Gadgetory

I think if you grow up in claritin it's a different kind of culture so I'm going down River Road down here and I see what the kids would like look a cloud maker and a cloud maker is just this this car joven I guess you want to call it we knew that we really shouldn't be eating the cat suit out of the river because the rivers were you know comparatively speaking pretty polluted people that have been here since the 50s and 60s that used to see the sky dark at noontime think that you know it can't get any better than this coke works are one of the dirtiest processes and we happen to have the largest coke works in the country when you think about the Mon Valley you think about Pittsburgh you think about steel to principal ingredients of making steel iron ore and coal you need coke and the way you make coke is by taking coal processing it baking okay that's coke so the coal releases all the chemicals that are in cold so you'll get ammonia zits solvers and a whole bunch of the products there are dozens and dozens of chemical byproducts that are stripped out of the coke oven gas and then sold separately so this isn't just a coke making facility it's actually a chemical plant as well I find it necessary hi handkerchief they're the children's mop in some futile attempt to block out some of these pollutants even though I know the sulfur dioxide can't be filtered and when I send them out into this air I feel like just like a murderess I close the door behind me and I think it's Anchorage's today what will it be tomorrow well growing up I understand that that was back in the 60s and 70s that predated the creation of the modern environmental and the modern conservation movement there was no Department of Environmental Protection there was no Earth Day okay there was no Silent Spring written with that advent of the modern environmental movement you saw a recognition that what we spew into our air and dump into our waterways does eventually affect our health I think last year we had 12 football players with asthma and I think we only had 30 players on the team so almost half at some form of asthma swimming pools a pointless I stopped using my swimming pool two months ago I was vacuuming it every other day with black soot all over the bottomless Winkle it's horrible in the 60s and 70s there was nothing green here nothing nothing okay now you can go deer hunting up here I was talking to some of the students and the parents a couple days ago and we were talking about Pollution Control and the parents are really afraid of it because they say as long as there's smoke coming other smokestacks then there's food on the table and money and clothes for the kids and the fathers who are working well I had a father and he died five years ago and he worked in a steel mill all his life and he died of a heart attack and I'm just wondering if that's not Lyme because of the pollution we had this tremendous you know economic dislocation that was not caused at all by the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency and the laws and regulations this happened because in the 1960s and early 70s there was a conscious decision by steel makers in this country that they were going to invest in the new technology of steelmaking either down south or offshore after 15 months of hearings the variance in Appeals Board made this landmark decision it denounced the US Steel Corporation for its waging a kind of blackmail using the threat of unemployment to intimidate workers and public officials it ruled that US Steel be taken to court and made to clean up its pollution the people of Lincoln borough Pittsburgh and towns up and down the Monongahela River now know they don't have to hold their breath well we're currently standing on the rooftop of the air quality programs offices in our in Lawrenceville Pennsylvania the rooftop here serves as our main urban monitoring site and you can see the instruments that we have deployed we currently have 25 monitoring sites scattered across Allegheny County monitoring 60 different pollutants at all of those sites besides the fact that the process is dirty the plant sits in a river valley which is prone to what are called temperature inversions and these temperature inversions tend to trap the pollution is there so if this plant were anywhere else except sitting in that valley it wouldn't be anywhere near the problem that it is in a few minutes we'll formally commissioned our plants newest coke battery the C battery and the first of three new low emission quench towers the battery and the wench tire as well as the environmentally focused rehabilitation work we've done on batteries one through three represent an investments of more than 500 million dollars by our company this is the single largest facility investment project and this plants nearly one hundred twelve year history and one of the largest investment programs in our company's 112 year history you know we want to keep good family paying jobs and we want to clean up our environment too okay because that's good for us it's good for us in the short term it's good for us in the long term it's not an either/or choice you got to deal with both there always be a a constant trade-off in terms of how much pollution reduction is necessary versus the controls on how much facilities can afford to put on those controls however what we've seen as time is going on that we can have both we can have acceptable error we can have perfectly clean air but we can't have acceptable you