Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their being was taken from them by the river." The Everses now lock their doors, for instance, and live on a heavily trafficked road -- too busy for Mark to ride his bike safely. "I really miss my home and neighbors," says Tony, 26, an assembler at a radiator plant. "I figure if we can't live by our old neighbors, we may as well live out in the country by ourselves, so I'm looking around for a farm or something." A plaque in the Everses' new home sums up their past in touching fashion. THOUGH I MAY WANDER...
...These foundations are a wonder to behold," says George Trentz wistfully as he stands before a row of crumbling concrete walls, virtually all that remains of the former Kaiser Steel Corp.'s mill in this town, an hour's drive east of Los Angeles. The plant, once 20 stories high and 100 yds. long, has been reduced to a ruin, and as workers with acetylene torches continue their cutting, Trentz watches the factory where he worked for years literally disappear before his eyes. If it were simply another smokestack victim of America's decline in manufacturing, it would just...
...Basic Oxygen Process Shop No. 2, known as "the BOP shop," was among the most formidable steelmaking facilities in the world. The two huge Voest-Alpine furnaces could produce up to 2.8 million tons of high- grade carbon steel annually. But soon after Kaiser built the plant (at a cost of $287 million), the company encountered new environmental regulations and rapidly rising union wages that made the mill noncompetitive with overseas producers. Within five years Kaiser shut the plant down. For a decade the BOP shop came to life only occasionally as a movie set -- in 1990, for example...
Then, in late 1992, the Shougang steel corporation of Beijing agreed to pay $15 million for the plant. Soon after, 290 engineers and laborers arrived from China to begin packing up their new possession. After being cut or unbolted, each piece -- some are bigger than a boxcar -- is numbered and labeled in Chinese characters to ensure that the 60,000-ton jigsaw puzzle can be reassembled correctly back home in China. The furnaces now hang oddly in the open air, but within weeks they will be lifted from their cradles and made ready for transport to the port at Long...
...Fontana mill is the largest plant bought in the U.S. and taken home by the Chinese, but it is hardly the only one. In North Carolina the Chinese picked up a secondhand nuclear-plant control room, in Pennsylvania they purchased a used microchip-making facility, and in Michigan they bought an auto-engine assembly line. If China's economy keeps going along as it has been, the steel, microchips and engines made in these newly exported plants may ironically come back to America one day -- as imports...