Saturday

Rollie and Judi wondered about the location of Silver Bell. It was about 40 miles northwest of Tucson. From what I can find out, most everything was dozed off by ASARCO and there is a tall fence around the property. There were about 20 company houses there, and they were all moved.

Click on images for a larger view

One day when I was at work, the mining engineer came in my office, and put a hard hat on my head and drove me out to El Tiro, the huge open pit mine. They were going to blast that day. At the far left in the top picture, there is a man in a red shirt, and there were a couple of pickups there too. Eveyone moved off, and we waited. I remeber the ground jumped under my feet before we heard the sound of the explosion. According to what I wrote on the back of the picture, there were over 300 drill holes and over 70 tons of blasting powder.

After the blast, we had to beat it back to the pickup and waited about 30 minutes for the dust to settle enough to see to drive back to the office. The whole top tier had been blown off.