Fatal explosions are big news, but construction, transportation jobs are now bigger killers

On Aug. 11, a blast at the Clairton Coke Works killed two workers and injured more than 10, a scene Pittsburgh has lived through before, but one that now makes national news instead of fading quietly into local memory.

U.S. Steel’s preliminary findings indicate a gas-valve failure during a flushing operation allowed coke-oven gas to build up and ignite; several workers were trapped in the rubble, and the blast was felt miles away.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s investigation is still in its early stages, and could take 18 months.

The Clairton plant, perched on the Monongahela River about 15 miles south of Pittsburgh, has fed the region-defining steel industry since its launch in 1901.

Coke is baked coal that burns very hot with little smoke — ideal for smelting steel.

At one time in Pittsburgh, deaths at a mill were familiar, but the vigorous response last month was evidence of a much-changed worker safety landscape.

Table of contents

The toll

THEN:
A disaster that made front-page news in 2025 would have barely registered a century earlier, when explosions, falls and toxic gas were part of daily life. “The Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–08” documented 526 workplace deaths in a single year, in Allegheny County’s mills, mines and other workplaces.

Crystal Eastman, a lawyer and reformer who investigated accidents for the Pittsburgh survey, captured the human cost in her 1910 book “Work Accidents and the Law.” She described an annual toll of “five hundred such wrecks in all … 45 one-legged men; 100 hopeless cripples walking with crutch or cane for the rest of their lives; 45 men with a twisted, useless arm; 30 men with an empty sleeve; 20 men with but one hand; 60 with half a hand gone; 70 one-eyed men.” And those were only the recorded injuries.

In a Greater Pittsburgh of around 600,000 people, she wrote, “It is no wonder that to a stranger Pittsburgh’s streets are sad.”

“The scale was staggering,” said historian Rob Ruck of the University of Pittsburgh, in a recent interview. Coke-making carried its own hazards, he added, with toxic fumes often falling hardest on Black workers assigned to those jobs.

Some disasters seared themselves into memory:

• Allegheny Arsenal explosion (1862, Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh): killed 78
• Darr Mine disaster (1907, Rostraver Township, Westmoreland County): killed 239
• Molten steel spill (1907, Butler, Butler County): killed 4, injured dozens
• Mather Mine blast (1928, Mather‹, Greene County): killed 195

By the 1940s and 1950s, fatal accidents in steel mills and coal mines had declined, though they remained far too common even into more recent decades.

Stacy Mays, a pipefitter at U.S. Steel’s Duquesne Works in the 1970s and ’80s, recalled that plant managers literally built death into their annual projections. “At Duquesne, it was usually two or three a year,” he said.

Mays nearly became one of those statistics. In 1983, while blanking a 12-inch coke oven gas line, he heard a hiss. “The next thing I knew it was almost a week later,” he said. He woke in the burn unit with shattered facial bones, a broken nose, burns from the chest up, and his left ear nearly torn off. Doctors told his wife he probably wouldn’t survive the night. He did — and after a month in the burn unit and more than six months off the job, he returned to work.

He spent 47 years in the mills, starting as a pipefitter helper at Duquesne and retiring as a shift coordinator at the Edgar Thomson mill in 2019.

NOW:
Workplace fatalities across industries are rarer but far from gone. In 2023, 169 Pennsylvanians died on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, down slightly from 183 the year before. Nationwide, 5,283 workers were killed by traumatic injuries.

The Clairton Coke Works illustrates both progress and peril. The Aug. 11 blast was its first fatal accident in more than a decade, the last being in 2014 when a worker fell into a trench. But it was not the plant’s first serious explosion: Blasts in 2009 and 2010 killed one worker and injured more than a dozen others.

The jobs

THEN:
Steel and coal defined Pittsburgh’s identity into the late 20th century. In the early 1900s, before the introduction of labor laws, tens of thousands of men worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, with what workers called the dreaded “turnaround.”

“Every other Sunday you did 24 hours straight on the job, just to get a single day off,” said Ruck. For immigrant families, it was grueling but often the only path to steady wages.

