Brian Doyle remembers the explosion that hurled him to the coke plant’s floor — but little else from that day.

It was a Wednesday — July 14, 2010 — and Doyle, a steamfitters union member and contractor for Power Piping, was inside the Clairton Coke Works getting ready to repair pipes near the coke ovens.

The gas lines were supposed to be shut down. But something went wrong that morning. A blast tore through an array of ovens inside the sprawling U.S. Steel plant.

After the explosion — one of several at the plant in the past 15 years — paramedics rushed Doyle to UPMC McKeesport hospital with a back injury, lots of bruises and a lump on his head that remains today. First-degree burns covered 40% of his body.

All these years later, he has still not forgiven the place — and certainly not forgotten what happened to him there.

“Clairton Coke Works might be one of the most dangerous places on Earth,” Doyle, 56, told TribLive last week. “It’s a bomb. It’s essentially a bomb.”

On Monday, that “bomb” went off again.

At 10:47 a.m., an explosion ripped through the works’ batteries — the clusters of ovens that superheat coal — and shot plumes of black smoke and soot into the sky above the 392-acre industrial site along the banks of the Monongahela River. The blast left two dead and 10 injured.

On Friday, U.S. Steel said a preliminary investigation showed coke oven gas ignited when a valve failed because of a pressure buildup as it was being flushed for planned maintenance.

U.S. Steel maintains that its facilities are safe, and that the company is dedicated to making them even safer. Now, after a nearly $15 billion merger this summer with Japan’s Nippon Steel, the responsibility to back up that talk will be shared and the pressure heightened in the aftermath of last week’s disaster.

“From our mines to our mills, producing the steel America relies on each day is a demanding job, and the men and women of U.S. Steel take their roles in that process very seriously,” Andrew Fulton, a company spokesman, said in a prepared statement in response to questions from TribLive. “U.S. Steel makes safety its top priority every step of the way.”

A terrible cost

The year Doyle was hurt, he retired and went on permanent disability. In 2014, U.S. Steel capped four years of legal wrangling by paying Doyle an undisclosed sum to settle a lawsuit he filed over his devastating injuries.

“It was not enough for what they did to me and how they changed my life,” Doyle said. “I support my family and everything. But it’s not enough for everything I went through and still go through.”

Doyle said more than 100 people called to check on him Monday after news broke of the explosion. He said he’s pretty sure he’s OK.

Pittsburgh steel built modern America, but sometimes at a terrible cost.

During World War II, Pennsylvania’s second-largest city produced half of the steel made nationwide. A decade later, Pittsburgh boasted nearly 100,000 steelworkers. The very name of its professional football team was minted by the mills. The Steelers’ tricolor logo — the “steelmark” — was created by U.S. Steel and the American Iron and Steel Institute.

The mammoth plants that consumed the banks of Pittsburgh’s three rivers exuded strength. Steelworkers’ grit, determination and a salt-of-the-earth work ethic became one with the region’s identity.

But beneath that tough identity is a shared understanding of the prospect of injury, death and loss.

“It is dangerous work that they do,” Gov. Josh Shapiro said during a visit to the coke works after the blast.

That was illustrated Monday by the two men who joined the roster of lives lost at the Clairton Coke Works. Westmoreland County residents Timothy Quinn, 39, a heater-foreman and single father of three, and Steven Menefee, 52, were killed in the blast.

“I have the deepest sympathy for those workers and their families,” said Andrew Miklos, 75, of Elizabeth Borough, a retired Clairton Coke Works laborer and the former president of its steelworkers union.

“I’ll tell you, mill life is a lot like family life,” Miklos said. “And when something like this happens and somebody gets hurt, they all hurt.”

Pittsburgh lawyer John Gismondi has seen it all before. He represented the family of Nicholas Revetta, killed in a 2009 explosion at the coke works. And he sued on behalf of workers injured in the blast that hurt Doyle. Gismondi was sitting in his Grant Street office Monday morning when his cellphone buzzed with news of the latest disaster.

“The initial reaction was ‘Gee whiz, here we go again,’ ” Gismondi told TribLive. “Three major explosions in 15 years sort of strikes me as a lot. I don’t know what the future may hold. But, three explosions? I don’t think that’s something to chalk up as the cost of doing business.”

Gismondi said few would argue that the Clairton facility comes loaded with danger.

Coal is pulverized before workers in Clairton push it into narrow brick-lined ovens, or batteries. They bake the coal at 2,000 degrees, producing coke, an essential component to making steel. The process also produces gas, tar, ammonia and other chemicals.

“If you were to list all of the hazards at Clairton Coke Works, you would have to say that safe handling of gas is near the top,” Gismondi said. “When you make coke, you’re generating gas every day, and it’s in huge volumes. It’s like how water is an integral part of a car wash.”

‘Adrenaline rush’

A century ago, an estimated 500 to 800 men died in steel-mill accidents nationwide each year, a rate of nearly two workers a day, historians say.

Those who survived “were worn out by 40 and dead at 50,” Doug Styles, who guided tours of U.S. Steel’s historic Carrie Furnace site in Swissvale, told TribLive in 2019.

Over the decades, fatalities in the industry dropped dramatically — to six dead in 2023, according to the most recent federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That same year, 1,075 construction workers died on the job, making that the most dangerous sector.

