A tugboat passes United States Steel’s Clairton Coke Works in Clairton, Pennsylvania on the morning of September 9th, 2021. Originally constructed in 1901, the Clairton Coke Works is the largest coke-producing facility in the United States.
The Clairton Mighty Mites youth football team emerges from beneath the bleachers at Neil C. Brown Stadium to take the field for a Saturday little league game on September 18, 2021.
Welcome to Clairton, The City of Prayer
Steel once promised vitality, growth and a sense of national import to this community along the Monongahela River, 15 miles south of Pittsburgh. And for as long as industry could provide, Clairton thrived. It was at the heart of the region’s defining steel industry, and is home to America's largest coke-producing facility — the Clairton Coke Works.
The shift change whistle used to send thousands of workers flooding into the streets. Musical icons like James Brown and Tina Turner once performed at clubs along State Street. There were three movie theaters and four grocery stores. Now, there are none. Today, Clairton’s main thoroughfares lay idle and crumbling. Closed storefronts and broken streetlights frame the tall white plumes rising from the coke works. It’s quiet, mostly, save for the drone of trucks and trains and the intermittent whine of an industrial siren in the distance.
A microcosm of the broader Rust Belt, Clairton represents a portrait of the varied impacts of steel’s decline. Residents cope with a confluence of stifling air pollution, illness, poverty, and community-wide trauma. This year-long project documents the richness of a community often reduced to its struggles, and the complex relationship between Clairton’s environment and the people who live there.
This work received a national Edward R. Murrow Award for Feature Reporting in 2022.
Johnie Perryman lays in his bed at home in Clairton, Pennsylvania on June 22, 2021. Medication bottles line Perryman’s bedside, and protruding from his abdomen are the wirings of the battery-powered device that keeps his failing heart pumping. “Who's going to file murder charges against United States Steel when they kill me? Is anybody going to file charges?” Perryman questioned, recalling statements he made to the Allegheny County Board of Health on March 6, 2019.
Youth football players listen to their coach speak at the end of practice at the fields just across the road from the Clairton Coke Works on August 10, 2021.
The people of Clairton breathe air that’s consistently ranked among the worst quality in the nation.
The airborne byproducts of coke production, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), are known causes of conditions like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart disease and cancer. The pollutants have been linked to a long list of other health problems, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies coke oven emissions as known carcinogens.
The childhood asthma rate in Clairton is over 22%, nearly triple the national average. People here live with an excess lifetime cancer risk from industrial sources that is 2.3 times higher than what the Environmental Protection Agency deems as acceptable risk; U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works contributes about 98.7% of that increased risk, according to ProPublica.
In December 2018, an explosion at the coke works critically damaged the facility’s No. 2 control room, shutting down the pollution control system and causing U.S. Steel to send unfiltered pollutants, including excessive amounts of SO2, into Clairton’s air. Residents weren’t notified for 16 days.
Like steam and soot, residents say illness, too, is a byproduct of steel.
Johnie Perryman descends from the second story of his Clairton home. “It just zaps all the energy out of you sometimes, the air does,” he said.
Chris Wilding stands next to the swimming pool where she says small black particles accumulate on the water’s surface in her backyard across from the Clairton Coke Works in Clairton, Pennsylvania on June 17, 2021. Wilding suffers from a host of health issues linked to air pollution including asthma, COPD, diabetes, emphysema and kidney disease.
Andre Hines, 16, stands for a portrait at the South Park Skatepark in South Park Township, Pennsylvania on June 24, 2021.
“I don’t go outside” when the air is bad, said Hines, who has asthma. He uses an inhaler twice each morning and tries to limit outdoor activity on days when the air is especially poor.
The Clairton band marches along Miller Avenue towards Neil C. Brown Stadium for the first home game of the season in Clairton, Pennsylvania on September 3, 2021.
Art Thomas, a retired union worker of 36 years with United States Steel, stands for a portrait at Clairton Park in Clairton, Pennsylvania on October 3, 2021.
After his wife became sick with neurosarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease linked to air pollution, Art Thomas began advocating for stricter environmental regulations for his former employer through Valley Clean Air Now, a local grassroots advocacy group.
Advances in emissions filtration have decreased the visibility of particles in the air, but Art says it’s no less harmful today than it once was. “It used to be black, now it's white,” he said, “but it’s got the same shit in it.”
If U.S. Steel can’t improve its pollution problem, Art says they should be forced to close. “Clean up or close down,” he said of the corporation that once defined his career and put food on his table.
Youth football players leave practice in Clairton, Pennsylvania on August 10, 2021.
Richard and Georgia Ford hold photographs of their children, Richard (left) and Carmela (right), who died from cancer at age 48 and 25, respectively. Richard, a member of Clairton City Council, lost five members of his family to different forms of cancer. Each of them lived in Clairton. “How does one family have that many members die of cancer?” he said.
A man’s silhouette frames the shadows of broken street lights on Miller Avenue in Clairton, Pennsylvania on August 25, 2021.
A woman holds out a soiled towel after wiping black soot from the windows of her home in Clairton, Pennsylvania on June 3, 2021.
