Down at last – The Asarco stacks are no more.
It took about 35 seconds for two of El Paso’s more visible and sometimes controversial pieces of history to fall to the ground and disintegrate just after the sun rose on a clear, almost windless Saturday morning.
One cannon-like, reverberating boom was followed several seconds later by another reverberating boom. The Asarco stacks slowly fell like giant trees onto cushioned dirt beds on the former 126-year-old Asarco copper smelter site in West-Central El Paso. Three unexpected paragliders hovered in the sky above Juárez to get a bird’s-eye of the planned destruction.
At 6:55 am local time, the smokestacks were gone.
“It’s the end of an era. It’s changed the skyline,” said Ted Houghton, an El Paso businessman and chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, who watched the demolition from a special viewing area near Executive Center Boulevard and Interstate 10.
Huge, gray clouds of what Asarco site Trustee Roberto Puga said was concrete dust erupted as the smokestacks fell with two thunderous thuds. The mass of dust clouds spread from the Asarco site to nearby neighborhoods in Juárez, where residents coughed and worried about the dust’s effects.
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