Article

2025-04-15 Economy

US has 10 Blast Furnaces Left (UK Just Nationalized Their Last One - For a Museum?)

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Posted by Gloluns Turkeyneck4904 2025-04-15 06:07|| || Front Page|| [10330 views ] Top

#1 One of the nastiest places in the world to work.

Temps well over 120F [160 in the PPE], fumes, dirt/grit/coke dust(the bad kind), hydration breaks. Inland Steel/Indiana Harbor, 6 years.

A lot like Texas summers.

Posted by Skidmark 2025-04-15 10:45|| 2025-04-15 10:45|| Front Page Top

#2 Quick search - in 1875 there were 700 blast furnaces in the US making an average of 25 tons of steel a day. In 1950 the US Steel Works in Gary, Indiana had 12 operating. Serious decline. Amazing that the Chinese purchased the last one in the UK and then were going to shut it down before the LABOR government decided to nationalize it.

Posted by Clem+Elmish4239 2025-04-15 11:33|| 2025-04-15 11:33|| Front Page Top

#3 My oldest brother worked at Armco in Middletown, OH first as a mason relining the blast furnace and later as a Mill Wright repairing the manufacturing equipment. His wife had to wash his work cloths at the laundromat because all of the grit and ironing filings would destroy a home washer. I believe that it still has an operational Blast Furnace.

Posted by TZSenator 2025-04-15 12:28|| 2025-04-15 12:28|| Front Page Top

#4 12 operating. Serious decline.

Decline in numbers, certainly (my darling father-in-law worked at Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna (Buffalo), NY until it closed in the 1980s). But I suspect those twelve produced considerably more — and better — steel than the 25 tons/day it needed 700 to make three quarters of a century earlier. Are America’s ten now all specialty manufacturers, or are some mass producers like the old days?

Posted by trailing wife 2025-04-15 13:22|| 2025-04-15 13:22|| Front Page Top

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