Two workers were killed and ten were sent to area hospitals from the explosion on Monday at the U.S. Steel Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh.
Don Furko is a mechanical maintenance planner who this week reached his 25th anniversary at the U.S. Steel Plant, and who, until recently, was president of the local United Steelworkers union.
Furko was working in a building separate from the battery units where the explosion took place. Batteries are essentially a series of super-hot ovens set to around 2000 degrees.
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“It was about a quarter to 11 [o’clock]. All of a sudden, the whole building shook,” he said.
He thought maybe something had happened in his building.
“And I started getting text messages from people down the river asking me what happened. In other words, it shook the whole Mon Valley pretty hard, and then realized that it had to be from outside,” Furko said. “So I followed my coworker out and walked over to the east side of the building and saw all the smoke coming from 13, 14 battery.”
He followed his coworker out of the building and saw all the smoke coming from the direction of the 13 and 14 battery. Furko grabbed some protective gear and sprang into action, heading straight toward the battery to see if he could help anyone..
“It was chaos. I’m not a veteran. I don’t want to liken it to a war zone, but I just saw everything mangled between 13 and 14 battery. It obviously had blown out, outwards through the east and west sides of the battery,” Furko said.
He found a couple of guys he knew were on a break, almost directly across from where the battery exploded. Furko said debris hit the lunchroom.
“The one guy got knocked out of his chair from the blast,” he continued.
Since they were uninjured, he and his friend went down to try to help the first victims that were found. Furko said that they were “blown clear of the battery – about a hundred feet from where they were standing.”
Furko said plant managers had had only seconds to try to evacuate people once they realized a blast was imminent.
Afterward, “Everybody was exercising caution because we just had an explosion. We’re worried about a second one,” he said. “But while I was checking on three members that I knew were hurt, apparently that’s when they found Mr. Quinn, deceased in the rubble.”
Thirty-nine-year-old Timothy Quinn was the father of three.
“Somebody saw the top of his shoe, and when they dug him out, unfortunately, he had already passed, no way of really giving CPR.”
Battery workers at the plant work in pairs, for safety and other reasons, according to Furko.
“So I found his partner, who had just got out of there a split second ahead of Tim. I had to break the bad news to him that he passed away,” Furko said.
The search for missing workers
By the afternoon, emergency crews from numerous communities were on the scene; they still had not located two workers.
“I think everybody was just pretty much waiting to see if the two guys that were unaccounted for, if they would be pulled out, what the plan was going to be to try to rescue or recover them,” Furko said.
One of the workers was found alive.
“So you had a procession of everybody passing him along on a stretcher, to where there was an actual gurney to go and take him into the ambulance,” Furko said. “Basically, there was no line between union and management. Everybody was one team trying to get our members back safe.”
Later that night, rescue crews found a second deceased plant worker.
The following day, Tuesday, at the plant
On Tuesday, Scott Buckiso, executive vice president of U.S. Steel, said there was one explosion on Monday, followed by the releases from two pressure valves. Batteries 13 and 14 remained offline, while 19 and 20 were online, he said.
“Everybody’s shocked and upset by what happened yesterday,” Furko said. “It’s very quiet. But, Furko said, many workers were back at the plant on Tuesday.
“I’m sure that if somebody wanted to stay home because of yesterday, I don’t think that they[the company] would have an issue with that,” he said. “The operating crews aren’t operating right now, so they might actually feel better being in a group situation because we work with each other. You spend more time with your coworkers than you do your family. So it’s almost like your second family. And it might be better psychologically to spend time with the crew and reflect on everything.”
He said both the company and the union are providing counselors for workers who need to talk.
Furko said he wanted to wait and see before commenting on the company’s liability.
“But if the root cause was not fixing something that should have been repaired long ago, or some other mistake that could have been prevented, I don’t know…” he said, ending this thought midsentence.
Furko said the plant is cleaner and less polluting than it was when he started working there 25 years ago. U.S. Steel said the investigation into the cause of the blast is ongoing.