Technology has helped steel mills become safer places, experts say.

Today’s cranes operate remotely, and control rooms have been enclosed to keep workers away from molten metal that flows past them at temperatures nearing 2,700 degrees. Sensors measure gas leaks and temperatures. The sophistication of advanced personal protective equipment grows each year.

“Safety culture” also has changed the mill landscape, officials say. Training, both before and during work, is constant. Committees staffed by mill workers regularly review safety measures.

Despite all that, risk remains pervasive.

Some steelworkers told TribLive last week there’s a flip side to the daunting nature of mill work: the allure of being gutsy enough to work in a hazardous business.

Chad Cramer, a 42-year-old steelworker from Hunker, has many family members who toiled in the mills. Cramer, who started on a blast furnace, epitomizes the split nature of the job, acknowledging the dangers while embracing the challenges.

“All things aside from what just happened at Clairton, being around things like this, you’d think there’d be more injuries. But, there’s not,” Cramer said. “The element of danger? Yeah, it’s still there. There’s definitely an adrenaline rush you can get while going to work.”

The spirit driving Pittsburghers to work those jobs helped define the city in the 20th century as a scrappy underdog.

“Pittsburg is a place to read up for, to unpack your trunk and settle down at,” James Parton famously wrote in an 1868 article about Pittsburgh in The Atlantic magazine. “If anyone would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg and looking over into — hell with the lid taken off.”

Anyone touched by the brute force of explosions at the coke works, from survivors to workers’ widows to investigators, understands that analogy all too well.

“When you have that much power, that much heat and gas, that much molten metal, it’s always inherently dangerous,” said Ron Baraff, a Pittsburgh-based steel historian with the nonprofit group Rivers of Steel.

“You are taking very, very volatile gases and dirt and adding a human element,” Baraff said. “And, with all those things, you’re always running a real danger something could happen. You can only ‘safety out’ so much.”

Miklos, the retiree, knows the routine well.

He worked in Clairton Coke Works for 44 years, often handling odd jobs — say, lugging 100-pound bags of soda ash to a water treatment plant — on what he called the “labor gang.” He still remembers his hiring date: April 30, 1974.

When Miklos became president in 2009 of Steelworkers Local 1557, he kept working on the plant floor to stay connected to those who kept things running.

Miklos, who grew up in sparsely populated McKean County in northern Pennsylvania, remembered the first time he entered the coke plant, the entire mill seeming to chug along on a different scale.

“I was in awe,” Miklos told TribLive. “I had never seen anything like that. I’m not from around here. I didn’t even know what a mill was.

“But I got to Clairton Coke Works, and I learned fast.”

Steel industry widows

Monday’s explosion triggered bad memories for Sherri Novak.

Her husband, Jeff Novak, a heater foreman, was one of 17 people hurt in the 2010 blast at the coke works.

“When I heard, at first, I didn’t think about it, I tried not to think about it, but later it hit me,” Sherri Novak, 64, of Perryopolis, Fayette County, said of the most recent Clairton calamity. “It brought back a lot of memories.”

Her husband was hospitalized in a burn unit for a month. His skull fractured, he was placed in a medically induced coma. Multiple graft surgeries later repaired scorched skin.

Jeff Novak survived his workplace injuries but couldn’t beat cancer. He died a couple of years ago at age 64.

His widow knows firsthand that precautions can take you only so far.

“Even with all the safety rules,” Novak said, “it’s still dangerous, no matter how you look at it.”

Maureen Revetta’s two children have grown up not knowing their father.

Her son was 4 and her daughter barely a year old on Sept. 3, 2009, when a fatal explosion at Clairton Coke Works killed their father, Nicholas Revetta. He was one of 4,551 people to die across the nation that year due to their work.

Paramedics rushed the contractor and Laborers Local 373 union member to Jefferson Regional Hospital. They were too late.

Revetta, another Power Piping employee like Doyle, was killed in the city where he grew up. He was 32.

His widow, still frustrated nearly 16 years after the explosion, told TribLive last week it took U.S. Steel administrators three days after the blast to call her.

A monthslong investigation followed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal watchdog for American workplaces. OSHA has fined U.S. Steel at least three times since 2009 for unsafe working conditions at the 124-year-old coke plant, records show. But regulators did not cite or fine U.S. Steel for the blast that killed Revetta.

His family later settled a lawsuit with the company for an undisclosed sum.

Gismondi, the lawyer who represented Revetta, said aging equipment and bad monitoring devices triggered the 2009 explosion. He would not comment on what might have happened Monday.

Neither would U.S. Steel President David B. Burritt, who pledged that the steelmaking giant will cooperate with a transparent, thorough investigation.

“We’re not going to speculate. We’re going to let the people do their work and support them,” Burritt said in a prepared statement. “And we will take every step necessary to keep our people safe. Safety is and always will be our No. 1 priority — every shift, every day, every facility, always.”

Revetta learned of the latest explosion through a Facebook post. One emotion dominated.

“It’s the anger. The anger comes back — and all the fighting I had to do with U.S. Steel,” said Revetta, 48, a public school teacher.

She questions what has changed or improved at the coke works since her husband’s death.

“I’m hurting, just knowing what those families are going through,” Revetta said. “(U.S. Steel is) saying now they’re going to get to the bottom of this. But are they?”

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