905 Comments for Bethlehem Steel Mill

I'll bet it's tasty!

This place must be infested with mosquitoes in the spring/summer.

Since these are not on their tracks anymore, I can't imagine how they moved them. The weight must be huge.

@John Galt Thanks; the Bethlehem furnaces are still there, but unfortunately I believe the closest you can legally get to them is from outside a fence on the casino property, but at least they're still standing.
I know these are even farther away and maybe you're aware of them already, but you can actually walk through the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord furnaces in Germany - stoves, casthouse, coal bins; just a fantastic museum. I believe this can also be done at the Völklinger Hütte furnaces, also in Germany.

Thanks! Yep looks like a spotlight to illuminate the skip car loading process.

I wonder if they're hooked up to the vents on top of the furnace, maybe as a way to manually release the heat in case of malfunction.

I wonder if protective gear would do much vs. molten metal, seems like it would go through anything.

I heard a similar story from a guy working at a local steel mill who cleaned giant tanks with extremely high pressure water jets; said he saw a guy get sliced in two when he dropped his line. Crazy stuff.

Also had the chance to acquire a steam burn on my foot once, the blister blew up to about the size of a grapefruit. Fun stuff.

Was this before wearing hard hats, steel toe boots and other safety gear was made mandatory?

It must have been hotter than hell working in this place

I'm sure the noise here punctured a few ear drums over the years

not something to mix cake batter in

Hey flushed, it's good to hear from you again. I alway enjoy your comments. For someone that's been through what you've been through you have a pretty good head on your shoulders.

When I was a steamfitter apprentice I was walking into the paper mill we were working a shutdown on. We all had to walk this same path into a door through a 10ft wide corridor full of pipes above and on each side. One day walking back in with whatever I had been sent out to get a steam line blew out 3 feet in front of me it took me another step to stop. Turns out an elbow has blown.

The degradation of pipe under the conditions it is used are known factors quantified down to the millimeter. As is fairly normal in industry the mill never replaced pipe when the calculations for use dictated they should be and waited for a failure to occur before doing the absolute minimal repair.

Anyway I did not get hurt but I shook for a couple of hours.

it looks like electrical conduit for control wiring.

I've decided it must have been the Thomas Edison documentary that just ran on PBS again that makes me think I just saw this. In part of it he opens an iron ore mine in NJ and build from scratch a whole new process for separating the ore. He ground the ore to dust and ran it through magnets to separate the iron ore from the rock it was embedded in leaving him with ore that had less by product in it.