Anthony Prince, Nijmie Dzurinko, Larry Regan
The August 11, 2025 explosion at U.S. Steel’s Clairton (Pennsylvania) Coke Works comes 118 years after journalist William Hard wrote “Making Steel and Killing Men,” a groundbreaking report on U.S. Steel’s South (Chicago) Works where 46 men were killed in a single year.
Last month, when a massive gas explosion killed Timothy Quinn, 39 and Steve Menefee, 52 and injured ten others at U.S. Steel’s Clairton (Pennsylvania) Coke Works, they weren’t actually making steel. What these men were doing, what they sacrificed their lives to produce, metallurgical coke: coal baked at nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit until it becomes over 85% percent pure carbon. From there, it goes to the blast furnace where it efficiently fuels a mixture of iron ore and limestone at 3,000 degrees F. creating pig iron which, after oxygen is injected at supersonic speeds, becomes steel.
I know all about coke and the deadly black dust it produces because I worked on the blast furnace in the very same mill which William Hard used to tear back the curtain and reveal the human cost in tears, sweat and blood of making steel in America. When I was Employee No. 13056 at the once giant - now extinct - South (Chicago) Works of the United States Steel Corporation, the coke came in on barges nearly round the clock, The dust laden stock house, where the scale cars added up the tons, looked like the inside of a Kentucky coal mine.
Then, more dust as the coke was loaded into skip cars and hauled 200 feet up the side of the blast furnace where it was charged, along with the raw materials needed to make iron, into the “throat” of the hissing, roaring, smoking, fire-breathing, gas-producing coke-burning inferno. For every one minute that molten iron was tapped we created one million dollars in profits for the world’s largest steel corporation.
Not only as a steelworker, but as Chairman of USWA Local 65’s Union Safety Committee, I knew, with 5,000 serious lost-time injuries and five fatalities in as many years, how death, injury and occupational disease stalked our mill, just as it did at the Clairton Works. I knew, too, that it was the negligent recklessness and thirst for profit of the world’s largest steel company that held the plant gate open for the Grim Reaper.
In 1978 I saw it in the South Works foundry, where we found silica dust levels 10 times the legally allowable airborne concentration, where we had 26 confirmed cases of complex silicosis, where “G.I.” Joe Banvich, tethered to an oxygen pump, made the front page of an award-winning special edition of the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “The Working Wounded”.
I saw it in the horribly charred remains of Paul de la Garza in the Basic Oxygen Shop when a long ago reported but un-repaired defective warning horn failed to operate just as the brakes jammed on an overhead crane carrying 10 tons of molten steel. Paul never heard or saw it coming as the ladle tipped and the metal poured down. He was five days away from retirement.
And I saw it in the early 1980’s when U.S. Steel became “USX” diverting its profits to buy Marathan Oil, a piece of Disneyworld and other lucrative investments while shutting down South Works one department at a time. Last to go was the #4 Electric Furnace where Eddie Cimochowski, working out of his job class, with no safety man watching, without the full crew mandated by U.S. Steel’s official “Safe Job Procedures,” was crushed under a massive iron shear used to cut scrap. I saw how the company illegally altered the scene of the accident before the Cook County States Attorney could determine if a charge of negligent homicide might be considered.
Even when the mills closed, thousands of us were barely able to draw a breath, thanks to permanent scarring of our lungs from years of exposure to coke breeze, silica dust, asbestos and other deadly occupational toxins. “We left the mill,” we said, “but the mill didn’t leave us.” And the killing of men (and women) took other forms. Journalist William Serrin writes about the rash of suicides that followed U.S. Steel’s announced shutdown of the Homestead Works. He tells of Foreman David Sapos who wrapped a steel cable around his neck and jumped off a structural beam to his death. Rich Locher lost his job as a crane operator, studied nursing but still couldn’t find a job. He shot himself in his own garage.
Mike Stout, a former crane operator and chief grievance officer for Steelworkers Local 1397 at the Homestead Works, recalls the impact of the deindustrialization of the Mon Valley:
“Within a five-year period from 1981 through 1986, I personally knew ninety-one workers under the age of sixty who died of strokes, cancer, heart attacks or suicide. It was an economic war.”
