How about cutting our industries some slack on the environment?
Environmentalists should remember these companies could easily make their products overseas instead of in Hamilton
When I was young you could stand on the brow or cross the skyway and the industrial sector was a huge brown smudge that drifted up into the sky.
Now for the most part you look on the Hamilton horizon and it is clean and clear. Most of the time? I started work as a maintenance apprentice at Dofasco in the late seventies. I started in the coke ovens and blast furnaces and had opportunities to work all throughout the plant in my 35 years there.
Everywhere I went great sums of money were being spent on pollution controls and dust reduction.
Let’s be realistic. Making steel is a dirty, stinky process starting with the cooking of coal to produce coke yet for all the fire and brimstone taking place behind those walls there is very little smoke emitted overall.
Every time there is a nasty plume seen rising from these steel plants the cameras all come out and pictures are taken followed by demands that basically they shut down the only industries we have in this city anymore, forever. These people do not understand or care about the extraordinary effort that goes into eliminating emissions, however, with great technology comes the chance of failure of these very systems. When a valve or damper sticks and you get an over pressure in a furnace or vessel you have two choices. Vent or blow the place up. When hot iron somehow comes into contact with water the result is a great explosion. Do the environmentalists think the steel plants want this to happen?
ArcelorMittal Dofasco has asked for an extension to meet targets for pollution and our elected politicians would rather shutter the place than grant an extension or perhaps more fines would help? Stelco recently said they would like to restart their blast furnace. A project that would take years and tens of millions of dollars to see happen.
This could finally signal a turning point for this ailing giant, producing jobs and work for locals and all our Mayor Fred had to say about it was it had better spew nothing but flowers from its stacks?
All these environmentalists that think they are helping by calling the ministry of environment every time they see a puff of smoke should try to understand that all the steel Hamilton produces could be made in other countries, that have little care about pollution, and pay their employees far less than we do, and do it cheaper.
So how about cutting some of Hamilton’s largest private employers a little slack and appreciate the fact that they are still here investing in Hamilton?
Brian Stephenson lives in Binbrook