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Ghost Town Chemistry

March 11, 2009 at 7:13 am | Posted in Day to Day | 4 Comments
Tags: New Idria, panoche

Southern San Benito county is a lonely place, and you probably haven’t spent much time there. I never had. But long ago when I was learning analytical chemistry, I saw a display in the Applied Science Building explaining the environmental toxicology work that was being done at an old mercury mine called New Idria. The photographs in the display showed, in vivid reds, that the pollution from the mine was so bad it could be seen with the naked eye. That seemed pretty cool to me, and I had always wanted to visit it. Every chemist loves toxic liquids, explosions, and other dangerous things with a well-understood oxidation pathway.

Twenty-five years later, I got my chance in one of Sandy Lydon’s history field trips offered through Cabrillo Extension, “Ghost Towns, Outlaws, and Hot Springs.”

Sandy wrote:

Geologists know the Panoche. Bikers and birders often go there, and amateur astronomers love it for its clear, dark skies. The landscape is dotted with the remains of failed dreams– abandoned mines and farmsteads and roads that go nowhere. Windows without glass, screen doors swinging in the wind, machinery slowly rusting away. The very place names of the country speak of bandits and outlaws—Tiburcio Vasquez and Joaquin Murrieta sought refuge in the Panoche. Basque sheep ranchers found a welcome here.

First, how do you say it? Panoche: when it’s a noun, say it “panoch” and use three syllables when it’s an adjective : “pa-no-che valley.” The Panoche is geological rubble pile of odd minerals scraped off the Pacific Plate as it plunges under the North American plate, where water, heated by the open wound in the mantle under the San Andreas fault, boils up through the ground like percolating coffee. In this rare geology, some people have been able to make money. But not many.

For example, there are four great mercury deposits found on earth (so far). Almaden, Spain, Idrija, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, New Almaden, California, and New Idria, California.

On the surface, the Panoche is an open land of low hills, streams that cut through flat valleys, and the kind of locals who sometimes make you want to check that your car doors are locked. Sandy says it looks like Mongolia, and he would know.

As far as I could tell, in the Panoche, there’s only only one place to eat, and that’s the Panoche Inn. And there is only one place to get a room, and that’s Mercey Hot Springs. There’s only one disturbing abandoned town, and that’s New Idria (a flickr link to some cool nighttime photos).

History, geology, and the politics of why the BLM land around New Idria is closed can be found on the website created by our guide, Ray Iddings, Jr. : 3Rocks.org. (On that site is an amazing story of early California they call The Sanchez File. Murder and robbery, and drownings and tragedy. The usual Californio story. I haven’t had time to read it yet. )

The tour of New Idria took almost all day, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. (I do admit to playing hooky and holding very un-historical conversations with my classmates.) We toured the old head quarter’s building, which, like all buildings in New Idria, is slowly being vandalized. Currently, people are stripping it of its old-growth cedar walls. I saw one plank that must have been 18 inches wide. That size of tree will never be seen again.

You may want to see a photo of the headquarters, but of course I forgot to take one. I took photos of the clothes line in the back, and the wallpaper. Always looking for the women, I am.

Ray told us of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Like everywhere else, eventually flu came to remote New Idria and killed so many people they were buried in a mass grave. The doctor of the town noticed that people who worked in the “Scotch furnace,” never got sick from the flu. The Scotch furnace was notorious for being unhealthy and where overdoses of mercury vapor were common. The doctor rotated people through the scotch furnace to “take the vapors” so-to-speak and those people didn’t get flu.

As you may know, if you ever played with a broken thermostat as a child (and didn’t die), mercury in its elemental form isn’t as dangerous as you might think. Once it is organically bonded to other things, like, say, small molecules like methyl, it’s deadly. But it is a known medicine in Asia, and the old Western remedy “calomel” included mercury in its ingredients. Chemically, mercury and zinc are cousins, and we all know that zinc can cure colds, or at least if you take zinc lozenges it will make you think you’re getting a cold as long as having a cold would take you. Zinc and Mercury are in the same family on the periodic chart. It is unlikely that any pharma today would do research into this relationship. But there is is probably something anti-viral about mercury.

But is New Idria toxic? Not really.The chemists didn’t find the creeks and dirt to be infected with anything worse than iron oxide. The mercury taillings from 19th century mines which extracted the mercury inefficiently were sent through the furnace by the 20th century miners for their residual product. The mercury was too valuable to be left lying around. The dirt around New Idria is completely saturated with “asbestos” but not the kind that causes lung cancer, just the kind that makes you cough, like any dust would.

So, what did I think of New Idria? The chemistry was very cool, as well as seeing a 100-year-old furnace, riveted because welding hadn’t been invented yet. The ghost town may have been picaresque, at one time. But in the last ten years or so every window is shot out, every wall is pulled off, every door is ripped off its hinges. The history and ownership of New Idria after the mines closed is complicated and sad and stupid and I just don’t want to write about it. The story is told elsewhere. From the stories we heard from our guide, Ray, living in New Idria was like living in any mining town in any state in the union: noisy, remote, violent and a place, god willing, a place to leave. New Idria isn’t polluted by chemical waste, as I thought when I was in college; it’s toxic on a whole other level. There are some who love it, but I hope someone will be able to take a bulldozer to it.

Next Post: “Lighting Water on Fire, and More Fun in the Panoche“