A few hours into U.S. Steel’s open house event inside Carnegie One Library in Braddock, the Allegheny County Health Department issued a hazardous air quality warning.
Concentrations of fine particulate matter — particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can cut through your body’s defenses to settle deep in the lungs — skyrocketed as smoke from Canadian wildfires wafted over the region.
The health department ordered certain companies to reduce pollution-producing activities. The list includes U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson facility just down the street from the library in Braddock, along with more than a dozen other large plants in the Mon Valley subject to the health department’s Mon Valley Episodic Rule. Enacted in 2021, it was meant to balance the reality of the region’s industry, topography, and public health.
The balancing act continues, as the Allegheny County Health Department is working to drafts a permit for the installation of U.S. Steel’s new hot strip mill at Edgar Thomson.
The centerpiece of Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel’s $2.5 billion investment in the Mon Valley, the hot strip mill has been the most discussed part of what’s in store for U.S. Steel’s operations here since Nippon bought the iconic Pittsburgh steelmaker a year ago. But the company knows people have other questions, too.
U.S. Steel scheduled the open house for a four-hour window on Thursday, with media allowed in the room for the early portion. Representatives from the company were stationed at tables separated by topic. Information about the new hot strip mill was in one corner. Operations at Clairton in another.
“So what we doing in Clairton? Does anybody know?” Clairton’s mayor Jim Cerqua asked after a round of handshakes.
Cerqua said he came to “pick someone’s brain” about what Nippon’s investments mean for his community, because he hadn’t heard much outside of the hot strip mill. He worked as a tar plant foreman at Clairton Coke Works in the 1970s and 1980s, a proud U.S. Steel alum who values the company so much he plans to dedicate a park shelter to it.
“My town would be a ghost town” without U.S. Steel, he said.
Cerqua didn’t get a lot of details about planned improvements at Clairton — something about new coke oven doors and a future baghouse project. He seemed satisfied with that.
“They’re staying. That’s the big part,” he said.
U.S. Steel, which has about 3,400 employees across its facilities in the Mon Valley, had threatened to close plants and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh if its deal with Nippon didn’t go through.
The $14.9 billion acquisition of one of the most recognizable U.S. brands by a Japanese company — a deal that was opposed by the leadership of the United Steelworkers union — was a political hot potato for both Democrats and Republicans until a reversal from President Donald Trump paved the way for it to close last year, with the U.S. government taking a “golden share” in the company.
While the number of employees here is a tenth of what it was 50 years ago when Cerqua worked at U.S. Steel, it remains a large economic engine.
It’s also a major source of local air pollution. Clairton, in particular, has high emissions of hydrogen sulfide — the rotten-egg smelling signature of coke oven gas. Cerqua has heard these concerns from constituents, he said.
“I think people really understand it’s a two-bladed sword,” Cerqua said.
Outside of the library, a group of environmental and community activists held a rally and urged U.S. Steel to abandon the announced investment in a new hot strip mill at Edgar Thomson.
Instead, some argued that the company should redirect that money to getting itself off coal-based steel making and improving air pollution controls at its Mon Valley sites.
According to its proposed installation permit, U.S. Steel expects the new hot strip mill and associated buildout at Edgar Thomson to increase the facility’s emissions of particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide.
U.S. Steel notes that its overall Mon Valley footprint will be balanced by a decrease in emissions when it closes the old hot strip mill currently operating at Irvin. At that point, only the particulates and the carbon monoxide will still be higher in the aggregate. Company representatives also noted that it will be making more steel with less energy and fewer emissions per unit.
Those gains will not fall evenly on the Mon Valley, advocates warned.
“It is a benefit to the folks that live, really, in the downwind field of Irvin, but it really is not a benefit to the folks here who live here around the Edgar Thomson plant,” said John Graham, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force who gave a presentation on U.S. Steel’s proposed emissions from the new hot strip mill during a SWPA Grassroots Town Hall earlier this month. The title of the virtual event was, “A New U.S. Steel Hot Strip Mill in Braddock Is a Bad Idea.”
North Braddock resident Edith Abeyta, who emceed the rally outside the open house on Thursday, made her way inside the library to ask why U.S. Steel is expanding its footprint. Doesn’t it have enough land? And what will it do with the Consumer Fresh Produce building it acquired — the one that used to grow produce as a vertical farm?
It’ll be used as storage space for tools, Ron Ferchak, operating lead for the new hot strip mill project told Abeyta.
They chatted about misconceptions and how to get more information out to the public. Some community members dislike how information is titrated at open houses like these and would instead prefer a public presentation with questions and answers that everyone can hear.
Abeyta left comfortable with the conversation but not with U.S. Steel’s plans.
“I’m not advocating for green steel,” she said later, trying to distill her skepticism. “I’m advocating for community say.”
In addition to the pending Allegheny County Health Department installation permit, two smaller permits — for sewage line connections — are currently before the councils of Braddock and North Braddock.
Earlier this month, Braddock delayed a vote on the permit asking U.S. Steel for more information on its overall project plans. Nathan Mallory, a member of the North Braddock Borough Council, said during the SWPA Grassroots Town Hall, that he sees the sewage approval as the only mechanism for the local government to extract more information.
“That’s our only vote,” he said. “After, everything is pushed to the county and state.”