The economic trickle-down effect from Doe Run Lead Smelter

St. Louis Post-Dispatch. ^ | 11/08/2003 | Repps Hudson

[Willie Green]

GLOVER, Mo. - The two stacks of Doe Run's lead smelter towering over the fall-dappled Ozark hills soon will stand useless, sentries from an era past.

Around Dec. 1, the Glover smelter will become the latest monument to the long, painful decline of mining in Missouri, a state explored and settled by Spanish and French miners more than 200 years ago.

[Willie Green]

ping

[lelio]

Boyer believes the displaced smelter workers can be retrained to work in health care as respiratory therapists and licensed practical nurses; the pay would be about $10 to $14 an hour.

Woo hoo, going from a $24 / hr job to a $10-14/hr one. Is that progress?

Bush won over Gore with 1,189,924 to 1,111,138 votes. Have 70k people had their lifestyles downsized in those three years?

[woofer]

That's a shame, I repaired and replaced a few transformers at the Glover Smelter. Back then it was St. Joe Lead. Did some switchgear work at the old St. Joe smelter in Herculaneum MO, too. A lot of changes over the last twenty years.

Used to be three big lead companies in the Viburnum area. St. Joe, Doe Run and Asarco. Doe Run was the last dog running. But it got run down anyway.

[A. Pole]

Woo hoo, going from a $24 / hr job to a $10-14/hr one. Is that progress?

Yes, cheaper labor is a gain.

[Swiss]

"The roads. That's what killed business here," said Jeannette Schrum, an owner of the Parlor, a 95-year-old former funeral home now revived as a bed and breakfast.

"Getting anything in and out of here is really hard."

Cheaney, the newspaper editor, agreed: "It's all two-lane, twisty, windy, no-shoulder road."

All of Missouri has suffered from the road situation but Billions of State taxpayers money was not used for roads but went to Kansas City and St Louis school districts by orders of Federal Judges to improve racial balance and improve scores (which never happened)

[snopercod]

I guess folks just aren't buying ammunition like they used to.

[woofer]

Nice try, but that don't cut the mustard. None of the mines are being closed that I am aware of. And demand isn't the problem. Economics are pushing the decision. Why pump bucks into a smelter that can't be expanded or modernized as effectively as another?

Besides, the silver vault is at the Herculaneum facility and that is where the profit is really at.