The history of the Liège steel industry goes back further than the birth of Belgium in 1830. In 1817, the Englishman John Cockerill founded his first steelworks in Seraing to produce the steel for his looms. In the following decades, the steel industry develops to its peak, until it takes its first hits in the early 1980s. The majority of the steel activity in Liège and Charleroi is then brought together in Cockerill Sambre. Several blast furnaces, coking plants, coal mines, hot and cold rolling mills, factories for processing blast furnace slag,... dominated the Walloon economy for almost 200 years.
Various mergers and acquisitions attempted to revive the declining steel industry. When the Indian steel giant Mittal came on the scene in 2006 and took over Arcelor to form ArcelorMittal, the end was near. Numerous layoffs and austerity measures followed, much to the dismay of workers and unions. In 2013, after years of social unrest and negotiations, the curtain finally fell on the Liège steel industry. Some companies are still being placed "under cocoon", with the prospect of a potential restart, which unfortunately never comes...
This site contains the administrative buildings, where the main administration of the steel company was located. The main building still contains a number of beautifully dilapidated offices and archives.
Apart from the administrative wing, there is also a large part of the site where there is a workshop where the company's trains were maintained and repaired. This part was mostly emptied.
According to the IEA, the global steel industry’s CO2 emissions leaped from approximately one billion tons in 2000 to two billion tons in 2018. This is because the steel sector’s share grew from 20% to 25% between those years and the plants use fossil fuels to power production. Japan’s Mitsubishi...
È triste dirlo, ma il rischio è che ci saranno più disoccupati che cozze. A quel punto, la Lezzi, sulle rovine dell'Ilva erigerà felice un monumento al mitile ignoto.
Three Lake Michigan beaches remain closed after a Northwest Indiana steel mill dumped toxic chemicals into a tributary earlier this week, an incident that wasn’t reported to the public until hundreds of dead fish began floating past boaters.
For decades, the industrial facilities situated on the Northwest Indiana shores of Lake Michigan have been dumping crap into Lake Michigan or the rivers and canals in the area, and into the air. So here again, a steel company dumping toxic chemicals into the lake. And here we also go again......agencies of the State of Indiana being aware of the dump or spill, and not telling the public. The only reason we know: pleasure boaters noticed a lot of floating dead fish.
Excerpt from this Chicago Tribune story:
Three Lake Michigan beaches remain closed after a northwest Indiana steel mill dumped toxic chemicals into a tributary earlier this week, an incident that was not reported to the public until hundreds of dead fish began floating past boaters.
Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal notified Indiana officials on Monday that a plume of cyanide and ammonia from its Burns Harbor steel mill had spilled into a branch of the Little Calumet River. But the mayor of Portage, a lakefront city west of the plant, said the state’s environmental agency did not alert local officials or citizens until Thursday.
As a precaution, the National Park Service closed the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk beach area at Indiana Dunes National Park. The neighboring community of Ogden Dunes also closed its beach and restricted its Lake Michigan water intake.
Portage Mayor John Cannon said state officials and the region’s steel industry should be required to promptly notify local communities about chemical spills and other violations of environmental laws. The mayor “holds ArcelorMittal responsible,” Cannon said Friday in a statement.
Cyanide is used by the steel industry to electroplate and clean metals. ArcelorMittal legally discharged more than 61,000 pounds of the toxic chemical into the Little Calumet River during 2017, according to federal records. But in a statement Friday, the company acknowledged that it violated legal limits on the amount of cyanide and ammonia released during a single day.
The company said it already has fixed a malfunctioning system that circulates water through the plant’s blast furnaces. It also is collecting water samples daily from a pair of sewage outfalls and every quarter-mile of the Little Calumet downstream.
The spill — and the delayed public notification — raise new questions about state and federal regulation of the region’s steel industry.ArcelorMittal’s plant has violated the Clean Water Act during five of the past 12 quarters, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website that tracks enforcement and compliance.
In November 2017, a U.S. Steel plant next door to the ArcelorMittal mill dumped hexavalent chromium, a highly toxic metal, into another Lake Michigan tributary and asked state environmental regulators to keep it secret.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Photos of the aftermath of the BOP demolition at Weirton Steel yesterday. All of these were taken off Main/Route 2 just after the blast, the last photo of the sculpture was a block up wind for reference. You can see how blue the sky was. Down closer to the BOP the sky was thick with thirty some years of mill dust. You could chew the wind. There was a WPD cruiser in the first photo with its lights on you couldn’t see a block away. They didn’t have to dynamite the building, it was a cost saving measure that blew windows out, cracked walls, and covered all of Weir Ave with who knows what. I feel for the people that live there. Bet they didn’t dynamite the munitions plant that made 8” shells during WWII and Korea when they cleared the land it occupied for the BOP back when. Profit over people baby. Link to a news segment about the fallout in the FB comments. #therustjungle #basicoxygenfurnace #weirtonsteel #weirton #arcelormittal #demolition #demolished (at Weirton, West Virginia) https://www.instagram.com/therustjungle/p/Bu1eHLZHCX8/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=c4hien3om8o
