Where there's smoke, there’s fire: on September 3, 1973, a fire breaks out in the baghouse at the Bunker Hill lead smelter in Kellogg, Idaho. The baghouse building, which dates back to 1917, is the plant’s chief pollution control. Before going up the smokestack, emissions from the plant are forced through twelve thousand tube-shaped wool-and-Orlon filter bags hanging from the ceiling, each thirty feet long and eighteen inches wide. Every one of the bags is full of lead dust. On September 3, twenty-eight hundred of the bags burn, along with a section of the roof. The baghouse is now out of service. Before the fire, emissions not captured by the bags were running around 10 to 20 tons per month. After the fire, up to 160 tons per month—50 to 70 percent lead, along with arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and zinc—are pouring into the air. But lead prices are climbing—they’ll reach $479 per ton in October 1974.

Smelter officials are faced with a choice. Frank Woodruff, a company man who has climbed the copper ladder working at the Chino Mine in New Mexico, a hard man known for layoffs, has been elevated to vice president of Bunker Hill’s new parent entity. It’s now a wholly owned subsidiary of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation, based in Houston. He must help his overlords decide whether to shut the smelter down until the baghouse can be rebuilt, which could take six months. Other possibilities include keeping the facility open but reducing production. The most desirable option, however, is felt to be this: Continue production at current or greater levels while pumping unimaginable levels of lead into the community. Families live right next to the smelter, yards away, in a neighborhood called Deadwood Gulch. Woodruff writes a memo to chew over with corporate. He and Gulf know all about El Paso and what children there were recently deemed to be worth, and they consider the costs as if weighing up pork by the pound. “El Paso—200 children—$5 to 10,000 [per] kid,” he writes.

Another official at Bunker Hill works the math in a back-of-a-napkin calculation, estimating that the legal liability for poisoning five hundred children would amount to a mere “6–7 million.”[107] If Gulf and Bunker Hill decide to keep running the smelter flat out, increasing production, they’ll come out $10 million or $11 million ahead, even if compelled to pay an inflated $12,000 per child. The choice is children or profits. Guess which they choose. For Woodruff and his colleagues, it’s not a hard decision. They’re doing the devil’s business, which is no different from what Ted does. Like Ted, Bunker Hill has been killing people for years. It’s second nature. So the smelter does not shut down. Lead production is ramped up, for profit. The owners run the plant full bore, forcing their blast furnace smoke through the remains of the baghouse. When that slows them down, they release emissions directly into the air in what will amount to one of the largest lead-poisoning events in American history. Bunker Hill is in a box canyon with narrow walls, prone to temperature inversions. Locals call the canyon “the Box.” The Box is now filling with lead.

— Murderland by Caroline Fraser (18%)