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In 2015, when Karen Grzywinski heard that the Shenango Coke Works near Pittsburgh was closing after 54 years in operation, she didn’t believe it. Neither did her neighbors, some of whom had joined her in fighting a long battle for the plant to better control its pollution. “A number of us thought it was a joke,” she said. “We were really, really surprised.”
Shenango, which produced coke, a concentrated form of coal used to manufacture steel, was then a major source of air pollution in the region. After years of suffering from respiratory symptoms triggered by bad air days, Grzywinski said she noticed a change soon after the closure. “You could look across the river and not see this perpetual haze,” she said. “It was astounding, the difference.”
Since Shenango closed in 2016, researchers at New York University, the University of Pittsburgh and the Allegheny County Health Department have tracked respiratory and cardiovascular emergency room visits and hospitalizations before and after the shutdown, each time finding dramatic evidence of improvement. Two weeks ago, the authors of one of those studies published an analysis focused only on respiratory health.
Comparing the three years before and three years after the closure in the nearby community of Avalon, they found an immediate 20 percent decrease in weekly ER visits for respiratory problems and a 40 percent decrease in visits for pediatric asthma. Pediatric asthma visits continued to decline over the long-term, as did hospitalizations for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
While researchers expected a decrease, they were not anticipating the size of the reduction, said Wuyue Yu, a postdoctoral fellow in NYU’s Department of Population Health who co-authored the study.
The significant drop could be due to the nature of the pollution created by the coke-making process, which releases a dangerous cocktail of chemicals and compounds like benzene, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter.
“This pollution mix is far more toxic than everyday pollution,” said George Thurston, the other co-author and a professor in NYU’s School of Medicine, where he directs the program in exposure assessment and human health effects. “It’s like coal-fired power plant particles, but on steroids.”
Air monitors at the site show that daily levels of sulfur dioxide “significantly and abruptly dropped” after the shutdown, the study noted. Particulate matter decreased. And benzene, a carcinogen, “decreased substantially.” Sulfur dioxide is a known trigger for asthma patients, said Dr. Deborah Gentile, a physician who has studied pediatric asthma near the Clairton Coke Works, a facility about 20 miles from Shenango that is still operating.
The researchers said the striking signs of improvement in children’s respiratory health made sense. “It’s a perfect storm, this kind of pollution for kids. So when you reduce it, you see big benefits,” Thurston said. “It’s an especially sensitive population. They’re sort of the canaries in the coal mine, or in this case, in the coal valley.”
Children are more vulnerable to air pollution for a number of reasons. “Children are not exactly the same as adults. They’re developing. Given their body mass, they breathe more often. They’re outdoors more,” Yu said. Thurston said the results suggested fewer children were developing asthma in the first place.
For researchers interested in the impacts of air pollution on public health, Shenango represents a rare opportunity to show clearer cause and effect in a field where results are often complicated by compounding factors. “This was a natural experiment. No one designed this,” Gentile said. “It’s a very important study.”
She added: “They’ve shown that the population didn’t change that much. The makeup of the population didn’t change. The only thing that changed was the pollution exposure.”
Thurston said that while the pollution caused by coke-making is especially harmful, the impacts it has are indicative of the broader health threat from fossil fuels.
“We’re all exposed to [fossil fuel pollution] every single day. We’re bathed in it,” he said. “All throughout our lives, day and night, every day of the week, we’re exposed to this when we drive on roads, when we get on a train, when we go to the city. I know because I carry an air monitor around with me, and I see the exposures.”
“Industry Comes First”
In the 1980s when Grzywinski first moved to Ben Avon, a charming, leafy suburb across the river from the Coke Works, she had no idea how much the plant would come to impact her life.
Although Grzywinski grew up in Pittsburgh, she was shocked by the pollution in her new neighborhood. Early on, she noticed soot collecting on her deck. Then there were odors and visible pollution that settled over the town. She kept her windows closed and stayed inside.
Some of her neighbors were indifferent. “We would ask, ‘Did you smell this last night? Did you have to close your windows?’ They would be really kind of nonchalant,” she said. “Back then, and I’m guilty of it too, I saw it more as an environmental problem, and I was slow to realize the health impacts it had. I also think that in this area, it’s ingrained that industry comes first.”
But then she developed unusual allergies and adult-onset asthma. By the late ’90s, she was active with multiple community groups advocating for change at the plant. Grzywinski recalled meetings with the health department where officials argued with residents, saying they had no proof of their health claims.
Between 1980 and 2012, Shenango paid more $2 million in penalties for air and water violations, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in 2016. In 2012 and 2013, the plant violated county emissions limits for 330 days over a 432-day period. Eventually, in 2004, Grzywinski moved away from Ben Avon, a mile and a half farther from the plant, in part to escape the pollution.
After Shenango’s sudden closure due to “global overcapacity in the steel industry,” according to the company, county officials continued to express doubts that the plant had affected residents’ health, Grzywinski said. In January 2016, a deputy director of environmental health for the county told the Tribune-Review he didn’t expect a significant improvement in air quality overall, though he did think the county would receive fewer odor nuisance complaints.
The recent research proving just how much the plant’s pollution impacted air quality and the people living nearby has been heartening to Grzywinski.
“Not only did it validate what we were saying and trace it to the plant’s operation, but this research also shows that health continues to improve without that plant,” she said. “I think the best word is validation.”