Today we see the face of the steelworkers in those permanently disabled from injuries and occupational disease. We see it in the hospital burn units. We see that face and those of our families in the polluted air we breathe. And we see it on the streets of Pittsburgh, South Chicago and Gary, Indiana where the ranks of the unsheltered and unhoused include men and women whose descent into homelessness began when the mills and fabricating shops and all the jobs dependent on the steel industry disappeared.
I remember the last time I drove from Chicago to the old Steelworkers Local 1397 headquarters in Homestead across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. It was 1991, two years had passed since the Homestead mill had closed. The sign reading “Local 1397 Hall” was gone, replaced by one that read “Club 97.” It had become a community refuge center, established and operated by former steelworkers and their sons, for the those who had been tossed onto the human scrapheap. I talked to them about a new Union that I was helping to build: a Union of poor people, of the homeless, of cast-offs from the cast house, from the coke oven to the corner, from the structural mill to the structurally unemployed. I told them how we had formed the Chicago/Gary Area Union of the Homeless, how we were using what we learned organizing on the shop floor to build a new movement for jobs, housing and health care for all.
This year’s annual Labor Day parade through Pittsburgh began with a “moment of silence” for the men who died at the Clairton Coke Works. But now it’s time for us to be heard. Time to demand accountability for these deaths and bring an end to the industrial slaughter that each year claims over 5,000 men and women. And that doesn’t include the tens of thousands who suffer permanently disabling injuries and occupational disease.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Today, as we consider the victims of the Clairton Coke Works disaster, we lift our banner inscribed with the time-honored watchword: “Remember the dead; Fight like hell for the living.”
The author is the former Chairman of the Steelworkers Local 65 Safety and Health Committee at U.S. Steel’s South (Chicago) Works and currently serves as Lead Organizer and General Legal Counsel for the National Union of the Homeless. He can be contacted at princelawoffices@yahoo.com.
I grew up in Monessen, a steel town in Westmoreland County about 30 miles South of Pittsburgh. My grandfather worked for Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel. When I was 7, I wrote an essay about the necessity and importance of labor unions. In what was one of the highlights of my childhood, I won a $50 prize for the essay and attended an award ceremony in a nearby state park.
My grandfather never talked about his work but his labor instilled in me a work ethic that lives on to this day - in positive and negative ways. The kind of belief system that accepts difficult labor as a given and a necessity. The kind that assesses people by their ability to sacrifice for the sake of work.
My experience of my grandfather also contributed to the commitment I would eventually develop to a fundamental transformation of this society. Not because he and I were close, but because I saw in him someone whose labor dominated his whole life. My grandfather’s independent thoughts, goals, ideas, and dreams, if he had them, dissolved under the pressure of decades of crushing physical labor. I grew up understanding that the mill could take everything, including one’s life, as it did to my grandmother’s brother who years before was knocked into a vat of molten metal.
In 1985, Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel filed for bankruptcy. In 1986 the Monessen mill closed. One year later, my uncle moved me and my grandparents out of Monessen 4 hours away to Southeastern PA.
Like Monessen, Clairton also sits along the Monongahela River. Like Monessen, Clairton grew up as a steel town, and both hit their peak of population in the 1940s and 1950s. Now both hover around 6,000 residents. Clairton has a 30% “official” poverty rate, which means that if we use the more comprehensive measure of the Poor People’s Campaign the rate would double to 60%. Clairton is racially mixed, with about half white and half Black residents. Although I never heard of Clairton Coke Works growing up, my grandfather’s mill used its coke to make steel.
Since founding Put People First! PA in 2012, and developing a regional Healthcare Rights Committee in Southwestern PA, I’ve come to know more about Clairton, and to understand the role of Clairton Coke Works in poisoning the surrounding community. Its residents, like Ms. Pamela Lee, have joined our ranks of fighters for healthcare justice. Coke production leads to chemicals like benzene, mercury and lead in the air residents breathe. According to ProPublica, Clairton residents have 2.3 times more than the EPA’s “acceptable limit” for lifetime cancer risk, which can be attributed to the Coke works. And fully 1⁄4 of children living near the plant have been diagnosed with asthma, which does not account for all of the undiagnosed cases.
