The Old Ford Motor Dump
Yesterday I was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the rehabilitation facility swapping stories with other transplant patients. I shared my recollection of the The Old Ford Motor Dump.
In 1920, there was no such place as Kingsford, Michigan, but there was a man named Edward Kingsford. He was reportedly a forester, a real estate agent, and the owner of a Ford dealership in Iron Mountain. He was also the husband of Minnie Flaherty, Henry Ford’s cousin.
It just so happened that Ford was in the market for timberland. Kingsford brokered a deal for Ford to purchase over 300k acres in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Ford quickly set about building a sawmill and automobile parts plant on the land. By 1923, the Village of Kingsford had sprung up around the facilities[i].
I’ve always appreciated how Ford vertically integrated his manufacturing operations. I imagine his employees felling mighty trees and milling them nearby. The lumber was then fashioned into beautiful features for Ford’s cars including the famed woodie of surfer culture.
Ford was also a skillful recycler. A chemical plant was established to transform waste wood into charcoal briquettes. By the 1950s, synthetics had all but replaced the wood used in cars, so Ford closed the automobile parts plant and the lumber mill. The charcoal briquette business was sold off to a newly formed interest called the Kingsford Chemical Company that continued manufacturing Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes to fuel happy barbeques across the country for years to come.
Regrettably, there was a limit to what could be recycled. The byproduct of making charcoal was tar and there was nothing productive to do with it. Employees ended up burying the waste tar in a variety of places around the growing town. The charcoal plant was shuttered in 1961, but the tar remained.
Over the next several decades, I believe some of the tar degraded into a variety of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including methane. Methane is odorless and colorless. It silently spread underground via soil and groundwater, and into the basements belonging to unsuspecting residents where it accumulated to volumes approaching the lower explosive limit.
On July 12, 1995, the methane permeating parts of Kingsford made itself known. A resident was in his basement folding towels that had just come out of the dryer. The static electricity ignited the methane and his house exploded.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in a memorandum urgently requesting funds to remediate the neighboring homes wrote “The explosion lifted the house off its foundation and severely injured the occupant.” The EPA memo further noted, “The fireball from the explosion melted many items within the basement but impacted the first floor of the ranch-style home even more seriously. Most of the home's major appliances were melted, nearly all rooms on the first floor were severely burned and charred, and all furniture and personal possessions were consumed by the fire.”[ii]
The EPA stated the methane source was likely anthropogenic and zeroed in on several areas of buried waste. One of those areas was known as the Old Ford Motor Dump. By the time I arrived onsite to help with the cleanup, it was already four years after the tragedy. I wrote about those experiences here, including what it was like hauling tar that was seeping out of the ground.
The stories of the explosion had become part of the town lore. Folks also talked about how the Menominee River, about ½ mile west of the explosion, had been bubbling with something flammable for years. There were accounts of people choosing to light the river on fire with their Bics. I don’t know for sure if that actually happened, but I do know that the methane did bubble out of the water because the EPA sampled it. I also know that if someone says to you, “hey watch me light this river on fire,” you probably have a problem.
