Now all gifts are triple matched! Support our non-profit journalism today.

Support non-profit journalism. All gifts today are triple-matched.

A better Pittsburgh story.

David and Cindy Meckel returned to Glasport's home after a holiday on January 2, 2019. They said that the air in Mon Valley often had a rotten smell, but when they returned home, the stench of "cat urine" was unbearable. They have to wash the soot on the outer walls of their homes several times a year, and it takes more than a whole day to scrub them. Some plants in their yard began to die.

They quickly learned that a fire broke out at the Clareton Coca-Cola plant near Christmas Eve, which caused the shutdown of pollution control equipment. They don’t know—just over a month later, the regulator knows—how serious the problem is. Thousands of additional pollutants were released and burned at the Irvine factory near their home. 

For environmentalists, this situation is like going back to before the Clean Air Act of the 1940s: The company has been burning coke oven gas for more than three months without eliminating any potentially harmful pollution. 

In the days after they returned from vacation, David Meckel visited a doctor at Allegheny General Hospital due to breathing problems; he was prescribed for the first time in his life Inhaler. His wife was diagnosed with asthma in 2018, and she said that she must start using the inhaler six to seven times a day and wheeze when she wakes up at night. 

They are not the only ones with breathing problems. According to a study published earlier this year, the number of asthma visits in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms in postal codes including Clayton almost doubled during the decline in the company’s pollution control measures. According to another study by the University of Pittsburgh, asthma patients who are closer to the coke plant have more severe symptoms during this period. 

According to ongoing litigation, the risk of this large-scale pollution release is imminent. The fire in 2018 occurred due to a series of preventable problems, which the plaintiff believes revealed how poorly maintained the coke plant is; this made residents vulnerable to additional failures, which could expose them to harm in the future Pollution levels. According to the testimony of the staff in the lawsuit, the Allegheny County Health Bureau, which joined the lawsuit, has no right to crack down on negligence in maintenance and has lost trust in the company's self-maintenance.

"In fact, U.S. Steel is rolling the dice, hoping they will be lucky enough to avoid disaster."

U.S. Steel argued in this case that it has spent millions of dollars to improve its already industry-leading safety program, it has not cut corners in maintenance, and has little evidence to support the damage caused by official air-based fires to residents Quality monitor nearby.

Irvin Works is generally considered to be the cleanest of US Steel's three Mon Valley plants. But after a fire at the Clayton coke plant in 2018, the company stated that it burned unpurified coke oven gas at its Irvine plant, about 5 miles away, because it was the best option. A tall pipeline on the mountain called "Peach Tree Flare" will spread the pollution to higher and farther places, so the impact on nearby residents will not be so strong, even if it affects a wider range.

But the pollution from flares also makes it difficult to measure the pollution level of emissions leaving Irving. The coke oven at the Clairton plant has equipment that can measure pollution, but it cannot measure torches. 

Braddock's Edgar Thomson factory and Clairton Coke Works installed advanced air pollution monitors in nearby communities to measure daily pollution based on prevailing winds. But there is no similar display in the downwind of the Irvine factory. Therefore, thousands of tons of additional pollution are not accurately recorded anywhere. 

The structure of US Steel’s air quality permit is such that the company will be fined once a day at a cost of approximately US$100,000 because it violated the pollution permit of the Irving Torch. But the Edgar Thomson and Clairton factories are subject to stricter supervision and may incur millions of dollars in additional fines every day. 

When the company resumed pollution control in April, asthma patients in the area reported improvement in their breathing and fewer emergency room visits. 

According to the plaintiff's documents in a recent court case against U.S. Steel, the "dilapidated" conditions at the Clayton Coking Plant are so severe and persistent that there is always the risk of additional fires and breakdowns. 

The case was filed by PennEnvironment and the Clean Air Commission in 2019 to allow the company to perform a long list of deferred maintenance, which the plaintiff claimed was necessary to prevent future fires and could cost tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit requires the court to appoint an expert to oversee additional maintenance and potential redesign of the facility to prevent malfunctions. They also tried to recoup the tens of millions of dollars in profits that they believed the company had made by delaying work that could prevent fires or limit pollution.

"A lot of facilities are proactive: there is a problem or a problem occurs. They deal with it. They report it. They move on. We have to get information from U.S. Steel."

The two parties have exchanged internal documents and met with witnesses of the other side, but the trial date has not yet been determined. This case has generated more than 2 million pages of documents. Not all documents are public, but PublicSource has reviewed thousands of pages of available pages, including key complaints and responses, expert witness reports, internal company documents and expert witnesses (including U.S. Steel employees, health department employees, and local residents). The testimony said they were burned by the fire.

