Vol. 74/No. 29      August 2, 2010

Brian Doyle, one of the injured workers, told the press that the alarm went off on his gas detector indicating dangerous levels before the blast, but his crew kept trying to seal the pipe they were working on. He said the explosion picked him up and blew him across the floor.

Less than a year ago an explosion in the plant killed a worker for a pipe installation contractor.

The Clairton Coke Works is the biggest coke manufacturing facility in the United States. Some 1,500 workers produce an annual 4.7 million tons of coke—coal baked at high temperature to remove impurities for making steel.

In spite of U.S. Steel’s long history of safety violations at the plant, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has a record of imposing only paltry fines for violations. OSHA fined the company $2,600 in 2005 for hazardous conditions. In 2006 the agency fined the company just $7,000 when a worker lost both legs after being struck by equipment.

The United Steelworkers union, which organizes most of the workers at the Clairton plant, is sending a team to investigate the July 14 explosion. Steelworkers union spokesperson Gerald Dickey downplayed the company’s responsibility in an early statement. “There’s no reason for us to believe it was a dangerous place to work,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Steelmaking is a dangerous business. There’s going to be situations that happen.”

OSHA issued a statement just hours after the explosion asserting that the blast that day and the one in 2009 “occurred in two separate areas of the plant and are unrelated.” The agency said that it did not issue citations or fine U.S. Steel for the 2009 incident “because plant employees were not exposed to any hazards.”

Maureen Revetta, whose husband Nicholas was killed in the 2009 blast, criticized OSHA for closing that investigation without determining the cause. “How could someone who is supposed to be protecting the safety of workers tell me that?” she said to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Expressing her support for the newly injured workers Revetta told WPIX TV that she thought OSHA’s job is “to provide an explanation as to what happened and to make the workplace safe for the men that have to go there every day.”
 
 
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