Job assignments followed strict racial and ethnic lines. Ruck noted that older immigrant groups — the Irish and the British — secured most of the skilled, safer, higher-paying roles, while newer arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe were pushed into the most dangerous work. A 1925 chart from McKeesport’s Central Tube Company ranked native-born whites at the top, Hungarians and Slovaks for heavy pick-and-shovel jobs, Italians excluded from certain trades and African Americans confined almost exclusively to cleaning and demolition.

NOW:
By the 1980s, the collapse of steel and coal had shuttered most mills and mines. In 2023, only about 16,000 people were employed in steel statewide, a sliver of what the industry once supported. The state’s most dangerous jobs are now in construction, transportation, oil and gas, and healthcare. The same year, construction led all private-sector industries in Pennsylvania with 30 fatalities. 

“Construction has taken over that mantle” of the most dangerous industry, said Bopaya Bidanda, professor of industrial engineering at Pitt, because it remains difficult to automate. Work at heights, heavy lifting and coordination across contractors make accidents harder to engineer out.

Among occupational groups, transportation and material moving accounted for 46 deaths in 2023.

The shift in workplace fatalities reflects a national transition from goods-producing to service-based work, said Marissa Baker, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington. Facilities like Clairton are remnants of the old economy, while most jobs now fall in healthcare, hospitality, food service or IT. Baker said the “fissuring of the workplace” — where hotel housekeepers may be employed by staffing firms rather than hotels, or baggage handlers by contractors instead of airlines — “creates confusion about who is responsible for safety enforcement and often drives a race to the bottom.”

Staffing cuts add another layer of risk, said Steve Sallman, director of health, safety and environment at the United Steelworkers. “What used to be a five-person job might now be done by two or three,” he said. “Staffing cuts, long hours and low wages push workers past safe limits. It comes down to profits over people.”

The hazards

THEN:
Steel and coal production exposed workers to open flames, molten metal, toxic gas, bare wiring and rail cars that crushed men without warning.

Mays remembered the cast house, where molten iron was channeled off site for further production, as relentless — hot, dirty and smelly in summer, freezing in winter. During the deep freeze of 1976, he said, clothes grew so stiff workers had to rotate shifts to thaw at coke heaters scattered through the plant. “You had to always be aware of your surroundings,” he recalled. Yet there was solidarity: “You watched out for your buddy. When you work in a mill, any mill, you join a brotherhood.”

NOW:
Modern risks are more diffuse, according to experts. Workers face toxic chemicals, fine dusts and nanomaterials with uncertain effects.

“Combustible gases remain one of the most persistent dangers,” said Sylvia Johnson, member of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, noting risks across steel, refining, and chemical facilities. Combustible dust — long a killer in Pittsburgh’s mill era — still drives explosions in industries from flour milling to sugar refining.

A hidden toll far surpasses the tally of sudden accidents. In 2023, the AFL-CIO estimated 135,000 Americans died of work-related diseases — more than 20 times the number killed by traumatic injuries. These illnesses often stem from repeated, low-level exposures  accumulated over years. Musculoskeletal injuries remain the top workers’ compensation claim, said Baker, but the larger crisis is occupational illness. “A welder who develops lung cancer in retirement may never have it linked to decades of shop-floor work,” she said.

That burden still falls unevenly, according to Baker. Immigrant, refugee and undocumented workers often take on the most dangerous jobs in agriculture, food service and other labor-heavy sectors, but may not benefit from Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA] protections because of language barriers, weak enforcement or fear of retaliation. Contracting arrangements push risks further down the chain, leaving workers with hazards while shielding companies.

Safety gear and training

THEN:
In early mills and mines, protection was virtually nonexistent. Miners often relied on a canary in a cage to warn them of toxic gases underground or in confined spaces. “The bird had a much faster metabolism and respiration rate than a human, so if there were toxic gases in a confined space — methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide — the canary would die before the men did. That was their alarm to get out,” said Barry J. Momyer, president of American Health & Safety Consulting, a Robinson-based firm.

But in practice, safety often came second to production – even more recently. Mays recalled catching a foreman disconnecting a gas meter to keep a job moving, and another who told workers to “just wrinkle up your nose” when gas was leaking.

