Steel: Changing Workplace

How It Looks in Allegheny County

In October 1969, Edward Spear, president of the United States Steel Corporation, was given a “Good Neighbor” award by a now defunct organization called the Cleaner Air Week of Pittsburgh. Less than a month earlier, six employees at the Clairton Works of U.S. Steel had been hospitalized when concentrations of gas and fumes felled them on the top of the coke ovens at the plant, which is just 12 miles up the Monongahela River. At the Clairton Works some 30,000 tons of soft coal are consumed daily, producing enough coke and coke-oven gas for all the steel-making facilities of the corporation in Western Pennsylvania. It has a profitable by-product called anhydrous ammonia, ...