Booming Business Company Busy Preparing For The Huge Blast That Will Take Down Stacks
It’s a bigger blast than any concocted by Inland Northwest extremists, powered by more than 1,000 sticks of dynamite, 500 blasting caps, thousands of feet of blasting wire.
It will take a week to drill the 500 holes, 25 inches deep, to accommodate dynamite made to order for the 1-1/2-inch diameter holes. It will take four days to load 2-1/2 sticks into each hole.
There are 500 blasting caps, each hooked up to two wires that lead to THE BUTTON.
Two weeks of on-site preparation for four simultaneous explosions on May 26 that will lay down, logging style, the last four stacks from the Silver Valley’s smelting heyday.
Fourteen million pounds of concrete will fall in about 20 seconds.
The super-charged leader of this purposeful sabotage: Anna Chong, president of Engineered Demolition, Inc., a woman with a degree in international banking, fluency in five languages and a sweatshirt that reads “Have a dynamite day.” It goes well with her faded blue jeans and black, steel-toed boots.
How does a native of the South Pacific islands get involved in blowing up things?
“My mischievousness,” Chong said Friday. “I was one of those daughters that a mother didn’t know what to do with. You should have seen my first chemistry set.”
Maybe she gets it from her father, a Chinese engineer who spied on the Japanese during World War II. Or her mother, the ingenious woman who started the first air-conditioning store in the South Pacific.
Don’t discount her husband, son of a Pennsylvania miner, who started dealing with explosives at age 11 to help his father with his night job - demolition.
Eric Kelly founded their company and is the chief blaster. The couple met in Seoul, South Korea, through her brother.
“I felt sorry for him so I took him out to dinner,” she said. Then fireworks. Now she markets the company’s explosives expertise worldwide while he stays in the field.
“He’s living the childhood dream,” she said.
The couple has three boys who like to visit the job site. “Some people go on vacation to Disneyland,” Chong said. “We go to the projects.”
The couple has seven full-time employees and burns more than 20,000 pounds of dynamite a year. They’ve taken down the Met Center in Minneapolis, nuclear buildings at Hanford, old steel mills and all kinds of stacks.
Their largest job - the Sears warehouse in Philadelphia - required 13,000 pounds of dynamite. And the building was 150 feet from a soft drink bottling operation.
The explosion reduced a building 60 football fields wide to rubble in 7-1/2 seconds. Cleaning up the rubble took another 2-1/2 months. Not a single pop bottle was broken.
Stacks are the most elementary blasting job, Chong said. The zinc and lead smelter stacks at Kellogg are interesting, however, because the two tallest - 715 feet and 610 feet - are the highest to be blown in North America. The world record was a 1,000-foot stack in South Africa, touched off by another company.
Engineered Demolition has cut doors into the Silver Valley stacks to direct the direction they fall, and to gain access to drill the charge holes.
One push of the button will take out the largest stack. Another will take out the other three. The action starts with the stack highest up the hill and moves downward.
That makes for the most aesthetically pleasing adventure. If the order of blasting were reversed, the dust might obscure the undoing of the tallest stack.
The Blowing Our Stacks Committee still is selling $2 raffle tickets for the right to push the ceremonial plunger, which will signal the blast man to level the tallest elements of the 21-square-mile Superfund site.
The latest sales gimmick: the winner can sell their ticket for $500 to the committee if they don’t want all the publicity that comes with being a plunger pusher.
Today, Engineered Demolition is in Alabama. Then there’s a power plant in Detroit, followed by making hamburger out of a giant Toronto meat-packing plant.
Chong undoubtedly will help pack the powder holes at some of these sites. But don’t expect her to trip the trigger.
“You are so close to the actual structure that you have to hide behind something,” Chong explained. “You don’t get to see anything.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Engineered Demolition’s victims The Sears Building, Philadelphia, made the 1994 Guinness Book of World records for its size - 60 football fields wide - and the dynamite requirement - 13,000 pounds. Hanford Nuclear Power plant buildings, U.S. government’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Flare tower, at U.S. government’s Savannah River nuclear reservation. Columbus Homes - four apartment buildings - Newark, N.J. Old National Bank building, Topeka, Kan. Coming attractions: Four stacks in Alabama today. A power plant in Detroit. A meat-packing plant in Toronto.