like felling trees. Workers will notch the bottom with a wrecking ball in the direction they want them to fall. They then cut the back to topple the stack; most come within three feet of their target.

In all, about 250,000 tons of scrap will be sent to other steel mills to be melted down and turned into new steel. Some of it will be loaded into old railcars that themselves will be scrapped, he said.

Three towering blast furnaces, about 200 feet tall, form a distinctive feature rising above the plant. They were built on site and lined with 2 1/2 feet of brick.

“They are about the toughest thing we have out there to bring down,” Curtis said.

In about a week, crews will set explosives around the foundations to topple them. Those towering structures have long been the distinctive landmark of the old steel mill. Their destruction will be a symbolic end; an icon of Utah Valley will disappear.

“When those blast furnaces go, that’s the end of it,” Baird said.

N.S. Nokkentved can be reached at 344-2930 or at nnokkentved@heraldextra.com.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.