Furnaces' days are numbered

VINEYARD — Grant Holdaway remembers Geneva Steel going up.

Back then, he was a 12-year-old-boy picking beets in a nearby field.

Now, he is a 74-year-old man watching the steel mill come down.

"I might start crying thinking about it," Holdaway said Thursday from his home in Vineyard, a small town of about 150 that has revolved around Geneva for generations. "It's the cycle of life, I guess."

In the coming days, the heart and soul of the plant — three blast furnaces that form one of the most recognizable pieces of the Utah Valley skyline — will be torn down.

When that happens, any flickering hopes that Geneva will once again produce steel will be forever snuffed out.

"Once you knock those down, it's over," says Carl Ramnitz, Geneva's former vice president of human resources. "You shut off the life support of the plant when you destroy those."

For most in Utah County, the dismantling of three Geneva blast furnaces is nothing to get teary-eyed about, even if the Three Towers, as Ramnitz calls them, have been a part of Utah County's landscape since World War II.

Even Holdaway is anxious to see what will become of the northeastern shores of Utah Lake once Geneva is gone.

But some see the destruction of the blast furnaces, the last ones West of the Mississippi, as an opportunity lost.

Mike Hart, president of the Sierra Railroad Co. in Davis, Calif., says he wants to buy the equipment from Geneva and convert it into processors that could recycle everything from scrap metal to garbage.

Using new technology, the the blast furnaces could recycle up to 10,000 tons a day of municipal solid waste, Hart says.

But Geneva isn't interested.

Instead, the bankrupt steel mill is moving forward with its plan to sell its property to developers in order to pay off creditors.

"It's bad enough that they're taking off with all the money. Now they're scrapping the facility," Hart says of Geneva executives. "It's like scrapping a classic car to get the change out from behind the seats."

Because the blast furnaces are too big to move, Hart says hundreds of unemployed steelworkers could again work at the plant under his plan.