Permanente Quarry
Limestone was mined beginning in 1902 but remained a small operation until 1939 when it was purchased by Henry J. Kaiser to supply the 5.5 million barrels of cement to build Shasta Dam.
The rock was transported nine miles by wagon to Mountain View, where it was then loaded onto Southern Pacific Railroad trains at a rate of 30-60 tons per day in the dry season.
[21] From the outset objections to the plant were lodged by neighboring farmers who were afraid that cement dust would adversely affect their wine grapes, apricot, cherry, and prune trees.
5-cubic yard Bucyrus-Erie electric shovels put the limestone into diesel-powered Caterpillar-Le Tourneau rubber-tired 20-ton buggies and then onto four miles of gravity flow conveyor belts at the rate of 1000 tons per hour.
Even before production was a full capacity for Shasta, Permanente Cement Co. had contracts for a half million barrels each, from the Navy for dry docks and air bases in the Hawaiian Islands, and from the ready-Mix Concrete Company of Honolulu.
In June 1940 Permanente Cement signed a lease with the Port of Redwood City for four acres of land for 20 years for spur tracks, storage silos and bulk ship loading equipment.
[28] The port facility made it possible to fulfill the Navy contracts which by November 1941 included construction projects at Midway, Guam, Wake, and other American-owned Pacific islands.
According to the after-action report filed by the commanding officer of USS Vega, at about 0930 they saw a group of Japanese planes circling over the harbor in preparation of a dive-bombing attack.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, 65,000 barrels were available in the Pacific, most of it in Permanente's privately owned bulk facilities in Honolulu, making it possible to quickly put the airfields back into action.
Kaiser was confident that would not be the case and guaranteed acceptable quality delivered right to the construction site, using compressed air to blow the cement in and out of the ships.
The magnesium carbonate and magnesite ore arrived by rail from Kaiser-owned mines in Nevada and the gas was piped from San Joaquin Valley oil fields.
Initial production was shipped to aircraft and munitions factories, but work was proceeding on adding a fabrication plant and a mill to turn out rolled sheet magnesium and tubing.
According to Sheriff William Emig, Hansgirg professed a hatred for Adolf Hitler, and although he had worked in Japanese-controlled Korea, it was for a branch of the American Magnesium Metals Corporation.
When Attorney General Francis Biddle denied his wife, Josephine Marie, the right to visit him, she wrote a personal letter to First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, telling her that Fritz could not publicly criticize Hitler because their son was in the German Army and would suffer retaliation.
[48] In 1943 Charles Rabella, a 38-year old truck driver died from burns suffered as he hauled a load of excavated material from the magnesium plant up the canyon.
[50] The Army required all visitors to be photographed and signed in The Hansgirg process was never as efficient in practice as it was on paper resulting in the Permanente plant being the only one that was losing money.
The Reserve Metals Company (RMC), a wartime government corporation, bought PMC magnesium at a higher price than was paid to other producers to offset the losses incurred by Kaiser.
In 1941 PMC was interested in making the M50 bomb, a four-pound device, delivered in clusters, that used a magnesium casing and thermite, a mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide.
On July 28–29, 1945 61 B-29s of the USAAF 58th Bombardment Wing, launched from Iwo Jima, dropped almost 80,000 M74 bombs, all filled with "goop" on the small Japanese city of Aomori.
[52] The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was not able to determine whether "goop", napalm or other incendiaries were the most effective as they all inflicted heavy damage on the predominantly wood structures in Japanese cities.
George E. Dawson of the Chemical Warfare Service told the 500 employees, "While your work on the M-76 incendiary-the one used mostly in Germany-was commendable, it wasn't until the M-47 goop bomb was developed that you really went to town.
In October 1946, Permanente launched a $1,000,000 expansion program to increase cement production by 10% to 5,500,000 barrels (22,000,000 sacks) per year to meet demand in Hawaii and the Seattle area.
The foil was used for electronic, radio, refrigeration and air conditioning equipment and as protective packaging for food, tobacco, chewing gum, candy, and medical supplies.
In 1955 Kaiser, and Fritz Burns, his California home building partner, bought the Niumamu Hotel, a group of dilapidated cottages at the west end of Waikiki.
Customers at the adjoining car rental agency could rent bright pink Willys Surrey Gala Jeeps with pink-stripped cloth tops and upholstery.
Such pollution would be especially harmful to aquatic life in downstream areas such as Rancho San Antonio County Park, where selenium concentrations are often more than five times higher than state and federal standards allow.
[79] In December 2012 the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District filed a lawsuit against Santa Clara County, challenging the reclamation plan for Lehigh Southwest Cement's Permanente Quarry near Cupertino, saying its environmental impact report failed to analyze and mitigate the project's impacts on air quality, hazardous materials, recreation, groundwater and endangered species.
The cement plant was responsible for 29 percent of total Bay Area airborne mercury emissions and was shown to impact a rural site, Calero Reservoir, 20 miles (32 km) away.
[86] Mercury, a neurotoxin and pollutant which is concentrated in the aquatic food web, was found to be 5.8 to 6.7 times higher in precipitation near the cement plant than at a control location 2.0 miles (3.2 km) away.
[90] Anthropization related to quarry operations and the cement plant have resulted in sediment discharges into Permanente Creek that are 3.5 times what would be expected under undeveloped conditions.
