NELC clears the air in settlement with U.S. Steel
PITTSBURGH—On Jan. 29, National Environmental Law Center (NELC) attorney Matt Donohue joined staff from PennEnvironment and Clean Air Council at a press conference on the steps of the Allegheny County Courthouse to announce the settlement of their long-running Clean Air Act citizen suit against U.S. Steel. Flanked by community members, the groups detailed the terms of the settlement, answered questions from local and national press, and took a moment to commemorate a win that both holds U.S. Steel accountable for violating the law and improves air quality in western Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley for years to come.
The lawsuit was filed in response to a catastrophic fire at the Clairton Coke Works that erupted on Christmas Eve in 2018. The blaze, which NELC attorneys have since established was caused by U.S. Steel’s poor maintenance practices and chronic underinvestment, knocked out key pollution control systems at Clairton, systems on which U.S. Steel’s nearby Irvin and Edgar Thomson steel mills also rely. U.S. Steel nevertheless continued to run all three plants without these legally mandated controls, committing thousands of violations of its Clean Air Act permits over 102 days, and subjecting neighboring communities to dangerous concentrations of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and particulate matter.
Subsequent breakdowns at the Clairton plant knocked these same pollution control devices offline on two additional occasions after NELC initiated enforcement action on behalf of PennEnvironment and Clean Air Council, and the Allegheny County Health Department intervened as a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit.
“Every outage of the pollution control systems at Clairton is a violation of the Clean Air Act, and every outage puts the people in the surrounding communities at risk,” explains Matt. “We needed a comprehensive settlement that will prevent future breakdowns, regardless of cause.”
With that in mind, NELC attorneys focused the settlement, which was incorporated in a consent decree filed with the court, on three concepts: compliance, deterrence, and remediation.
- Compliance. The settlement mandates wide-ranging plant upgrades to ensure future compliance. U.S. Steel will spend a total of $37 million to address the poor maintenance practices, corroded equipment, and defective designs that caused past breakdowns. Looking toward the future, the settlement requires U.S. Steel to pay a new penalty any time the pollution control system suffers an outage. The penalties can be as high as $112,500 per day, and are designed to shift the burden for preventing new problems from groups like NELC to U.S. Steel, where it belongs.
- Deterrence. U.S. Steel will pay a financial penalty of $5 million. This is the largest payment secured in a Clean Air Act citizen suit in Pennsylvania history, the third largest nationally, and it helps demonstrate to this and other companies that it does not pay to pollute.
- Remediation. The settlement forces U.S. Steel to begin remediating the harm its pollution caused its neighbors in the Mon Valley. A full 90% of the $5 million penalty payment, or $4.5 million, will be used for two new public health funds to benefit residents of the Mon Valley. All of the money must be distributed to local projects that address local public health or air quality. In addition, the settlement will reduce the amount of legal pollution emitted by U.S. Steel: It tightens the limits on the company’s emission of hydrogen sulfide, and requires the permanent shutdown of 60 particularly dirty coke ovens, reducing the total production capacity at Clairton by 10%.
Achieving this settlement required a particularly large investment of time and resources. As they countered a series of aggressive defenses mounted by U.S. Steel over the past five years, NELC staff reviewed well over 1 million pages of documents. To strengthen arguments that U.S. Steel’s failures warranted serious intervention, NELC attorneys participated in 31 witness depositions. This included deposing five U.S. Steel employees, a U.S. Steel corporate representative, seven experts retained by U.S. Steel, and a representative from McKinsey & Company (the firm helped U.S. Steel cut maintenance spending in the years leading up to the fire). To justify many of the concessions eventually secured in the settlement, NELC also relied on five of its own experts. And to protect the right of PennEnvironment and Clean Air Council to bring the law- suit, NELC recruited members of the affected communities to testify regard- ing the harms suffered during outages.
In the end, the enthusiasm from these communities is the settlement’s strongest validation. Speaking at the press conference, PennEnvironment member Edith Abeyta thanked NELC’s attorneys and staff for working to hold U.S. Steel accountable.
Ms. Abeyta, who was herself subjected to a day-long deposition by U.S. Steel attorneys, described a palpable sense of relief. Thanks to the settlement, she explained, “I can look forward to the day when I do not have to check an air monitor to open my windows, or fear that dangerous invisible gasses … are seeping into my home and poisoning me and my neighbors.”
Photo: Garrick Schmitt
