Before the U.S. Steel Explosion, a Legacy of Cost-Cutting and Broken Promises

In the aftermath of the Aug. 11 explosion at a Pittsburgh-area coal-fed coke plant that killed two workers, hospitalized 10, and sent a plume of black smoke into the air, local environmental nonprofit Breathe Project was resolute: “This could have been prevented,” the organization wrote in a statement hours after the catastrophe, “if necessary changes and upgrades were done to the plant when stated.” 

It’s still too soon to know what exactly went wrong to cause the accident at Clairton Coke Works. Longtime owner United States Steel Corporation and the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board — though under attack by the Trump administration — have each launched investigations into the incident. The federal probe could take more than a year. 

But Matthew Mehalik, Breathe Project’s executive director and an adjunct professor of environmental policy at Carnegie Mellon University, like other environmental advocates, is adamant: The explosion was preceded by a pattern of neglect by U.S. Steel.
 

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Over at least the last half-century, the company has repeatedly announced, then canceled, upgrades to its facilities, while deferring maintenance and spending less than industry standards on upkeep at Clairton. It has, however, spent millions on lobbying while advocating against regulations to the steel industry — rules that Mehalik believes “would have been really useful” in the aftermath of the recent explosion.

“It starts to feel like Lucy and the football,” Mehalik told Capital & Main. “There’s a promise, and then it gets yanked away.” 

An early finding by U.S. Steel appears to reinforce the point. The company pinpointed a broken valve as the source of the gas that fed the explosion. The valve was inside the oldest battery — a room full of high-temperature ovens that bake coal into coke, a fuel for steelmaking — in the plant, one of two that had not been fitted with the latest available technology, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. The Clairton Coke Works has seven operational batteries; at its peak in 1948, there were 22.

The plant is part of a three-mill behemoth in the greater Pittsburgh region called Mon Valley Works, named after the 130-mile Monongahela River that snakes through the city. The coke it produces is sent to the Edgar Thompson and Irvin steel plants in nearby Braddock and West Mifflin, respectively, where it powers furnaces that produce steel. The coke is made by applying extreme heat — up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — to coal, melting away impurities, which are then released in the form of a gas. What’s left are lumps of a hard porous substance that is used as fuel. 

The Clairton plant produces 4.3 million tons of coke per year. It is the largest producer of its kind in the country, and Allegheny County’s biggest polluter. It’s been linked to elevated rates of asthma and cancer, and subject to calls from environmentalists for a transition toward greener steel production practices that do not involve burning coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.  

After a highly politicized 18-month back-and-forth, the company was acquired by Japanese steel giant Nippon for $14.9 billion in June. As part of that sale, the new owner pledged to pour $2.4 billion into Mon Valley Works and make upgrades. The sale at one point raised activists’ hopes that its new owner would decarbonize the facility and build a better relationship with its neighbors. 

Today, those hopes have mostly been dashed. Qiyam Ansari, founder and executive director of grassroots environmental nonprofit Valley Clean Air Now, said the company has responded to his inquiries with radio silence. 

“Nippon wasn’t here or hasn’t said anything,” Ansari said of the explosion’s aftermath. “Who do we talk to? What is their corporate governance structure?”
 

“It’s falling apart and is a ticking time bomb.”

~ Qiyam Ansari, Valley Clean Air Now

 
In an emailed statement, Nippon Steel’s public relations department told Capital & Main that it “promptly dispatched technical experts to Clairton” following the Aug. 11 incident. “Nippon Steel has been working closely with U.S. Steel,” the statement continues, “and is committed to providing all necessary resources to fully support the healing and recovery process, with safety at the center of everything we do.” 

U.S. Steel did not respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment. U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt said in a press conference the day after the explosion that safety is “in our DNA.” 

“This is the first thing we talk about in our meetings,” he said. “This is the first thing we cover in our board meetings. We take this extraordinarily seriously.” 

A chief criticism of the plant is its age. 

“It’s falling apart and is a ticking time bomb,” said Ansari, who heard the Aug. 11 explosion from his car. Only when he saw the plume of smoke rising over the skyline and smelled ammonia wafting in through his air conditioner did he realize the source of the sound was Clairton Coke Works. 

For some, the explosion brought to light another criticism: That, for the plant’s senescence, its owner has not done enough to keep it in good condition, creating risks for the broader community living around it, and for workers who enter its doors day after day. Some 35,000 people — 37% of whom are low income — live within a three-mile radius of the facility. The school building serving all of Clairton is less than a mile from Coke Works. 

Most recently, in 2019, U.S. Steel announced it would spend more than $1 billion on upgrades to Mon Valley Works, including building a cogeneration facility at Clairton Coke Works that would come with “state-of-the-art emissions control systems” and lower the facility’s health-harming pollution by as much as 80%, the company said.

“This will be the most innovative steel mill in the United States of America,” David Burritt, , the company’s CEO, said at the time. 

Two years later, U.S. Steel announced that it was pulling out of the investment.
 

In 2018, a consulting firm hired to recommend cost cuts determined that what U.S. Steel spent on maintenance at Clairton was below industry norms for any steel plant.

 
It’s not clear whether the cancelled upgrades to the plant would have affected the portion of the facility that exploded. But to Mehalik, they underscore a long history at U.S. Steel in which the company has chronically neglected to invest in Clairton. 

