Monday, October 30, 2017
WARREN TOWNSHIP — The last blast furnace in the Mahoning Valley came down Sunday afternoon on the former Republic Steel property in a dramatic yet quiet way.
The hulking framework and circular column on the west side of Main Avenue Southwest wasn’t toppled by a dramatic explosion. Instead, workers brought it down gently, as if pushing it ever so gently from one side.
It fell in a crash at around 12:30 p.m. with only a handful of steelworkers there to watch, the demolition company and owner of the property apparently handling it quietly on purpose.
MCM Management of Michigan had been dismantling the iconic structure since Aug. 2, Tara Cioffi of the Youngstown City Health Department and environmental health director for the Mahoning County Air Pollution Control Agency, told The Vindicator Oct. 18.
The work they were doing wasn’t obvious from a distance, but it was obvious from closer inspection Oct. 18 that parts of the blast furnace had been removed.
Cioffi said at the time that she believed the demolition would proceed in a slow and steady way and that MCM had until August 2018 to complete the job. She said she didn’t know when it would be complete.
But the toppling of the blast furnace is obvious from downtown Warren because it was one of the most prominent parts of the skyline south of the city.
BDM Warren Steel Holdings owns the blast furnace and the rest of the former mill property, having bought it out of bankruptcy in September 2012, after the mill had shut down in May 2012. The closing put about 1,000 steelworkers out of a job.
BDM revealed plans in 2013 to demolish everything on the 1,100-acre Republic Steel/RG Steel mill site and started the demolition soon thereafter. The blast furnace has been described as the final part of the demolition. The part of the property on the east side of Main Avenue has already been leveled.
Many other structures near the blast furnace remain, however, because Arcelor Mittal Warren operates a coke plant there and still uses the boiler in the coke-making operation. The boiler fed heated air to the blast furnace when it was operating.
There had been blast furnaces in the Mahoning Valley for 214 years, with the first one – the Hopewell Furnace in Yellow Creek Park in Struthers – being built in 1803. There are still remnants of two – the Hopewell and Mill Creek Furnace in Mill Creek Park.