Workers wrapped rags around their faces and treated burns or broken bones as part of the job. New hires learned by watching or by painful trial and error. That began to change in 1908, when U.S. Steel formed a Central Safety Committee to mandate rules, inspections and equipment upgrades — an early, limited step toward modern safety.

NOW:
Today’s workforce wears flame-resistant clothing, gas monitors, fall harnesses and hearing protection, with training on hazards and emergency procedures required by law. The canary’s role has been taken over by technology, according to Momyer. Wearable multi-gas monitors deliver instant readings, alarms and even GPS tracking, “built on the same principle of testing the air before entry, but with far more reliable results.”

But gaps remain. Inexperienced employees are often left to train newcomers — a dynamic Sallman called “green training green.” 

Language barriers can turn deadly. Sallman pointed to a fatal case in Texas in 2010 in which a worker who was not fluent in English misunderstood instructions that were only provided in that language, restarted a furnace full of gas, and was killed in the explosion. Protective gear did not prevent that death. Hard hats and gloves won’t stop an explosion or blunt a major impact.

Falls killed 421 construction workers in 2023 — 39% of all fatalities in that industry. “PPE sits at the bottom of the hierarchy of controls,” Sallman said. The real focus, he said, must be on eliminating hazards in the first place.

Bidanda said safety, beyond equipment, is now more deeply embedded in workplace culture across all fields. Many plants now begin meetings by identifying exits and evacuation routes, and require workers to adopt safety behaviors like holding railings on stairs. These measures, he said, may seem minor but reflect a shift toward making safety routine.

Technology and automation

THEN:
In the early steel production days, nearly all work was manual. Men shoveled coke, coupled rail cars and labored inches from molten metal and toxic fumes.

NOW:
Automation has sharply reduced fatalities by limiting human contact with equipment. “Automation has been an enormous difference-maker,” said Bidanda, noting that most historic injuries came from contact with machinery or falls.

The World Steel Association, which represents around 85% of the world’s production of the metal, reported 85 member fatalities worldwide in 2022, 61 in 2023, and a record-low fatal frequency rate of 0.017 per million hours worked — a steep decline compared to earlier decades.

Modern steel plants now operate with fewer workers and with machines designed with layered safety systems. Momyer said the biggest shift has been combining technology with training. “Take hydrogen sulfide, a worker’s nose adjusts, and after a while you can’t smell it anymore. The danger hasn’t gone away, but you’d never know it,” Momyer said. “An instrument doesn’t get tired or fooled. It keeps detecting and sounds the alarm when you’re at risk.”

The same lean staffing and faster production cycles that make automation efficient can also leave fewer eyes to catch hazards before they escalate. 

Emerging real-time exposure monitoring — from wearables that detect gas or noise to smart devices that track air quality — may help close that gap. Yet, Baker cautions, these tools only improve safety when embedded in broader programs with trained personnel who act on the data.

Compensation and accountability

THEN:
When workers died or were injured in early Pittsburgh, their families were often left destitute. Employers rarely offered more than a token $100 for a funeral, and lawsuits almost never succeeded. Disabled workers were sometimes left to beg outside mill gates on payday, surviving on coworkers’ spare change.

NOW:
After his accident, Mays recalled that U.S. Steel’s first concern was its safety record. A corporate rep even came into the burn unit demanding to know where his glasses were, until hospital staff had him removed.

Only later did the company provide support, covering prescriptions, sending guards to drive him to appointments and settling his case. But Mays saw it as image management. “They didn’t want lost-time injuries on the books,” he said. “One guy broke his foot and lived an hour away. For six weeks, a company guard picked him up at home, drove him in to clock in, and then back again. That was standard practice.”

Workers’ compensation now guarantees medical coverage and partial wages, and OSHA can fine employers. But penalties remain weak. Nationwide, the median federal OSHA penalty for a worker fatality was $14,063, according to an AFL-CIO analysis released last year, and since OSHA’s creation in 1970, only 137 workplace deaths nationwide have led to prosecution.