Deferred maintenance has retroactively been tied to incidents at the plant in the past. On Christmas Eve in 2018, a fire broke out in a Clairton control room, stifling the plant’s pollution control systems and paving the way for a 102-day release of sulfur dioxide into the surrounding area. Dr. Deborah Gentile, a pediatric allergist in the Pittsburgh region, saw an immediate jump in asthma attacks. “We saw a near doubling in patients,” she said. 

A few months later, a set of environmental groups sued U.S. Steel over the event and settled it in 2024 for a historic $42 million, forcing the company to make $37 million in pollution control upgrades to Clairton and pay a penalty of $5 million, $4.5 million of which was allocated to the local community. Some of the community funding paid for air filtration systems that Valley Clean Air Now’s Ansari distributed to residents in the aftermath of the Aug. 11 explosion — an irony not lost on him.

During the course of litigation over the 2018 fire, an inspector hired by the plaintiffs identified a leaky roof and corroded pipes as the source of the ignition. These could have been detected with an inspection, wrote Ranajit Sahu, the environmental engineer who authored the independent review. But they weren’t. “The accident was preventable,” Sahu’s report reads, “by a robust inspection and preventive maintenance program and by better plant design.” 

Sahu ultimately identified 36 instances in which the company delayed maintenance or upgrades, only to be forced to make them after the 2018 fire. “The Clairton plant is a very old facility that is forced to operate with little to no margin for error, and therefore presents a constant air pollution threat to the community,” the review states.

Attorneys also learned that the company had, in 2018, retained the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to recommend cost cuts, only for the consultants to determine that what the company spent on maintenance at Clairton was below industry norms for any steel plant, much less one its age. While most steel companies spend around 5% of their replacement asset value, or the cost to replace all of their equipment, on maintenance, U.S. Steel had spent as little as 1.52% some months.

“There was clearly a fair amount of data showing that the cause of that fire was really due to ongoing disrepair and mismanagement at the facility,” said David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, a nonprofit advocacy group that was among the plaintiffs in the suit. 

Years before, in 2010, an explosion at the plant injured 20 people, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration determined that the explosion ignited during routine maintenance and that U.S. Steel and a contractor it hired had willfully violated safety laws in the process. In 2009, another explosion at Clairton killed a worker, Nick Revetta, whose brother told Mother Jones that the room in which the accident took place had “leaks all over the place.” “I always knew somebody would get killed inside that place,” he said at the time.
 

The Allegheny County Health Department has hit U.S. Steel with millions of dollars worth of fines over illegal emissions and leaks in recent years.

 
In the mid-2010s, U.S. Steel employees described a “cost-cutting crusade” across the company, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019. It invested in cheaper, but less durable, heat-resistant brick, for instance; it slashed pension obligations; and it laid off one-quarter of the company’s salaried workforce, the Journal found. By the time McKinsey, the consulting firm hired by U.S. Steel, evaluated staffing levels in 2018, court documents show, it determined that “Mon Valley Works has already reduced based staffing [so much that…] opportunity for further staffing reductions does not currently exist.” 

James Kelly, former deputy director of environmental health at the Allegheny County Health Department — the local agency responsible for regulating U.S. Steel’s air emissions — said during litigation over the 2018 fire that Clairton Coke Works was “one of the most decrepit facilities I’ve ever seen in my nearly 30 years of work.” He described battling with the company over upgrades the agency wanted U.S. Steel to implement that the firm strongly resisted as too expensive. For the company, “It’s not about doing the right thing, it’s just doing whatever saves U.S. Steel the most money,” Kelly testified.

That agency has hit U.S. Steel with millions of dollars worth of fines over illegal emissions and leaks in recent years.

In 2023, U.S. Steel launched a battle to weaken a Biden-era regulation that required steel producers to reduce their emissions and establish new air monitoring protocols. U.S. Steel urged the Environmental Protection Agency to scrap numerous aspects of the rule and instead consider the costs they would place on the industry.  

“The integrated iron and steel industry poses extremely low risk to the public,” U.S. Steel attorneys told the EPA in 2023. 

The company went on to appeal the rule in 2024. U.S. Steel spent $3.5 million on lobbying that same year, and spent $2 million in the first half of 2025 as it battled to complete its sale to Nippon. This effort ultimately proved successful: In March, under the direction of the Trump administration, the EPA stayed the steel rule, and in July, proposed pushing deadlines for steel manufacturers to 2027. 

“[That rule] would have been really useful on Monday, August 11, when the explosion happened,” Mehalik said. 

In March, the EPA also solicited requests for exemptions from the rule. U.S. Steel applied. 

The company’s expenditure on lobbying comes nowhere near what it planned to spend on the upgrades that it subsequently cancelled. It’s also historically embraced a lower lobbying spend rate than many of its counterparts in its industry, Politico reported in 2023. But the dichotomy, for those who live around the plant, raises questions about U.S. Steel’s priorities. 

“We’ve known that the people who control the capital chose to deploy that capital in ways other than ensuring the safety and operability of the Coke Works,” Mehalik said. “Why aren’t you investing that money to make this plant safer?” 

Whether Nippon will course correct remains to be seen. Ansari, the Valley Clean Air Now founder, is pessimistic. “We have not been able to get into the room,” he said. Compared to U.S. Steel, Nippon feels monstrous. 

“They’re six times larger, and they are in a different time zone. … Where does accountability come?” 

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