Over the past year, Chris has been hospitalized four times with respiratory issues. When her lungs become irritated, “it feels like an elephant is sitting on my chest.” I’ve gotten sick more and had more problems breathing,” she said. “Since I’ve been home, I’ve noticed a difference. No longer commuting to Monroeville for work during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris Wilding says she has been spending far more time in Clairton at her house just across from the mill. “I take more medications than my 72-year-old mom does.” “I did not expect, at 54 years old, to have the issues that I have,” she said. Chris suffers from a host of health issues: asthma, COPD, diabetes, emphysema and kidney disease - conditions that have been linked to air pollution. I know people that have died, and then you have to question whether or not it was the air.” Chris Wilding stands on the front porch of her Clairton home. People are dying all of the time in Clairton. “Who’s going to file murder charges against United States Steel when they kill me? Is anybody going to file charges?” he said, recalling statements he made to the Allegheny County Board of Health on March 6, 2019, several months after the fire. Johnie sits for a portrait in his living room. Steel said some individuals we spoke to are involved in litigation and may benefit from “publicly disparaging the company.” The company said it would not comment on litigation outside the courtroom. After PublicSource sought comment about the health impacts from industry, U.S. Steel following the December 2018 coke works fire. Johnie provided testimony in a lawsuit against U.S. I’m wondering: How long is a pump going to last that spins 5,200 revolutions per minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week? That’s the sentence of death, is what it actually put in me.” “They had to chop my chest open and put a pump in there.
Doctors at Allegheny General Hospital placed a device in Johnie’s chest to ensure that his heart could continue to circulate blood throughout his body. Medication bottles line his bedside, and protruding from his abdomen are the wirings of the Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) that pumps blood through his body.Ī couple of months after the control room fire on Christmas Eve 2018, Johnie Perryman had open heart surgery. Johnie sits in his bedroom, where each night he charges the two large batteries that keep his heart pumping. Like steam and soot, residents say illness, too, is a byproduct of steel. Steel to send unfiltered pollutants, including excessive amounts of SO2, into the Mon Valley’s air. 2 control room, shutting down the pollution control system and causing U.S. In December 2018, an explosion at the coke works critically damaged the facility’s No. Environmental Protection Agency classifies coke oven emissions as known carcinogens. The pollutants have been linked to a long list of other health problems, and the U.S. The airborne byproducts of coke production, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), are known causes of conditions like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart disease and cancer. The people of Clairton breathe air that’s consistently ranked among the worst quality in the nation. “It just zaps all the energy out of you sometimes, the air does,” he said. Johnie Perryman descends from the second story of his Clairton home. To outsiders, Clairton is characterized by news clips headlining environmental concerns about pollution, reports on late-night shootings and features on the football season for the 1A powerhouse Clairton Bears. Today, the coke works employs about 1,400 workers, many of whom don’t live in Clairton.
Since its heyday in the mid-1950s, Clairton’s population has slumped from over 19,000 to just over 6,000. 3, 2021.Ī microcosm of the broader Rust Belt, Clairton represents a portrait of the varied impacts of steel’s decline.
The Clairton marching band marches along Miller Avenue toward the football stadium and the first home game of the season on Sept. It’s quiet, mostly, save for the drone of trucks and trains and the intermittent whine of an industrial siren in the distance. Closed storefronts and broken streetlights frame the tall white plumes rising from the coke works. Today, Clairton’s main thoroughfares lay idle and crumbling.
The city had movie theaters and grocery stores. Musical icons once performed at clubs along State Street. The shift change whistle used to send thousands of workers flooding into the streets. Steel faces lawsuit alleging that Clairton Coke Works ‘decrepit’ condition continues to endanger Mon Valley residents