Raffle Winner Won’t Get Bang For Their 2 Bucks Alternative Offered After Epa Says Civilian Can’t Blow Stacks

The idea brings out the 8-year-old in all of us: trigger the explosion that will bring 14 million pounds of concrete crashing to the ground.

Or, as Kellogg’s Blowing Our Stacks Committee puts it: “Take a Power Trip With Your Finger Tip.”

The committee forgot, however, about the fickle finger of the feds.

The committee is using the May 26 demolition of Kellogg’s two huge smelter smokestacks as a fund-raiser. For $2, anyone can buy a chance to push the button to blow up a stack. The demolition’s part of a massive cleanup of the Silver Valley’s 21-square-mile Superfund site, contaminated by mining wastes.

But the federal Environmental Protection Agency, overseeing the demolition, doesn’t think it’s such a good idea to have a civilian setting off the explosion.

What if, for example, an airplane happens by?

Or what if some fool scales a fence and runs out next to a smokestack?

“If it were decided at the last second for it (the explosion) not to happen, it would be awfully hard to get the word back to the winner of the raffle,” said Krista Rave, EPA spokeswoman.

“There’s so much that could wrong.”

She said the EPA was up front with the group from the start.

“Maybe they didn’t understand it, and I don’t think we went into detail,” said Rave.

When the EPA mentioned this late last week, it raised a few eyebrows at the Blowing Our Stacks Committee. The group’s printed 100,000 tickets, after all, and a quarter of those are already in the hands of eager service clubs, schools and churches.

“WIN A CHANCE TO BLOW UP ONE OF THE TALLEST SMOKESTACKS IN NORTH AMERICA!” trumpets a poster.

The EPA’s offering a compromise. The raffle winner can push a button to give the OK to a demolition worker, who would actually trigger the explosion.

“The demolition expert is the one who does the final button-pushing,” said Rave. “Whoever pushes the (raffle) button will begin the chain of events.”

The Blowing Our Stacks Committee is trying to put the best face it can on the news.

“Nobody’s complaining a bit. Nobody’s carping at all,” said publicity director Cliff Marshall. “The stacks will come down on the winner’s signal. … That’s what the raffle was promising.”

Still, the group hopes to negotiate the specifics with the demolition company chosen Monday: Engineering Demolitions Inc. of Blue Springs, Mo. The company submitted the lowest of four bids, which ranged from $75,000 to $261,000.

Marshall, like many residents in the mining valley, has some blasting experience himself. Why not rig up an arming switch, he wonders, or some other safety device that would allow a raffle ticket buyer to safely trigger the explosion?

“A lot of people - surprisingly - don’t care,” he said. “But I was always one of those kids who had a pocket full of firecrackers.”

, DataTimes