Today’s consensus stretches back more than a century, said Ruck. Over time, companies shifted from ignoring disabled workers outright to what he calls “liberal corporate capitalism” — a system where firms offered minimal benefits mainly to stave off public outrage. Sallman argued that real accountability is overdue: “We need something like Canada’s Westray Law,” he said, which can hold corporations criminally liable when negligence kills workers.

The role of unions

THEN:
Workers fought bitterly to unionize not just for wages, but for safer conditions. The Homestead Strike of 1892 ended in bloodshed, and the General Steel Strike of 1919 collapsed under repression — both fueled in part by demands for shorter hours and protections from deadly conditions. Even when the CIO organized big steel in the 1930s, women and Black workers were often excluded or relegated to the most hazardous jobs.

NOW:
The United Steelworkers, a union based in Pittsburgh, has become a national leader on safety, securing the “right to know” about toxic substances, building joint safety committees and pressing multinational companies through global councils. 

The goal, said Sallman, remains the same as it was a century ago: “We need strong agencies, strong regulations, and strong unions to make sure workers come home safe at the end of the day.”

Regulation and public response

THEN:
By the early 1900s, reforms began to turn the tide on workplace dangers. “The Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–08” exposed industrial deaths and disfigurement in vivid detail, while Eastman’s “Work Accidents and the Law” fueled a national push for reform. In Pennsylvania, her work helped secure passage of the Workers’ Compensation Act of 1915. 

Pitt formed a pioneering safety engineering program in the 1930s — a reflection of the city’s central role in shaping safety education.

NOW:
The creation of OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health [NIOSH] in 1970, followed by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board [CSB] in 1990, marked a new era of oversight. Each agency plays a different role: 

• OSHA enforces safety laws, inspecting workplaces and issuing fines.
• NIOSH conducts research, producing the science behind exposure limits and protective standards.
• CSB investigates major industrial accidents, identifying root causes and recommending fixes.

But enforcement remains thin. Fewer than 1,900 federal and state occupational safety inspectors are responsible for more than 11.8 million workplaces — a ratio so sparse it would take decades to visit them all. The CSB illustrates the strain too. Since 1998, it has issued more than 1,000 safety recommendations, most successfully implemented, but the agency has fewer than 50 staff and must choose which of the roughly nine major incidents reported each month it can investigate.

The regulatory landscape reflects decades of hard-won progress.

“In the early 20th century, workers were treated as expendable,” Baker said. “There was a race to the bottom — who could produce the fastest and cheapest — while ignoring hazards.” Agencies like OSHA and NIOSH proved that regulation was essential, she added, because “without it, unchecked capitalism will exploit and harm workers.” Those protections still exist, but she warned they are now under political attack.

Sallman added that public attention can accelerate change but shouldn’t be the trigger. “It shouldn’t take injuries and deaths to move things forward,” he said. “We need updated regulations and stronger enforcement so that safety isn’t reactionary.”

The long arc

“When I heard the Clairton news, my mind went straight back to Duquesne, 42 years ago,” said Mays. “I could see the clothes I had on, the tools in my hands, the smells, even that hiss. Those workers were just trying to do their job.”

That sense of history repeating fueled the urgency on Aug. 22, when United Steelworkers marched from their Downtown headquarters to Mellon Square, demanding stronger federal oversight and denouncing proposed cuts to OSHA and the CSB.

Still, the culture around safety has changed dramatically. Momyer said that in his consulting work across the country, “Pittsburgh stacks up well,” adding that while technology has advanced, the bigger shift is in mindset with companies now investing in training, equipment and systems in ways they didn’t decades ago.

The challenge ahead, experts warn, is whether those gains can keep pace with emerging risks. Baker pointed to hazards that rarely make headlines but quietly take a toll: fatigue, night shifts, workplace violence and chronic stress. “These, too, are hazards that demand attention before they become the next tragedy,” she said.

Aakanksha Agarwal is a wine, travel, and lifestyle journalist. Originally from India and a former Bollywood stylist, she now writes from Pittsburgh, exploring the intersections of food, culture and community from a global perspective. She can be reached at aakanksha.agarwal1988@gmail.com. 

This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.