How bad was the air pollution when the mines and smelter were operating?
I understand the valley was pretty grim. This is a valley. You do get temperature inversions in here which tend to hold the smoke in. We’ve got some pictures from Osburn that were taken in the 1930’s that we use primarily to show the extent of the tailings that used to be near Osburn prior to WWII, when they re-mined most of them. But in the background there is this kind of gray haze, and originally I thought it was just bad pictures from the 1930’s, and I showed it to some of the people up here, and they look at it and say, ‘Oh, no, no. That looks like what it used to look like when the smelter was running.’ So you would get smoke literally every where. It was not that there were not solutions for their time, but, again, this is the sins of the father type thing that you have to keep in mind. When they built the smelter in 1917, they did some studies as best as they could, meteorology studies in those days to determine where wind currents were going to go, when they were going to have
