Last year, seismic monitors installed by Natural Resources of Canada determined that the noise was most likely emanating from Zug Island, Michigan, a fenced industrial zone dominated by steel-making operations and described by one former employee as akin to Dante’s Hell.
Does an explosion at the Zug Industrial Park lead to major friction between the U.S. and Canada?
What's in the near vicinity?
Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant (MAP) located in Wayne, Michigan. The 140-acre site has been manufacturing Ford cars since the late 1950s.
But now, after a £340m facelift, the environmentally-friendly plant that features a flexible manufacturing capability will manufacture the new Ford Focus, and later this year the all-electric Focus.
“It’s amazing if you stop to think that a little more than 18 months ago we were just getting started on our transformation of this facility,” Jim Tetreault, Ford’s vice president of North America Manufacturing, says.
“All told, we’ve invested $550m to transform the body shop, renovate the paint shop and install new tooling and equipment in the final assembly area at MAP – and you can see the result of this investment. I’m proud to say that MAP is currently Ford’s most flexible facility. Today, we can build up to six different vehicles on two different platforms with little to no downtime for tooling changeover.
“From all four Rouge
River sites,” he said. “Unless somebody
else wants to pay for it, it’s finished.”
You’ve got a river that’s, oh,
127 miles long with four major branches that
start in farmland, wind through
heavily-populated cities, converging to flow
past one of the biggest auto factories in
the world, two steel mills, open piles of
salt, gypsum and cement and the biggest
single-unit wastewater treatment plant in
the country. All the water comes down those
four branches, running past all that
industry, passing a trio of iron blast
furnaces on Zug Island where it dumps into a
big stream called the Detroit River.
Mid-Point - March 21st 2013
God Bless,
Gail