Clairton Mayor Rich Lattanzi, who survived both throat and colon cancer, sits behind his desk surrounded by three terms worth of memories at the municipal building in Clairton, Pennsylvania on August 19th, 2021.
Like many former steelworkers in Clairton, Lattanzi maintains that the air is far better than it used to be. “Those hills back there used to be black,” he said outside of a polling location during the primary election in May 2021, gesturing beyond the white columns of emissions and across the river, where green trees line the hilltops.
“U.S. Steel is about one third of our tax base,” the mayor said. He doesn’t want to see the corporation leave for fear of what it would mean for the city financially. “I think this town would be done.”
(left) Clean air advocate Melanie Meade holds a Summa Canister, a device used to capture environmental air samples for lab testing, as she stands for a portrait in her front yard overlooking the Clairton Coke Works in Clairton, Pennsylvania on April 26, 2021.
(right) Emissions rise from the Clairton Coke Works on September 3, 2021. Many residents say they observe increased emissions from the mill at night and in the early morning.
Dr. Deborah Gentile, an asthma and allergy specialist, speaks to a patient at the Cornerstone Care clinic in Clairton, Pennsylvania on August 10, 2021. Research conducted by Dr. Gentile showed that a 2018 fire at the Clairton Coke Works led to nearly twice as many asthma attacks and a dramatic increase in hospitalizations for people in Clairton with asthma compared to the previous year.
Cheryl Hurt, a lifetime Clairton resident, stands with her 2-year-old grandson, Ky’rell, inside her home daycare in Clairton, Pennsylvania on July 12, 2021. “We don’t see what I grew up seeing,” said Hurt. [The younger people] … don’t understand the small particles that are more deadly than what we used to see because we used to see it, now they can’t see what’s killing us.”
A candlelight vigil on St. Clair Avenue in Clairton, Pennsylvania on September 29th, 2021. Robert Linnen, 41, was shot and killed while leaving a bar in Clairton six days earlier. The murder remains unsolved.
For many people who live in Clairton, poor air quality is not the most immediate concern.
“The last thing we thinking about is the god damn air when we worrying about how to get by, when our kids being shot in the street. We got deeper issues than the air,” explained Annette Halcomb. “When my sons walk outside I’m worried if they’re going to make it back at night.”
Annette’s oldest son, Kenneth Lamont Ward Jr., was shot and killed in McKeesport in 2004. He was 23 years old.
Tina Ford wears a pendant bearing the image of her son, Armani, as she stands for a portrait in the alley where he was shot and killed in 2019 in Clairton, Pennsylvania on June 28, 2021. Armani Ford was 23 years old. The case remains unsolved.
“They could be among us, you know what I mean?” questioned Tina. When killers walk with impunity, she says, it leads her to question those in her own community: “am I among the people that did it? Are they speaking to me? Are they coming to my house?”
Andre Hines carries a photograph of his mother, Uniquea, to midfield before a little league football game on August 22, 2021. He and his grandmother, Karen, and brother, DaeDae, released balloons in her memory on her birthday. Uniquea was killed in 2010 by the boy’s father, leaving the young children to be raised by their grandmother.
Rex Cole, 39, stands in the hallway of the since-abandoned building where he was shot three times at 18 years old in Clairton, Pennsylvania on August 21, 2021.
Violence in a close-knit community like Clairton is a mental health issue, Rex said. “Because in the community, they’ll love you one second, but they can kill you that same night. I had friends killing friends. And you just sit there thinking like we're all just hanging out. We're all friends. What made you shoot him in his back?”
Cheerleaders stand against Neil C. Brown Stadium as Clairton police officers question bystanders after a fight broke out in the stands during halftime of the first home football game of 2021on September 3, 2021.
The Clairton Bears hold the record for the longest win streak in Pennsylvania high school football, at 66 games.
The team has won ten WPIAL championships since 2006 and is widely regarded as the standard among 1A high school football teams in western Pennsylvania.
“There's nothing different that we're doing from other communities that look like ours,” Clairton head coach Wayne Wade said. “We're fighting and battling the same things that they are. There are the same vices in those communities as there are in ours.
“But we've created a culture and a climate of being champions. And it's so hard, once you become a champion, to take that from you.”
The Clairton Mighty Mites pose for a photo after beating the Duquesne Dukes in a rivalry game on September 18, 2021.
Cocoa on her birthday, with her daughter on the hill in Clairton.
Youth football players watch from beneath the bleachers as an older team plays a football game in Clairton, Pennsylvania on September 18, 2021.
Girls dance class with Gwen’s Girls, a local youth program, at Morning Star Baptist Church in Clairton, Pennsylvania on October 13, 2021.
Melanie Meade, a vocal champion of clean air in Clairton, pauses for a moment to collect herself before virtually testifying at an Allegheny County Health Department hearing in March of 2021. “They don’t care,” said Meade of the Allegheny County Health Department. “They don’t hold industry accountable. They don’t stand up for our public health.”
The Clairton Bears prepare to take the field on gameday, September 3, 2021.