‘Dirty’ label does not soot Pittsburgh Posted on May 12th
PITTSBURGH - This old town has been running from its past for decades and, for the most part, it is a race that has been won.
But history bolted in to the present day last week and forced an ironic question: Will this famous city that celebrates its industrial heritage ever really be able to escape the grimy, dark side that came with it?
Pittsburgh, rated the “most livable city” in 1985 and again in 2007 by Places Rated Almanac, is now the “sootiest city” in the United States, worse than even smog-shrouded Los Angeles.
Who says? Well, it’s the usually-worth-paying-attention-to American Lung Association.
“Los Angeles moved faster to reduce levels of particle pollution,” said Janice Nolen of the ALA, based in Washington.
She added that if the trends do not change, Pittsburgh will be No. 1 for year-round pollution next year, too.
To those who live and work here, or whose job is to sell the city, this new distinction is no laughing matter. Modern Pittsburgh is taking a public relations hit for the past that made it famous.
Tourism boosters Visit Pittsburgh and the Greater Pittsburgh Hotel Association both declined to comment. Others, however, sternly criticized the testing methods and said the bad score blows in from a single source - the Clairton Works coke plant, a remnant of the region’s grit-and-grime past just 15 miles from Pittsburgh’s city line.
Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato was critical of the report’s methodology.
“It’s an irresponsible report that offers no context of where this city is going,” he said. “Anybody who lives here can tell you that if you look at the air today vs. 30 years ago, we’ve made great strides.”
Allegheny County Health Department spokesman Guillermo Cole also said the ranking was unfair.
“It’s a distortion,” he said. “The American Lung Association even acknowledged that if you exclude the Liberty-Clairton monitoring station, if you don’t count that area, we would rank 16th of 222 metro areas. Not that that is something to crow about, but you don’t make headlines when you’re 16th nationally or even locally.”
Nolen said one metric in determining the rankings was the number of weighted average days of high particle pollution levels. In this year’s survey, Pittsburgh recorded 62 such days. In last year’s survey, it had 60.7 days.
“It’s a very serious threat,” she said, “whether you are breathing it in the short term at a spiked level, or day in, day out at a lower level. Unfortunately, we are seeing problems with both levels of exposure among people in Pittsburgh.”
The Clairton Works is a sprawling 3.3 miles long and takes up 400 acres. Its “quench towers” shoot off bursts of steam, producing large white clouds every few minutes.
On the hillside overlooking the plant is the Allegheny County Health Department monitoring station.
Bright green pipes stretch for 11 miles alongside Route 837 and the Monongahela River. They link the three U.S. Steel facilities, the only three remaining steel mills in the region - Irvin, Clairton and Edgar Thomson. Combined, the three plants employ 3,500.
Clairton produces the oven gas, transported through the green pipes, that the two other facilities use.
Nicknamed “The City of Prayer,” Clairton, with a population today of about 12,000, is far different from what it was when steel was king.
At its peak, the Clairton plant produced just over eight million tons of coke a year - used in blast furnaces to convert iron ore into liquid iron.
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