20/2/00

Our main mine man

    This country's remarkable progress in widely varied fields could often be attributed to a lone individual whose expertise fostered a national success story. In mining and quarrying, Asher Shadmon was that man.
    Shadmon, whose recollections of Eilat's early days filled a recent Not Page One column, is still at age 77 one of the world's foremost authorities on what's underfoot.
    A mining expert seems about as useful to this country as a lumberjack, professions for which there are no thriving industries. Except for some quarrying, archeology and the Dead Sea Works, what's down below stays there. It is ironic, then, that in Shadmon we have one of the world's experts on marble (and building stone) who has "written more books on the subject than anyone else."
    He must be considered a reliable source when he explodes a cherished myth: Jerusalem stone is as yerushalmi as Jerusalem artichoke.
    "There is no such thing as 'Jerusalem stone.' Stone that's used in Jerusalem is Jerusalem stone.
    "Most of it comes from Ramon or the Galilee or the territories. It has become a very popular item, worldwide, and we have lots of trouble with Americans about that. Some Jerusalem stone was used in San Diego, but it came from near Yatta in the territories. About 90 percent comes from the territories."
    Well, you know what that means! Everyone will now agree that our rock is internationally treif, and some building in San Diego will have to be torn down.
    While we're at it, let's see what more damage we can do here:
    Eilat stone is phony too.
    "At one time I intended to start a gem industry based on Eilat stones, but there was so little that I stopped it and started importing from southern Africa, and that's what you still see on the market today. It's still sold here as 'Eilat stone,' but it's not from Eilat. It may be  worked in Eilat, but certainly not mined there."
    (And the Kotel is prefab concrete.)
        "They didn't have too many geologists when I came here," he says, grinning with sarcastic understatement. He arrived in '49 and went immediately to the far south to find water, and scratch the surface at Timna for copper. "There was nobody else who had any idea about mining. I began with a highfaluting title 'Resident Geologist in Timna,' and started the first pits there." Another fancy title he held early on was "Comptroller of Mines," but he was never much of a desk man, so he didn't stay long.
    He went to Eilat, he says, as a well-sitter. "That's what I did," he smiles. "We were drilling for water, and I sat on the well to see what came up." He's being modest. He was a scientist despatched by the government to see what might gush up, in order to kick-start the deep south. "I had to record all the cuttings that came out of the well, and measure the saltiness and chemical contents."
    Timna never amounted to much. "It doesn't exist anymore. The price of copper went down, so it didn't pay to mine anymore. We only did three or four years of mining." Likewise, Shadmon's hopes for a manganese mine went phht. Petroleum we won't even talk about. 
    "The only real mining now is the quarries. It's problematic because we don't have enough place where we can quarry without touching nature," or for that matter, human settlement. The quarrying industry, which Shadmon started, produces 20 million tons of stone a year.
    As with everything else in Israel, politics had to step in the way. "I opened the Ramon quarry in 1959 against big opposition from the government. We had to do a lot of drilling, and we had to spend 20,000 pounds." Rock was not the number one priority then.
    The only oil speculation was in the Knesset, by a misguided politician who thought he'd stumbled onto a secret plot. "There was a Communist MK who came to Eilat, during my first days there. Our rig was brought in from the Canadian Oil Exploration Company, and he saw those words on it, and the next day there was a question in the Knesset: 'Why we don't we announce that we're drilling for oil in the Arava?' Well, we weren't."

THERE'S A lot more call for Shadmon's knowledge outside this sliver of land. He carved out a UN career that progressed to the presidency of the International Association of Engineering Geology, and the chairmanship of the United Nations' International Commission on Building Stones.
    But he is not an indolent bureaucrat sitting