U.S. Steel declined an interview request for the lawsuit. U.S. Steel spokesperson Amanda Malkowski wrote: “Due to pending litigation, the interview was inappropriate, and for the same reason, we were unable to answer many questions.”

U.S. Steel announced earlier this year that it will not invest $1.5 billion in upgrading its Mon Valley plant, some of which will reduce Clairton's pollution levels. But Markowski said that the company's plan to shut down Clareton's three dirtiest batteries by 2023 "may" lead to greater "environmental improvements" than its initial investment plan.

According to internal company documents discovered by the plaintiff, the Christmas Eve fire in 2018 was not an accident or isolated incident, but was the result of the factory's reduction in maintenance and repairs over the years, and the factory's design was almost fault-tolerant. The fire itself was a wrong tragedy. Multiple equipment failures triggered a fireball the size of a football field. The fireball lasted for two hours and put nearby communities in danger a few months later. 

There are many failure points: undetected roof leaks and corroded pipe connectors; failure of the oil leakage warning system; 80% of cracked metal shafts; malfunctioning gas return valves. After the fire ended, the company spent $17.5 million to correct the problem, including replacing the cooling pipes that had become "thin coke cans."

According to the analysis of Ranajit Sahu, an expert hired by the plaintiff with decades of experience in coal and power plant research, the failure of many backup systems caused and worsened the fire, many of which were not regularly inspected Or maintenance. According to Sahu’s report, more than two years after the fire broke out, U.S. Steel still has many unresolved loopholes.

"In fact, U.S. Steel is rolling the dice, hoping that they will be lucky enough to avoid disasters before finally starting to take the necessary actions," he wrote.

In a statement to PublicSource, U.S. Steel stated that it has made significant investments in Mon Valley over the past three years and has an "industry-leading" maintenance program.

According to court documents, the last time the Clayton Coke Plant received a comprehensive inspection before the fire was in 2003. Inspections revealed problems with certain types of components that caused the 2018 fire. 

In 2009, an explosion occurred in a factory in the same location: a fire in 2009 caused the death of a U.S. steel company employee. Although the employee’s family sued the company, U.S. Steel has never been sanctioned by any government regulatory agency due to the fire.

"They have already carried out a trial run in 2009... They are not out of time to prepare," said Zachary Barber, an environmental clean air advocate in Pennsylvania. "In the ten years between these two fires, what are they doing?"

The lawsuit also identified two other factory shutdown incidents that occurred on January 6, 2014 and November 23, 2016, which affected the factory’s pollution control and had not been reported before.

U.S. Steel argued in court documents that the Christmas Eve fire caused only a few countries to exceed air quality standards. Its expert witnesses doubted whether the fire would cause the symptoms described by nearby residents. The company argued that it is unrealistic to require external supervisors to supervise the company's internal maintenance, and there is no basis based on the facts of the case.

In court testimony, the Allegheny County Health Department [ACHD] explained why the agency was unable to prevent future large-scale pollution violations in the Meng River Valley. The staff said that the department relies on the company's honest efforts. But they said they found U.S. steel companies increasingly resisted oversight. The company’s response to the fire further proved to the health department staff that the company puts its profits above the welfare of the residents.

A spokesperson for the health department said they were unable to discuss ongoing legal issues. But the testimony of the staff of the main department described how the county regulators viewed the compliance work of U.S. Steel before and after the fire.

Jim Kelly, who was the head of the department's environmental health department but left in May, testified that the Clayton Coca-Cola factory was "one of the most dilapidated facilities I have seen in my nearly 30 years of work." 

He also stated that U.S. Steel has a history of misleading the health department's true intentions. Kelly said that the company misrepresented its meaning in the negotiations and proposed changes, claiming to improve its environmental record, but Kelly later learned that this was indeed to save money. He also said that inspectors from the health department believed that they did not see the full picture of what happened at the US Steel Corporation plant. Kelly said he believes that U.S. Steel uses more employees to run the equipment during inspections than nearby equipment that has not been inspected. 

U.S. Steel stated in an email response that it is impractical for the company to change the staffing level based on inspections: “ACHD employees and/or contractors (depending on the day and time of day) are in our factory every day, So it will be impossible to adjust operations for these visits."

Kelly said the preliminary report submitted by US Steel to the health department stated that the fire would cause "light to moderate" pollution and its pollution control would be restored within a few hours, which was "very misleading." It was not until the beginning of February, about six weeks after the fire, that the health department requested and received more detailed emissions information that the health department realized how much pollution was pouring into the Meng River Valley. 

