US Steel Plant Hit by Deadly Blast Has History of Accidents

A United States Steel Corp. plant in Pennsylvania that experienced an explosion that killed at least two people has a history of accidents and violations over the past 15 years.

The Clairton Coke Works plant near Pittsburgh, the biggest facility of its kind in the US, has been the site of multiple fires, accidents and violations in recent years that resulted in worker injuries, lawsuits and fines.

The explosion on Monday took place inside a battery operating area at around 10:51 a.m. local time, according to Allegheny County police.

The blast comes after years of US Steel underinvesting in its facilities, a major factor in the company’s historic takeover by Nippon Steel Corp.

“While this is a sad and extreme event, it’s in a long line of failures that have taken place at this facility over many years,” said David Masur, executive director at environmental group PennEnvironment. “It needs a full investigation to find out if this is a plant that should continue to operate.”

Nippon Steel is working closely with US Steel and is committed to providing all necessary resources to support the healing and recovery process, a spokesperson of the Japanese company said in an email.

US Steel is working closely with authorities to investigate the cause of the explosion, Chief Executive Officer David Burritt said in a statement. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment about the plant’s history.

PennEnvironment and other groups sued US Steel over a fire at Clairton that broke out Christmas Eve 2018 along with power outages in 2019 and 2022. The suit argued that the fire was caused by a chain reaction of avoidable failures that resulted from decades of disrepair and problems. US Steel settled that lawsuit last year for a total of $42 million in penalties and upgrades.

The Allegheny County Health Department has cited the Clairton plant for every year since 2018. Those include removing coke from ovens without first capturing the emissions, which resulted in a $1.9 million penalty for the company last year.

And in 2010, an at the plant injured 15 workers, including 14 with burns, after a coke oven exploded.

The incident on Monday comes less than two months after Nippon Steel closed its $14.1 billion acquisition of US Steel following a protracted and increasingly political saga. As part of its revised takeover agreement, the Japanese steelmaker committed to invest billions of dollars to boost steel output at US Steel’s Mon Valley Works facility and modernize its mills. Clairton is part of the Mon Valley complex.

Operational Priority

Committing significant capital expenditure to upgrade and modernize US Steel’s Mon Valley Works facilities, where founder Andrew Carnegie built his first mill in the 1870s, has been an operational priority for the company for years. It’s been well known among steel industry veterans that the Mon Valley had gone far too long without significant investment.

And that investment was a critical pivot point in Nippon Steel’s bid to buy the company. United Steelworkers leadership was adamant about the need for the Japanese steelmaker and any other potential buyer to put significant capital into the facilities, which includes Clairton, as real investment would lead to safer workplaces and give decades of new life to the plants 鈥� critical to guaranteeing at least another generation of jobs in the Allegheny region.

Clairton is the largest manufacturing facility in the US for coke, a key ingredient for making steel. The plant, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Pittsburgh on the west bank of the Monongahela River, operates 10 coke oven batteries and produces about 4.3 million tons of coke per year, according to US Steel.

Asked whether there were any concerns before the explosion, US Steel Senior Vice President Scott Buckiso said at a news conference Monday the two ovens connected to the blast were in good condition in terms of productivity and safety.

“That’s why it’s important that we get the investigation done properly,” he said.

Photo: Ambulances outside the US Steel Clairton Coke Works facility in Clairton, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 11. Photographer: Rebecca Droke/AFP/Getty Images