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Let's not romanticize the steel industry.  In the age of open hearth furnaces, it was a dirty, smelly and dangerous operation.  The industry today is cleaner, more profitable, more productive and much more efficient than it has ever been.  As a native of Western PA, I can recall when the night sky glowed red over Duquesne and Braddock as steel was being made in the Mon Valley.  Now the only active Blast Furnaces in all of Pennsylvania are at U.S. Steel's Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, where USS uses the furnaces, the basic oxygen process (BOP), and a Dual-strand continuous slab caster to produce slab steel for the nearby Irvin Works. <a href="http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=35456">http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=35456</a>The slabs are delivered by the Union Rail Road,<a href="http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=108163">http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=108163</a>which, by the way, is one of the most photogenic shortlines in the eastern U.S.Also, in an age of ICBMs and B-2 Bombers, the U.S. is not likely to fight another two ocean World War which required huge quantities of steel for tanks, battleships and ammunition.  We can justifiably lament the loss of jobs and the decline of steel-making communities that transpired when Big Steel disappeared from much of Rust-Belt America, but it was inevitable that most of the large, vertically-integrated manufacturers would become industrial dinosaurs as the economics favored lower-cost, i.e., nonunion, mini-mills and foreign producers and as the technology evolved. In southwestern PA, there have been tangible economic and environmental benefits to the disappearance of heavy industry.  The air and water are cleaner and we now have access to  the riverfronts, where these brownfields have been and are being reclaimed by public and private monies. Where the Homestead Works once stood, for instance, Pittsburgh now shops and dines at the Waterfront, a bustiling retail complex beside the Mon. River.  <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06211/709449-85.stm">http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06211/709449-85.stm</a>Ironically, U.S. Steel returned to the site of the Homestead Works, when it moved its Research Center from Monroeville to a building at the Waterfront that Siemens had planned to use but then abandoned.   And the historic Carrie Furnace in Rankin, which served Homestead, will be preserved by Allegheny County, which acquired the property in 2005 and is seeking designation of it as a national historic site by the federal govt. <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07074/769438-56.stm">http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07074/769438-56.stm</a>Dave
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