sandy beach - ore is it?
In 1915 there were 960 stamps crushing 5,000 tons of ore daily, a world record. In the stamp mills the rotating cams lifted and dropped the 859- to 1,020-pound stamps on partially crushed gold-bearing rocks, pulverizing the rocks and the ore. Water washed the crushed material out through screens and over mercury-coated copper plates where the free gold was caught in the mercury. The sand and gold-bearing sulfides flowed to the vanners, a device used to concentrate the gold, where the sulfides were saved and the sand became "Sandy Beach."
The pounding of the stamps made so much noise the people in the downtown Douglas had to shout to be heard. When the mills shut down for Christmas and the Fourth of July, people could not sleep because it was so quiet.
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On the evening of April 21, 1917, three of the four Treadwell mines flooded . An estimated 3 million tons of seawater filled this space in 3 1/2 hours. The three mines closed down after the cave-in of 1917. The foundry and one power plant continued to operate until the Alaska-Juneau gold mine in Juneau closed in 1944.
from: www.juneaualaska.com/visit/stories/treadwell.shtml