The Poor People’s Campaign names systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation and the war economy as the four evils of our time. All of these evils flourish in Clairton, because of a system that puts profit over our lives. The tragic explosion in which two workers were killed and 10 were injured is only the most recent example of the system’s fruit. This Labor Day, we must understand that the working-class fight is bigger than a new contract. It is for a new system where workers control the production process; what they produce is for the purpose of meeting human needs and not for Wall Street; and we use the technological means at hand to heal, not poison the earth and our bodies.
The author is a Co-founder and Root Coordinator of Put People First! PA, on the Coordinating Committee of the Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign and a Member of the Organizing Team of the Non-Violent Medicaid Army. She can be contacted at: nijmied@gmail.com.
I was president of Local 1014 at the Gary Works in 1987 when U.S. Steel took a reckless and casual approach to safety. We had two men killed who were using argon gas on a maintenance. Job. The gas is invisible and they had no respirators. When other men tried to rescue them, those men were overcome. Like we told the newspapers at the time, it was because U.S. Steel was combining jobs and cutting spending on safety.
Mike Wright, our International Union Safety Director came out and said the accident was a direct result of the company running thin on maintenance. My Safety Chairman, Willie Moore, who later became President of the local, told them that U.S.Steel (which was called “USX” at the time) was not accurately reporting injuries and telling people who got hurt to stay at work so that the mill could keep a low lost workday rate.
In fact, this was the same year that at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had cited U.S. Steel for willfully underreporting injuries at the Clairton Coke Works.
In 1988 we walked out of a company-union joint safety conference at a theater in the Raddison Hotel in Merrillville to protest how our guys were being exposed to old asbestos pipe insulation in the 210-inch plate mill. It was falling all over the floor and they had some guy with a broom and a shovel picking it up which was totally against the regulations.
I told the local papers how they were exposing our workers, about what would happen if a wind came through that building and blew those deadly fibers all over the plant. I told them it was hypocrisy for U.S. Steel officials to be sitting there at the Holiday Star Theater talking about safety when they had this casual approach to safety inside the plant. And I told them that we’d had other incidents such as a toxic gas leak on the blast furnace that was over the prescribed parts per million and it took hours for them to correct the problem.
We had sulfur dioxide coming off our coke ovens and the whole region from Michigan City, Indiana to South Chicago was known as the cancer capital of the world. These were some of the issues that we faced when we were negotiating our contract in 1986 when U.S. Steel locked us out for six months. They were trying to starve us out and we got hold of purchase orders showing that they were stockpiling small arms and tear gas. When the
UAW autoworkers came to support us, they brought 400 gas masks with them. I told the newspapers, “What does U.S. Steel want? Another Homestead massacre?”[1]
We brought Jesse Jackson out to support us. He was running for president at that time. We had a big march to the plant gates with the steelworkers and 200 ministers. Jesse pointed to a building on the other side of the gate. I told him it was the main office of the mill. So Jesse just walked right in and we followed. Georgia Brooks was in the back of a pick-up truck with a sound system and she gave the most beautiful rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic I ever heard.
Right now, the current administration is trying to get rid of federal agencies that are supposed to protect workers on the job. As part of the proposed fiscal year 2026 budget, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) which is currently investigating the Clairton Coke Works explosion.
Experts and safety advocates argue the CSB's role is unique. It is supposed to focus on the "deeper root causes" of accidents, such as systemic failures and workplace culture, even though we have to push them to do so. We have to fight to keep these public agencies and make them do what they’re supposed to do. Otherwise, it might be left entirely to the owners of the nation’s mines, mills and factories where workers have been injured and killed – owners like U.S. Steel. We can’t let that happen.
The explosion that killed and wounded my fellow steelworkers in Clairton should never be forgotten. The struggle for human life over profit must go forward.
A Phoenix needs to rise from these ashes.
Larry Regan is the former President of United Steelworkers of America Local 1014 at the Gary (Indiana) Works of U.S. Steel; He recently retired as Vice-President of Teamsters Local 142 and is a Senior Advisor to the National Union of the Homeless. Photo: Larry Regan(L), Jesse Jackson(R)
In 1892, during a bitter strike against Carnegie Steel - later named United States Steel - ten men were killed when thousands of Homestead steelworkers were fired upon by Pinkerton detectives. ↩︎