The Anaconda Co. broke ground for the Berkeley Pit in 1955, dismantling and relocating more than a dozen Butte mine yards and uprooting the residential communities of East Butte, Meaderville, McQueen, Dublin Gulch, and Finn Town as miners removed approximately 4.4 million tons of waste rock to reach rich copper veins. Many relocated residents accepted the move because it meant good-paying jobs would stay in the community. Huge ore trucks nicknamed "ukes," holding between 25 and 200 tons, carried ore out of the pit to the Weed Concentrator east of the pit viewing stand. By 1962, production reached 320,000 tons per day of ore and waste on a round-the-clock, seven-days-per-week schedule. By the early 1980s, mining had become significantly less profitable, and after Atlantic Richfield Co. bought the Anaconda Co. in 1977, it decided to halt Berkeley Pit operations in 1983. When the pit closed, it was the largest truck-operated open pit copper mine in the United States, measuring 7,000 feet long, 5,600 feet wide, and more than 1,800 feet deep, with approximately 1.4 billion tons of ore mined from 1955 to 1982.