Iron Mountain

At an old Spanish hacienda near the Orinoco River, a U.S. Steel Corp. engineer named Folke Kihlstedt slowly pushed a stereoscopic viewer over some three-dimensional aerial photographs. A long, low, narrow mountain seemed to spring out of the paper toward him. To his trained eye, the vegetation, watercourses and the hues of the earth were meaningful. "That could be iron ore," he decided.

At dawn, a week later, "Kihl" Kihlstedt jeeped 60 miles south, over chaparral-covered sand, amidst flapping egrets, toward the low mountain. Next morning he climbed 1,600 feet to the top. The view filled him with awe. The rust-colored lode he saw was later described as "the richest concentration of iron ore on the face of the earth." Cerro Bolivar, as the mountain was named, is estimated to contain half a billion tons of top-grade (63.8% pure) iron ore.

That was six years ago. Last week Cerro Bolivar and the land around it swarmed with 7,000 men and their machines. Early next year the ore will start flowing north; by 1955 it will be feeding U.S. Steel's new Fairless plant on the Delaware River and supplying 10% of U.S. needs.

Mining Cerro Bolivar will be no easy task. Giant power shovels (the first were arriving this month) will scoop up blasted ore and load it on to trucks which will carry it to the railway (now being built). The 10,000-ton ore trains will roll through the chaparral 90 miles northeast to the black Caroni River, tributary of the Orinoco. For the workers a new town, Ciudad Piar, is sprouting at the foot of Cerro Bolivar, and a new port, Puerto Ordaz, has already been built on the Caroni.

Iron mining will yield Venezuela no such fabulous income as she gets from oil ($525 million last year). U.S. Steel thinks that the country will benefit mainly from 1) employment, a steady 3,000 after mining starts, 2) opening of the Orinoco to deep-sea ships, and 3) an investment expected to total $200 million, much of it spent in Venezuela.

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