15 years after a gigantic cave-in, miners in Livingston County still extract salt
Salt tempers a bitter recession
HAMPTON CORNERS — A thick seam of salt courses 1,300 feet beneath the rolling farmland of Livingston County, almost as far down as the World Trade Center stood tall. Extracting the crystalline commodity for de-icing roads has been a solid livelihood for five generations and, these days, it’s a steady lamplight in the dim tunnel of recession.
The salt bed, an elevated section of a 600,000-square-mile field, was first exploited in 1885. William Foster, the first salt baron in rural upstate New York, created the company town Retsof, its name his own spelled backwards.
In time, the Retsof mine was taken over by the Dutch conglomerate Akzo Nobel N. V.
A colossal cave-in in March 1994, registering a magnitude-3.6 on seismic detectors, sent a torrent of aquifer water flowing into the mine. No one was hurt, but the effects soon became clear on the surface.
Two sinkholes hundreds of feet wide engorged fields in the Genesee River Valley. Trees toppled, a bridge foundation crumbled, wells were sucked dry. Volatile methane seeping from the ground had to be corralled and ignited in flares.
Unable to plug the leak, Akzo laid off 300 miners as the 18-square-mile mine filled with water over two years. But the company also pushed ahead with plans to build a new mine outside the river valley in Hampton Corners, a crossroads hamlet 8 miles from Retsof.
As the project’s real-estate negotiator, Joseph Bucci often rose at 4 a. m. to catch dairy farmers at the start of their workday. He spent 18 months acquiring 10,000 acres of mineral rights. Offering $300 an acre helped — Akzo had never topped $100 an acre — yet it was still a difficult sell.
“I had to convince them we were going to mine safely, the way we did for 100 years,” said Bucci, whose grandfather worked in the Retsof mine, and whose father died in it in a methane explosion in 1975. “It’s always amazed me that so many cooperated. Just one farmer out of 57 didn’t sell.”
Federal inspectors and geologists had argued the 1994 Retsof disaster might have been avoided if Akzo hadn’t switched two years earlier to a mining technique that left chamber roofs cracked and drooping. Instead of leaving 80-foot-wide salt pillars in place, Akzo turned to a more productive pattern of placing thick abutments at the perimeter and slender pillars supporting the middle of each chamber. Akzo insisted the collapse was precipitated by an undetectable flaw in the overlying rock layers.
Bucci’s clinching argument to farmers was an assurance that Akzo would revert to the old method.
In a largely agrarian county where high-paying industrial jobs are precious, the mining company was a rare jewel. And yet, after spending $18 million on the long-planned new mine, Akzo executives in 1996 had stunning news. Gathering miners in a warehouse, they announced the company was selling its mining interests in North America.
The sense of betrayal was thick in the air. “A lot of grown men were crying, let me tell you,” Bucci says.
He knew right away he had a new and more desperate mission: finding a way to open the new mine himself.
Bucci found an immediate ally in Gunther Buerman, a business lawyer in Rochester who had negotiated compensation for a farmer whose home was endangered by subsidence. They were joined by a Wall Street financial adviser, Neil Cohen, and the trio launched American Rock Salt Co. at a cost of $126 million in 1997—much of it debt they’re gradually repaying.
Since a shaft was sunk in 2000, 1,000 acres have been mined of up to 4.4 million tons a year and the payroll has grown to 275. Today, Bucci and the other two executives guide operations at the single biggest-producing rock salt mine in the United States.
With $190 million in sales and rising profits from two snowy winters, American Rock Salt supplies much of New York and Pennsylvania and icy points from Wisconsin to Virginia.
About 50 million tons of salt are produced in the U. S. each year. Icemelting salt, sold in large crystals, accounts for nearly half of the $1.5 billion in sales, said Richard Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a trade association.
After a harsh winter, road-salt suppliers went into high gear in 2008 to meet surging demand and the 20.5 million-ton record set in 2005 was likely eclipsed, Hanneman said.
“We went through a lot of years where we just broke even,” Bucci says. “This winter’s like the ultimate topping.”
With overtime, many workers make $40,000 to $60,000 a year, according to Buerman.
“It gives you a quality of life hard to find in Livingston County,” says foreman Scott Garrett, who has three children in college.
About 2,500 people work rock salt mines in Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan and New York. Compared with coal mining, fatal accidents are relatively few. The last of the 36 deaths at Retsof occurred in 1990 when a roof slab buried two men.
“I’ve seen the best of mining and I’ve seen the worst. All in all, this is a pretty darn safe job,” says drill operator Dennis Raftery, a 31-year veteran.
Chamber by chamber, salt is sawed with tungsten carbide-tipped cutting bars, blasted nightly with ammonium nitrate and hauled out on automated conveyor belts. Miners remove 13 feet of a seam averaging 19 feet thick, leaving at least 3 feet overhead for stability, and use a roof scaler machine to dislodge loose chunks.
“Akzo took out almost 70 percent of the salt, we take out about 60 percent,” plant manager Greg Norris says, the air cloudy as a $1.1 million front-end loader shifts salt in 18-ton scoops. “We want everyone to come to work and go home every day. You don’t want to lose respect for Mother Nature.”
Sebastian Vitale, 29, whose great-grandfather Antonio was a salt miner here, baby-sits computers at a crushing station. One good thing about the underground is the constant temperature of 58 degrees, plus “you don’t add salt to your food,” he says.
Bucci delights in the periodic descent in “The Cage,” a swift elevator with room for 60 miners, and the 1.5-mile buggy ride through unadorned, pitch-black tunnels to the mine face.
Back in college, he worked 14 straight day shifts one winter break without ever glimpsing daylight. As a foolhardy 19-year-old, he recalls crawling through a breach into an abandoned mine to scour for century-old wine bottles and chewing-tobacco wrappers.
Never far from his thoughts is that April noon in 1975 when he heard the mighty explosion that killed his dad.
Trying to stem salty water leaking into a river, the elder Bucci, who was 54, had arranged for two six-ton rocks to be dropped into an abandoned shaft blocked with rotting beams. Assured there was no methane detected, he lowered a video camera, which was shorted out by brine. The explosion killed him and three other men at the shaft rim.
To this day, Bucci faults poor management. “Dad was operating on a very limited budget,” he says.
At 65, Bucci is hoping his son, an environmental engineer also named Joe, might someday take his place.
“What we have accomplished speaks for itself. It’s certainly overwhelming to me,” he says, his voice catching.
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