Neville Island smokestacks toppled
Shenango Coke Works had history of air, water pollution violations
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Shortly before noon Tuesday in Ben Avon, at the dead-end foot of Monitor Avenue, directly across the Ohio River from DTE’s Shenango Coke Works on Neville Island, a small crowd gathered.
They were there to see stuff blown up by dynamite — two 200-foot-tall brick smokestacks and a massive, two-tiered concrete coal storage bunker.
And from David Mielnicki’s backyard deck perched on the cliff’s edge above the river and Shenango, they had a perfect view.
“I’ve seen that thing growing up here my whole life,” said Mr. Mielnicki, 31, nodding toward the coke works that closed its 54year-old ovens in January 2016. “It’s really cool now to see it all go down.”
Shirley Cooknick, Mr. Mielnicki’s grandmother, watched from the porch, playing it safe after a demolition company employee, who earlier that morning had set up a seismograph at the edge of the cliff to measure shockwaves from the blasts, warned her to stay inside if the demolition sent thick clouds of dust her way.
At precisely noon, the sound of the first dynamite charge cracked across the river, clean and sharp like a rifle shot, and the bunker dropped to its knees, sending up a thick cloud of black coal dust.
Duller-sounding simultaneous blasts brought down the smokestacks, both collapsing in on themselves and toppling like dominoes. They sent bigger plumes of dust, several shades lighter than the bunker dust, skyward.
All three structures fell in seconds. The dust clouds hung over the Shenango site for a few seconds more, then began to slowly move southwest, across the island and the back channel of the river, then up into the wooded, uninhabited Kennedy hillside, where they dispersed after a few minutes.
“It produced more of a shock wave and blast than I thought it would,” said Gary Buckman, assistant fire chief of the Ben Avon Volunteer Fire Department, who was carrying a police scanner and said he just stopped by to help out if necessary. “That happened real fast, and all the smoke went in the opposite direction.”
Following the demolition, Allegheny County Health Department Director Karen Hacker issued a statement saying members of the department’s air quality and asbestos programs
observed the demolition and did not identify any air quality violations.
According to the ACHD, “the dust and materials had dissipated within 15 minutes of the implosion,” and the first four hourly air pollution readings from the county’s Avalon monitoring station following the implosions showed no pollution impact there.
Debbie Santucci, Mr. Mielnicki’s mother, said she’s happy the coke gas flare that burned on the island day and night is gone and that the coke works has stopped emitting air pollution that affected the health of residents in Ben Avon and the other populous municipalities northeast of the river.
“I used to come out of our house to go somewhere and had to dust off my car before I got in in because it was covered with black and sparkly dust from Shenango,” Ms. Santucci said. “I’m so happy to see those smokestacks fall.”
But those smokestacks represented something different to Dave Nelson of Avalon, who worked at Shenango for 32 years and, like his father and grandfather before him, was able to pay his bills and raise a family working there.
“They’re just memories,” he said of his time in the coke works. “They’re not good and they’re not bad. When I started, they didn’t have [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] or the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]. We did whatever and there were no rules.”
He was a daylight foreman in the coke works chemical plant and said emissions problems that developed overnight sometimes went uncorrected until morning and workers, including himself, were accidentally exposed to extremely toxic chemicals.
He said rules were needed because industries “were getting away with murder” and some, like Shenango, operated in a populated area.
Emissions from coking facilities are among the most toxic of industrial emissions, and Shenango had a more than 30-year history of air and water pollution violations for which it paid more than $2 million in federal and county penalties.
“So there should be some restrictions, but there also needs to be give and take to allow companies to operate,” he said. “My dad said each year they’d hear the place was going to be shut down, and he told me, ‘One day they’re going to be right.’ He would say just keep working until that day comes. Well, we all were able to retire before it shut down.”