Ore for Fairless

Standing on a dock edging the black Caroni River one day last week, Venezuela's President Marcos Perez Jimenez pressed a button, started a conveyer belt, and sent baseball-sized chunks of iron ore tumbling into the hold of a Swedish freighter. When the ship was properly "topped off," her hatchcovers were closed and she steamed downstream with the first cargo of ore for the U.S. from the steel-hungry 20th century's greatest ore find, Cerro Bolivar.

The null mountain of ore was discovered seven years ago in a worldwide iron search by U.S. Steel Corp. Since then, Orinoco Mining Co., U.S. Steel's Venezuelan subsidiary, has been working on the problems of how to get the stuff out of such a remote, tropical place. Cerro Bolivar ore coats the top of the mountain like a turtle shell. It is brought down in 93-car trains which have to be eased cautiously down a 3% grade for nine miles under smoking brakes. Against the chance that the brakes might fail, special sidetracks were built to switch any runaways to an upgrade. Once off the hill and on a tamer grade, the 91-mile railroad winds through a palm-tufted savannah, a rocky badlands where flash floods can fill dusty ravines with ten feet of water in a few minutes, and finally a sandy semidesert to the Caroni river.

Working at the end of long supply lines,

U.S. Steel has spent $175 million developing Cerro Bolivar. Whole towns were built: Ciudad Piar at the mountain, Puerto Ordaz on the river. But now the payoff starts. The rich hematite and limonite (eventually 10 million tons a year) will feed the $400 million Fairless Works at Morrisville, Pa.--where the first ore will arrive next week.

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