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Paper: Iron Range site work continues for Essar Steel
The Hibbing Daily Tribune is following up on the questions raised about Essar Steel’s new Nashwauk mine and steel mill. An Essar official recently told an Indian business publication that the project was “on hold.” However, the Tribune story says that local site work continues and it seems no one has been told anything but…
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Brown on the Air: BARTERING!
UPDATE: Oh, hell, this was bound to happen eventually. Spring is NEXT week’s topic. My books were cooked. This week the “Between You and Me” topic is “bartering.” What are you willing to do or give to get something else? Does this economy have you thinking about bartering for goods and services? For instance, I…
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Range paper reports on conflicting Essar Steel statements
The dog has been wagged. The Hibbing Daily Tribune is reporting on the Essar Steel quotes from the same Hindu Business Line story that I cited on Tuesday. The story quotes Essar’s top official saying that a project in southeastern India was going forward because North American projects were on hold until steel demand is…
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Ain’t no party like a Chisholm party (’cause a Chisholm party don’t stop)
Highway 169 by Chisholm will be out of commission all summer (story from the Duluth News Tribune). From April 1 until first snow, traffic will be routed through downtown Chisholm while repair work is done on the highway. The road travels over an “underworld” of underground mine shafts that have been collapsing and shifting for…
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Many Minorca miners to stay on during summer shutdown
Some good news: The Mesabi Daily News reports that ArcelorMittal has scheduled more than half of its workers during this summer’s planned shutdown of its Minorca Mine in Virginia, Minn. The miners will be kept on the clock for maintenance work instead of being . The Steelworkers Union announced that many senior workers are voluntarily…
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Follow MinnesotaBrown network on Facebook
I think I’m finally familiar enough with the Facebook world to advertise the fact that you can follow this blog on Facebook by clicking on the widget you see down the right hand column or this link. I’m half a year into using Facebook and have to say that I really recommend it … the…
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Physics + stimulus= jobs … and/or mutants
Federal economic stimulus efforts now include $40.1 million for a unique physics experiment just north of the Iron Range that I don’t fully understand. The Mesabi Daily News reports. The $178 million NOvA neutrino experiment has been studying the mass of the universe by shooting high energy subatomic particles from the Fermi Lab complex near…
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Essar officials indicate Nashwauk plant on hold
The top official for Essar Steel told The Hindu Business Line that their U.S. and Caribbean mining and steel projects were on hold until “some clarity emerges on the demand.” This includes the Essar Steel Minnesota project near Nashwauk. That’s reasonably consistent with what they’ve been telling U.S. media, but a good deal more stark…
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A ‘vital’ life in the ‘Zone of Plenty’
One of the best things about writing a book like “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is all the stories, clippings and first hand accounts that people give you afterward that weren’t in my book. This little number arrived in the mail last week from a Mr. Earl Currie. It’s a 1943 advertisement for…
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To be for it, or not to be for it
The Iron Range is a hard place to be an intellectual “Hamlet” type. This is partly because some of our most powerful officials and opinion makers have no idea what that means. It’s also because it’s a place that operates best when you pick a side and stick with it. Loyalty, old relationships, stubbornness, and…
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Deer 1, Matt Lauer 0
I was about to give Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today show some Northern Minnesota props after he missed this morning’s show because of “an accident involving a deer.” That is, until I learned that he was on a bike and didn’t actually hit the deer, but rather flipped over his handle bars trying to avoid…
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Wearing many ‘hats,’ a good hat is hard to find
This is my weekly column from the Sunday, March 22, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. I read a version of this piece for the March 21 edition of “Between You and Me” on KAXE. Wearing many ‘hats,’ a good hat is hard to findBy Aaron J. Brown Let me begin by saying that…
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Trapper envy
Everyone gets the wrong mail sometimes. Postal workers are humans, after all. Maybe you’ve received someone’s college alumni newsletter or some kind of notice from a cell phone company. You just put it back in the box and assume that the matter is corrected. Well, in northern Minnesota you get some different kinds of mistaken…
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Adapting fast, insiders say Range mines could recover quickly
Northern Minnesota iron mining is surely in a down cycle, with current and planned temporary taconite mine shutdowns looming over the Iron Range. But Mike Jennings of the Hibbing Daily Tribune has an interesting story in Sunday’s edition about the optimism of steel industry insiders in the long term strength of steel prices and the…
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The Lone Pine India Holi Polka
Most followers of Range news have been tracking the Essar Steel development in Nashwauk, a new mine and steel plant owned by an international India-based steel company. Iron Range officials and educators are trying hard to embrace the Indian culture of the Essar managers and employees being assigned to the new facility as it begins…