Todd Barrett was with a crew of laborers at the Clairton coke works that morning when they all felt something.
“We were at lunch at the time, and we heard a loud boom. We weren’t sure what it was, so we went outside,” said Barrett. “We went out to see what was going on because it shook our building, and we looked out and seen black smoke.”
It was an explosion at batteries 13 and 14 at the plant. The batteries consist of dozens of tall, narrow ovens where coal is processed into coke, a key material for steelmaking.
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Barrett’s co-worker, Joshua Pershing, had worked in those batteries when he was just starting at the plant in 2017. That’s when he got to know Timothy Quinn, 39, of Westmoreland County, one of two workers who died in the explosion.
“If you looked at Timmy, you saw the tattoos, the piercings and everything. But you talked to Timmy, it was like he could take a bad day, or take you from a bad mood and just have you laughing in a second,” Pershing said.
Also killed in the explosion was 52-year-old Steven Menefee. Pershing is a fourth-generation steelworker. He’s heard stories of things like this happening at the plant from years ago.
In 2009, an explosion in a control room killed one worker, and the following year, another explosion injured 20 workers. And Pershing was at work on Christmas Eve, 2018, when a fire tore through the plant’s pollution control building.
“We knew what we were getting in for when we put our names on the paper to come here and work. It pays the bills, it makes us a living,” he said.
In addition to the workers who died, 10 others were sent to area hospitals, and multiple workers were treated at the scene for minor injuries. Pershing said the mood inside the mill among its 1,000 or so workers was serious.
“Right now we’re all in a somber mood, every single man and woman in that place,” he said. “Because, you know, them guys, we saw them every day.”
For neighbors, a boom and a scramble to move indoors
About a half-mile away from the plant, Janelle Chapman was sitting on her back porch in Clairton that Monday morning.
“I just heard this loud explosion, the house shook, my back screen door flew open,” said Chapman, 37. “Then I looked over and I saw a big black cloud of smoke coming down from the mill, so I kind of figured something blew up down there. I hopped up and went in the house. I didn’t want to be inhaling (any) fumes.”
Chapman called her brother, who works at the plant, and made sure he was okay.
Though she was worried about air pollution that day, she says the air quality in Clairton doesn’t affect her or her children that much.
“With me personally, it really doesn’t affect me, but I know other people around that have like health problems,” she said.
The Allegheny County Health Department advised people within one mile of the plant to stay indoors after the explosion, but lifted that advisory several hours later. Officials say air monitors near the plant showed no spikes in air pollution.
Clairton Coke Works, site of Monday’s explosion, has a history of problems
A wish for clean air in Clairton
But Melanie Meade of Clairton says she’s had health symptoms since the explosion.
“I feel a lot more fatigued, I don’t have an appetite,” she said. “I haven’t seen any plumes, but I feel like something is going on.”
Meade has felt symptoms like dizziness since moving back to Clairton in 2013, when her parents got sick, and lives in her family home now that they have since passed away.
Meade wants someone in government to hold the company accountable for the health of workers and nearby residents.
The coke works is Allegheny County’s largest source of air pollution and has racked up $56 million in settlements and fines since 2022. The plant has violated the Clean Air Act in each of the past 12 quarters, according to the EPA, and is by far the largest single source of air pollutants in Allegheny County.
“You need to shut those batteries down and really have someone get in there” to investigate why the plant keeps polluting the area, Meade said. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an agency the Trump administration plans to eliminate, is investigating the accident.
Meade was vocal about high levels of pollution in early 2019 after the Christmas Eve fire knocked out the plant’s pollution controls for months, causing a 4,500 percent increase in sulfur pollution from the plant and a rise in local asthma cases.
So Meade was not surprised that an accident like this would happen.
“I have been expecting this to happen since 2019. They’ve had several explosions this year,” Meade said.
One in February sent two workers to the hospital.
‘It’s just always been there’
Debbie Clinton grew up in Clairton and lives in nearby Whitehall. When the explosion occurred, she was on the phone with her sister, who was in the family’s home in Clairton, taking care of their mother.
“When the explosion happened, she jumped and said, ‘What was that?’ and said the whole house shook, and her legs were like jelly,” Clinton said.
Clinton had been worried about fumes from the explosion affecting her mother, but said overall air pollution from the plant hasn’t affected her family.
“My mom’s 93, her neighbor down the street is 93, a gentleman on the street behind her is 96. They have lived here most, or if not all of their lives, and I don’t know why that pollution affects some people and not others,” she said.
Clinton remembers when the steel industry went bust in the ‘80s and the Mon Valley lost population. She hopes one day that the population comes back. She says the coke works has always been a part of her life.
“It’s been here 100-and-some years. It’s part of the community,” she said. “I really don’t think about it much. It’s just always been there, and you drive past the mill every day.”
U.S. Steel’s new owner, Nippon Steel, said it was fully committed to providing “all necessary resources” to the healing process with “safety at the center of everything we do.”
