Last A.O. Smith Employee To Work Final Shift in November

[postulater]

Nearly 10,000 people once worked at the sprawling ruins known to some as the former A.O. Smith industrial site, to others as the deathbed of Tower Automotive.

Now it is down to a single worker, Rich Wendling, who learned recently that his final shift comes in November, following the City of Milwaukee's decision to buy the mothballed property and create a modern industrial park.

When Wendling, 59, walks out of the guard shack for good, so will an encyclopedic body of first-hand knowledge about the 82-acre site that the city waged a bitter legal battle to acquire. The city has budgeted $18.3 million for demolition, environmental remediation and asbestos removal, chores that Wendling knows will be massive and expensive: The site, he says, holds miles of asbestos-laden ductwork, and soil contaminated with decades of oil discharges.

.....

He has watched the slow death of the place for the past decade, but he talks with obvious pride about A.O. Smith's longtime role as a generator of jobs.

"They were making 6,000 to 7,000 frames per shift to send to Chrysler, International Harvester, Ford and General Motors," he says.


<http://www.jsonline.com/business/61592447.html>

[watrwefitinfor]

1. Damn. How depressing.

I had no idea - You just assumed it would be there forever. I had a friend who ran one of the big presses the article mentions. Eons ago.

Wat

[midnight]

2. I wonder if this man gets retrained? I hope so. The fact that the

city wants this land is interesting. I wonder who is going to be moving into the industrial park. That area could use an ecomomic boost.

[hughee99]

3. It sounds like he's an electrician, he probably won't need retraining. n/t