10 years

EDITORIAL

It was exactly 10 years ago—Oct. 2, 2008, to be exact—when the “other shoe” dropped.

That’s when Alcoa announced it was closing the remaining three potlines at Rockdale Operations.

A lot has happened in the past 10 years, some of it bad, some of it good, but that date certainly marked the end of an era.

In a way the announcement—and the one in June, 2008, when Alcoa revealed it was closing the first three potlines of the six-potline plant—represented the first and second acts of “The End of an Era” for our community.

The third act, which essentially rang down the curtain, would come Oct. 13, 2017, when Luminant announced it was closing both units of its Sandow Power Plant.

Alcoa’s 10-year-ago stunner marked a historical watershed of sorts. Everyone knew it, but didn’t know what to make of it at the time.

Ten years ago this week there were hastily called meetings of area leaders where there was a lot of brave talk about how we were going to be all right, after all, and some whistling-past-the-graveyard grit about how all that needed to happen was for Rockdale and Cameron to start working together.

Rockdale and Cameron, and anywhere else for that matter, working together is always a good thing, of course. But everyone knew there was going to be an impact. There was.

One question at the time was “how many families is Rockdale going to lose?” We will probably never know exactly. The 2010 census came too quickly to fully enumerate the impact, as quite a few families, thankfully, drew many months of “sub pay,” receiving a percentage of former pay.

But here’s a clue. First-day enrollment in the Rockdale ISD in August, 2007—the August, 2008, figure already reflected some impact from the first three potline announcement in June—was 1,715. First-day enrollment this year was 1,484, a 13.5-percent drop. Some of it Luminant, of course.

But then the ultra-pessimistic viewpoint didn’t prevail, either. There were the usual “tumbleweeds will roll down US 79 in five years” comments and some big-city television stations discovered Rockdale and came to town to pronounce our obituary. (One illustrated its story on the shutdown of Alcoa’s smelter with video of Luminant’s power plant, which remained open nine more years).

More history is being made this year with Bit-main coming to part of the Alcoa land. It’s known at least one, possibly two, major businesses planning to locate on other parts, with an announcement perhaps toward year’s end.

Probably nobody in those devastated meetings 10 years ago this week could have envisioned we’d all be talking about such positive developments on the same land which, for all we knew back then, was ceasing to be productive, period.

But we are are doing exactly that. Like the fabled phoenix, the new is rising from the ashes of the old. The location that was chosen as the center of an epoch-changing industry for Rockdale 67 years ago is blooming again.

We can only image what it will be like 10 years from now.—M.B.