VINEYARD, Utah County — Electrical cords poke up like weeds through a concrete pad at what used to be the Geneva Steel casting area.

Nearby, a 20-foot-tall hunk of concrete and rusted rebar looms like a disheveled industrial haystack. The building used to be 40 feet tall, and the foundation goes another 40 feet into the ground.

"It took (crews) six weeks to get it down to 20 feet," said Dennis Astill, project manager and general counsel for Anderson Geneva LLC. "It's not gonna come down very easy."

What used to be the smoldering, smoking heart of Utah County has long since been closed, leveled and nearly forgotten.

But for developers of the Vineyard site, the Geneva Steel factory is present every day — in milelong concrete runways, cavernous holes and looming piles of steel-ribboned slag.

"People don't have an idea of the scale of this thing," Astill said. "It was an amazing piece of engineering."

Anderson Geneva LLC, plans to turn the 1,700 acres that was once home to a Utah County landmark into a new, vibrant center of growth, but they know it's a rocky, rebar-filled road.

In 1941, the U.S. government began construction on the steel plant in Vineyard to create plate steel for World War II shipbuilding.

After the war, the factory was sold to U.S. Steel for nearly $47 million. In 1987, Geneva Steel was purchased by a group of investors, including brothers Joe and Chris Cannon, and became Geneva Steel LLC. Joe Cannon is current editor of the Deseret News.

After the purchase, heavy debt and falling prices for steel affected the factory, and in 1999 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The factory finally stopped producing steel in November 2001, and with dynamite blasts in July 2005, decades of history tumbled down.

By December of that year, Anderson Geneva LLC., had bought the land for $46 million.

It was a worthy investment, Astill says. A recent economy study the company commissioned predicted that at full buildout, the site will be worth close to $3 billion.

"That's 25 to 30 years from now," Astill said. "But it will be a very significant development."

From July 2005 to June 2007, crews tore down the plant. China purchased most of the steelmaking equipment and CST Environmental earned the demolition contract to clean up and recycle the leftover scrap metal. Astill said 90 percent of the material was recycled.

Several large mountains of steel byproduct, the slag — roughly 3.5 million tons of it — will also be "recycled," with any remaining steel pulled out of the molten rock and the remaining material used as fill for projects on the site and elsewhere, Astill said.