East Helena has had a lead smelter for many, many years. Times and the Market have conspired to close the Smelter, and as part of the environmental clean up (a major project!) they have taken down the three smokestacks that have been the East Helena skyline for much longer than I have been around. They did it better than the old Great Falls smelter smokestack…they had to blow it up twice to get it to fall down…and they were afraid it was going to fall on its own!
It was an overcast day, but I never got rained on as I rode my GoldWing down to Helena. I was witnessing the end of a Saddlesore 1000 Iron Butt Association ride for a friend form Oregon. Note the Highway Patriol car with his lights on…I think he was asking people still in their cars to move on, but he gave up after he saw so many empty vehicles…
(1/60, f8, 28mm, ISO 200)
Sunflowers on the old highway…
(1/30, f8, 132mm, ISO 400)
I took a lot of photos, and made an animation of them, showing the stacks coming down. This is about as fast as it actually happened.
(All the frames were shot at 1/200, f8, 80mm, ISO 400)
An interesting subset of these photos is the short stack on the left that fell first. Note that it had a lid on it, that came off during the fall!
If you look closely at the last two frames you can see some of the bricks from the stack flying up, as the other two start to fall.
Here is a nice wallpaper sized photo of the dust cloud. They said later it was NOT full of toxic pollutants. I hope they are right; I got a lung full or two of the dust when I was filling up. It covered the town…
(1/160, f8, 130mm, ISO 400)
And of course, the sunflowers go on…
(1/60, f8, 65mm, ISO 400)
All in all, a pretty good start to the day. Other than the lungs full of toxic dust part…
~Curtis in /\/\onTana! {!-{>
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