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Chapter 15
Baking Soda
Hurtling 1600 feet downward at a windy 450 feet per minute in an open-mesh steel cage the size of a double garage, I’m risking my life--or, at least, my sanity—to see where the raw ingredient shared by two of the leavening ingredients on the Twinkies label comes from. Leavening makes things go up, but to see it I’m going down, way down.
I’m wearing earplugs, amplifying the machinery’s rumbling and clanging sounds inside my head, along with a blinding miner’s lamp on my hardhat, which makes for constantly moving shadows. My knees are a little weak with fright and the big, tough-looking miners standing around me are not reassuring, even if I could hear them through my earplugs and over the roar of the wind and the machinery. I am having trouble connecting this experience with the ubiquitous little yellow box of baking soda that sits in so many kitchen cabinets and refrigerators around the world.
I’m also wearing safety glasses, brand new cotton gloves, and a wide tool belt with a very heavy battery for my head lamp (“Good for 16 hours!” my host reassures me) as well as a canteen-sized emergency self-rescue carbon monoxide breathing kit in case of fire. I’ve also been given a dust mask (“just in case”) and a course in mine safety for which I am presented with an official U.S. Dept. of Labor Certificate of Training. All this just to see where an unassuming kitchen staple comes from?
Tim Davis, a Senior Mining Engineer with FMC Corporation and my guide, tells me to avoid looking him or others in the face because the bright miner’s lamp on my helmet will blind them. The word is, never look a miner in the eye. So we all affect a slightly bashful stance as we descend, painting the floor with pools of light as we head down into raw baking soda.
Finding Wyoming
Green River, Wyoming, a region of brown earth and white alkali flats, sits atop the world’s largest and purest trona deposit, which is not very impressive to most people because they have never heard of it. Trona was discovered in 1938 almost by accident when Mountain Fuel Supply, a company then based in Ohio (and now part of the much larger Questar natural gas company), drilled a wildcat exploratory oil well in this mineral-rich area along the Oregon Trail. Instead of oil, they found soft, brown, layered stone. A sample was sent to the USGS office in Washington D.C., where it sat, ignored, for over a year.
When the agency finally got around to analyzing it, the geologists found that it was a sedimentary rock made largely of pure sodium sesquicarbonate, which is easily cooked into sodium carbonate, commonly known as soda ash. Soda ash is the basic chemical ingredient in glass and soap, its most common and ancient uses (about half of the soda ash produced goes into glass); it is also widely used in hundreds of essential chemical products including detergents and water softeners. And it is where the “sodium” in sodium bicarbonate--baking soda--comes from, as well as the sodium in the other baking powder ingredient, sodium acid pyrophosphate. (It is a common source of sodium for sodium stearoyl lactylate, too, an unrelated Twinkies additive). So soda ash finds its way, indirectly, into much of what we eat, which is pretty alarming, considering it is also the primary component of glass and soap.
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This stuff may be used to make food, but it just looks like rock to me. To say that it does not suggest Twinkies—or any other food product--in the least is the biggest understatement one could make.
Driving through dark tunnels in an open Jeep is so unnerving that as we hurtle along I have to force myself to relax my white-knuckled grip. My right hand is wrapped around a five foot long steel crowbar that Tim tells me later is used to pry any pieces of trona that are left dangling from the ceiling; my left hand is tight around a sturdy canvas strap that I realize, once we stop, is no safety handle—it is only my camera bag.
At the mining face, a giant, ten-foot diameter, three-layered claw of a cutting wheel with dozens of sharp points carves out trona at the rather astounding rate of twelve hundred tons per hour, stopping only for periodic maintenance. It is mounted on heavy machinery the size of a tank, all of which was brought into the mine disassembled and reconstructed on the spot. It fills the space, and would be totally at home in a special-effects movie.
A long, solid steel conveyor spans the few hundred feet of the floor from the cutting machine to the entrance. No belt here—the broken rock drops onto the steel and is pushed along by arms that move continuously on the shiny steel track. Occasionally, the miners whack some oversized chunks with a shovel or a sledgehammer, the ore being soft enough to respond. The gale of ventilating air flaps my heavy canvas safety equipment belt vigorously. The dust is non-toxic, but as an added bonus, the miners needn’t worry about acid indigestion. This is medicine as well as food.
What’s most intriguing about this underground landscape is what’s missing: the close walls (“pillars” in minespeak) holding up the ground above, forming tunnels. Here, the roof, 750 feet long and about 20 feet wide, is held up only temporarily by a row of 135, C-shaped, computer-operated, hydraulic steel supports, like forklifts on steroids (putting out 750 tons of pressure each), lined up right next to one another in a long row of sheer, ten-foot tall strength. The top arms are about 14 feet long, the feet about eight and a half, and each unit is five or six feet wide. As the digging progresses, the whole shebang is moved along: the digger, the conveyor, and the self-powered supports, a few at a time, 32 inches for each cut. The ceiling of shale behind the cut is simply allowed to collapse. This is supposedly safe, but when a chip drops and bangs onto my hardhat, I jump about a foot.
[END OF EXCERPT]
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