Steelmaking legacy crashing down in Warren

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

In August 1913, a writer described the opening of the $2 million Trumbull Steel Co. south of downtown Warren as “a very important change in the whole character of this city.”

The new mill – which in 1929 would become Republic Steel, then decades later WCI, then several other companies – occupied 70 acres along the banks of the Mahoning River.

Today, the mill occupies about 1,100 acres, but it doesn’t produce steel anymore — and less and less of the mill is there every day as demolition of millions of square feet of factory buildings progresses.

The current owner, BDM Warren Steel Holdings, bought the mill in August 2012 out of bankruptcy for $17 million and attempted to find a new operator. But a year later, BDM filed paperwork describing the demolition of nearly all of the complex.

The mill last operated as RG Steel, but it started to lay off its workforce in June 2012, the same month it filed for bankruptcy. It had about 1,200 employees.

By the end of 2015, most of the mill will be gone, according to a time line that BDM gave to Howland Township officials. It estimates that demolition completion will be at the end of August 2016.

For now, there’s still a blast furnace on the western side in the part of the mill that’s in Warren Township.

That blast furnace — described in the 1950s as one of the largest in the world — has the distinction of being the last blast furnace in the Mahoning Valley, where there once were scores of them.

The BDM time line doesn’t mention the demolition of the blast furnace, and repeated attempts to reach any of the principal partners in BDM last week by telephone were unsuccessful.

But Darlene St. George, Howland Township administrator, toured the facility recently and said demolition of most of the buildings at the north end of the site made it look “like a bomb went off. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh. What happened?’”

St. George and others have estimated that about half of the mill’s buildings appear to have been demolished so far, though much of the site is not visible without passing through a security gate.

The size of the facility alone is enough to make people understand what an important force the mill has been over the decades: It occupies almost 1 square mile each of Howland and Warren townships — or about 4 percent of the land mass of each township. One small corner of the mill is within the Warren city limits.

The city of Warren made money by selling millions of gallons of water to the mill every day and processing the plant’s wastewater, and the community benefitted from the 5,000 jobs it used to have. In 1964, the payroll was $41 million.

Debbie Murphy of Vienna, who worked at the blast furnace for 16 years, said the mill also was important to the families who relied on it for their livelihood.

“A lot of us had family who worked there before us. I had a brother who worked there 40 years,” she said. “Almost every department you worked with, they’d tell you, ‘We were a family.’ You worked there day in and day out. You were there as much as with your family.”

Murphy, who retrained as a medical assistant in the two years since the mill closed and is now looking for work in that field, said the lost jobs at the mill have hurt local businesses.

“You see places closing. You know it had to have hurt them,” she said.

Ron Wynn of Warren worked at the mill 42 years. He was an electrician at the blast furnace who started there in 1970.

“It was booming,” Wynn said of the industrial sector of the local economy. “When I started you could go to Copperweld, GM, anywhere. Not today.”

Wynn said he worked at another company about a year after RG closed, but he doesn’t expect to work any more.

BDM is composed of companies experienced in demolition — Independence Excavating of Independence, Ohio, and Beaver Valley Slag and Bet-Tech Construction of Beaver County, Pa. It has been demolishing former RG buildings since September.

The Trumbull County Building Inspection Department processed five demolition applications in 2013 for specific buildings at the mill and has six more for this year.

Some of the 2013 demolitions were for buildings on the north end as large as 740,000 square feet and 441,000 square feet, including the 56-inch mill. One building listed as the silicon line was 165,000 square feet, and the pickle line was 217,000 square feet.

In 2014, there were demolition permits for a 200,000-square-foot 56-inch parts building and 8,000-square-foot office building, 30,000 square-foot fabrication shop, 80,000-square-foot slabbing/mill yard and 50,000-square- foot machine shop.

Demolition of the parts building continues through later this year, the application says.

Demolition of the building listed as slab preparation area and basic oxygen furnace, as well as the continuous caster, is slated for later this year and in 2015.

The final steps involve redevelopment planning and removal of concrete slabs underneath various buildings in the Howland part of the mill on its south end.

Kim Mascarella, planning director for Howland, said removal of cement slabs falls under the demolition regulations the township approved in 2010. They came into play the first time in an industrial setting in 2011, when Delphi Packard Electric demolished about 300,000 square feet of production space at its North River Road facilities.

The requirements say the demolition should return the property to essentially the same condition as before the building was constructed, including removal of concrete slabs under the building. That met with resistance from Delphi, but ultimately the company was “very cooperative,” St. George said.

BDM officials also balked originally at removing slabs because that requirement doesn’t exist in some other places, but BDM now says it will comply, St. George said.

“We want a marketable site,” Mascarella said of the reason for the regulations.

Mike Sliwinski, chief building official for Trumbull County, says his office is the main local agency involved with mill demolitions, but the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is doing the majority of the work because the primary issues in this type of demolition are health-related, such as industrial contaminants.

Linda Oros, Ohio EPA spokeswoman, said the agency is waiting for a remediation plan from the owners of the property, and the EPA will work with the company to determine how that fits with the regulations for things such as soil and water cleanup. Oros said she doesn’t know of a deadline for the company to submit the plan.