He said that U.S. Steel not only concealed this important information, but that its efforts to limit pollution after the fire were not "out of best conviction." In Kelly's view, the company used to reduce pollution much faster for economic reasons.

"A lot of facilities are proactive: there is a problem or a problem occurs. They deal with it. They report it. They move on," Kelly said. "We must obtain information from U.S. Steel."

Even before the fire broke out, the Allegheny County health department had begun to increase its efforts to try to control the pollution in Clayton. 

Since 2000, air pollution in Allegheny County has been steadily improving. But in 2013, the average annual fine particulate matter near the Clayton coke plant stopped decreasing, and it got worse over the next four years. 

The pollution problem in the Mon Valley coincides with U.S. Steel's efforts to cut costs, which the company calls the "Carnegie Way." According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of employees in the company has been reduced by a quarter.

A McKinsey consultant's speech in Clayton showed that by 2018, the number of full-time maintenance personnel at the Mon Valley plant was reduced to less than 700, four years earlier than the initial forecast. This is a reduction of nearly 200 employees from two years ago.

The workers in Menggu have concerns. According to a slide in McKinsey’s speech, one worker said: "Everything is going to fail." Another worker said: "The people here want to do a good job, but the boss wants them to produce more Coke soon. "We have a lot of'temporary repairs' that become permanent...We are not good at coming back and doing the correct repairs," said the third worker.

Malkowski said that since 2018, the company has hired 300 additional employees in Clairton, but could not specify how many of them were involved in maintenance. "We have been hiring at the Clayton factory and consider our employees our greatest asset," she wrote.

In the company's cost-cutting activities, the health department has increased the strictness of the license for U.S. Steel Corporation and increased the penalties for all companies that violate the regulations. After four years of rising or stagnant pollution levels, the amount of fine particulate pollution in the Meng River Valley in 2018 has dropped significantly. But after a fire broke out, particulate pollution increased again in 2019.

The health department has been widely criticized for failing to notify residents of the fire for more than two weeks. In the testimony of the court case, health department staff described their reliance on U.S. Steel's upcoming regulatory procedures. 

Karen Hacker, who served as the director of the health department until July 2019, stated in a report in November 2020: “In light of what we finally learned about emissions, it really triggered people’s attention to them. Questions about things that may be known but did not tell us." Sediment. "It's much higher than we thought, and they didn't share this information with us."

In June 2019, an electrical fire damaged the company's pollution control system for the second time, Hacker said, which further proved the company's poor record.

Jamie Graham, co-director of the air quality department, criticized the company for not reducing production in order to "faster and more stringently" limit the impact of pollution, but said "they chose not to." 

Kelly said the company claims that it takes 90 days to safely put the coke oven plant batteries in a "hot idle" state-basically shutting down the coke oven but still maintaining heat to protect them. "Hot idling" batteries will not produce any coke or pollution. The health department later discovered a historical example of "hot idling" by US Steel in just 35 days.

The health department rarely has the opportunity to actively regulate Clayton's pollution. But this situation is changing. Earlier this year, the health department passed a new rule requiring companies to take action to reduce pollution in the Meng River Valley when the weather traps it in place (known as temperature inversion).

The lawsuit is another step in this direction. Air quality activists criticized the health department for not doing enough to protect the health of residents. The department’s response is usually that it is acting in accordance with the law. In the lawsuit, the department stated that its existing legal powers are insufficient to protect the public from pollution incidents such as fires. 

Now it is seeking help from the court.

Oliver Morrison is a PublicSource reporter. You can contact him via Oliver@publicsource.org or Twitter @ORMorrison.

This story was fact-checked by Matt Maielli.

James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything you face can be changed, but only when you face it.” PublicSource exists to help the Pittsburgh area face reality and create opportunities for change. When we focus on inequality in our region, such as the "completely unacceptable" conditions of low-income housing in McKeesport, things will change. When we ask questions about decision makers' decisions, such as how Allegheny County handles COVID-19 safety issues for its employees, the situation changes. When we promote transparency on issues that affect the public, such as the use of facial recognition software by Pittsburgh police, things change.

Producing such news requires a lot of time, skills and resources. Our stories are always available for free so that they can benefit most people regardless of their ability to pay. But as an independent, non-profit newsroom, we rely on readers’ donations to support this vital work. Can you contribute any amount (or better yet, set up a monthly recurring gift) to help ensure that we can continue to cover important things and tell stories to improve Pittsburgh?

Oliver reports on PublicSource's K-12 education. Before becoming a reporter, Oliver taught English and drama in Delta, Arkansas for seven years. He previously wrote educational topics in New... More by Oliver Morrison