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“This historic announcement should send a message to all illegal polluters who put the health and environment of Pittsburgh at risk: We will not sit by while illegal air pollution rains death down on nearby communities and the Pennsylvanians who live in them,” David Masur, PennEnvironment’s executive director, told the crowd at a press conference on Monday, Jan. 29, at the Allegheny County Courthouse.
The environmental organization was celebrating the settlement of a lawsuit against U.S. Steel spurred by a Christmas Eve 2018 fire at the Clairton Coke Works. The record $42 million settlement includes $37 million in plant upgrades and the shutting down of coke oven Battery 15 — which holds 60 of Clairton’s approximately 600 ovens.
The remaining $5 million is a penalty U.S. Steel will pay toward public health projects in the Mon Valley. The Allegheny County Clean Air Fund will receive $500,000, with $4.5 million split between the Jefferson Regional Foundation and the Allegheny County Department of Economic Development.
The $5 million penalty is the largest Clean Air Act citizen enforcement payout in the state, beating a $1.5 million penalty against the Monessen Coke Works from a suit PennEnvironment was also involved in.
In a Friday press release, U.S. Steel wrote that it regrets the accidental incidents. U.S. Steel writes that $19.5 million will be spent on “upgrades to coke oven gas cleaning facilities,” but did not mention the additional $17.5 million for the repair of deteriorating facilities PennEnvironment mentions as part of the settlement.
The steel manufacturer also refers to the $5 million penalty as contributions “to projects supporting public health and welfare and/or air quality improvement in the Mon Valley.”
Matt Donohue, a National Environmental Law Center lawyer who litigated the case, says the plant upgrades, penalty payments and public health funds imposed by the settlement address the pollution of the Clairton, Edgar Thomson and Irvin Works through compliance, deterrence and remediation, respectively.
A consent decree — a document containing the terms of the settlement — was filed before the Monday, Jan. 29, press event, Donohue says.
“We expect that after a 45-day waiting period, the consent decree will be signed by Judge W. Scott Hardy, and at that time, it will become an official order of the federal court in Pittsburgh; it will be enforceable by the court in Pittsburgh,” Donohue says.
David Meckel, a Glassport resident and a witness for the lawsuit, said that the $5 million penalty was not enough.
“You need something that’s a real attention-getter like about 20 or 30 million,” Meckel says. “This is like if you were speeding in a school zone 100 miles per hour and they fined you one penny.”
Meckel recounted the difficulty he began having simply cutting his grass due to the pollution. Local kids, he says, sometimes aren’t able to have recess outdoors because the air is unsafe to breathe.
“They pay the fine and they continue to pollute,” Meckel says. “Nothing slows them down; nothing stops them. They are not going to fix anything; they don’t plan to fix anything. They’re selling a broken factory to Japan, and hopefully Nippon Steel [which is expected to acquire U.S. Steel later this year] will fix the problem and put the money into it and make it a clean, efficient business which it is not at the present time.
“They don’t care about you, and they’ve been killing you for over a hundred years.”
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