The Invisible Risk

Why Sparrows Point Workers Should Be Congratulated For Making It Through a Day Without Injury

By Mark Reutter

Originally published in Mother Jones, August 1980 © 1980, Foundation for National Progress. Some portions were deleted from this version.

© 2006, Mark Reutter

THINK BEFORE YOU ACT.
Your Safety Is In Your Hands.

These words are stenciled onto the door of a mechanic’s shanty tucked underneath a railroad trestle at Sparrows Point, Maryland. The shanty – windowless, scattered with tools – was the early morning refuge of Earl Barley. About an hour before the start of the daylight shift, he would push open the metal door, sit down at the center table, and begin a routine honed by 23 years of work at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation mill near Baltimore. He made tea with hot water from his Thermos, had a smoke, and, as a radio played in the background, changed into his work clothes.

On January 27, 1979, Barley was assigned as usual to a blast furnace repair gang. The other men in the gang knew his habits well. They knew he would leave the shanty at seven o’clock and walk up an adjoining alley to meet them. When he did not appear by 7:15, one of the men started down the alley to find him. Although his view was obscured by steam, Paul Ruszin saw something on the ground. He picked up his pace, then broke into a run. Outside the shanty door, face down, lay Earl Barley, half-dressed and with one shoe one.

Suspecting a heart attack, Ruszin went for help and came back with several other workers. A minute or two later, as an ambulance attendant rushed to Barley, Ruszin started to wobble. He lurched backward and, like a drunken sailor, threw a stilted punch toward Charlie Shears. What the hell is going on? Shears wondered. Two men aren’t going to get heart attacks like this, are they?

Shears surveyed the maze of pipes and exhaust stacks that climbed 80 feet above the alley. Nothing unusual. He sniffed. Pretty much the normal smell of the furnaces. More men gathered. Shears looked around the alley and caught sight of a cat – a large, gray cat. It was dead. “This man didn’t have any heart attack. He was gassed,” Shears shouted, then blacked out.

Unknown to the workers or anyone else at the plant, gas from a blast furnace pipeline was escaping into the alley. The gas – colorless, tasteless, and virtually odorless – contained a concentration of carbon monoxide so potent that it would produce bizarre effects within minutes: hallucinations, convulsions, loss of memory. In a few more minutes, unconsciousness would set in, then death from asphyxiation.

The leak that morning killed Earl Barley. Ruszin and five other men recovered after receiving emergency treatment in an oxygen pressure chamber. Fifteen more workers, including Shears, were treated for carbon monoxide poisoning.

Afterward, officials from Bethlehem Steel declined to discuss the incident with the news media other than to say that it was a “freak” accident whose cause was “a mystery.” A spokesman emphasized that steelmaking was dangerous work that requires employees to be ever vigilant of their safety – just as the company’s slogans warn. As TV cameras rolled, one official read a statement saying, “Concern for employee safety is paramount at Sparrows Point.”

No questions were raised at the press conference about the similarity between this accident and a string of other fatalities and injuries at the plant. But the accident fit a pattern, one that George Bourne, Joey Rothenberg, Walter Coonts, and Midge Hall knew well.

In numerous cases, management had neglected to take elementary safety precautions, failed to maintain hazardous equipment, and ignored patently dangerous conditions. This disregard for the welfare of workers is not confined to Bethlehem Steel.

Throughout the industry – in Pittsburgh’s steel belt, along the Lake Michigan shoreline east of Chicago, and in Ohio’s Mahoning River Valley – serious injuries have been on the upswing as mill superintendents try to find new ways to speed up aging machinery and boost production. Yet the high injury rate, like the carbon monoxide that killed Earl Barley, is a problem that is largely invisible to the world outside of steel manufacturing.

Life At The Point

Covering four square miles of former marshland at the mouth of Baltimore Harbor, Sparrows Point is the largest steel works on the East Coast and the third largest in the country. There are more than 1,500 buildings and furnaces. Several are as high as the nearby skyscrapers of Baltimore; others extend a third of a mile in length and are two city blocks wide. Flanking these buildings – eclipsed by their soaring verticals and broad horizontals – are hundreds of structures big in their own right: cylindrical stoves rising 12 stories and girdled by pipe; coke ovens, 635 of them, resembling monstrous auto batteries; pitch-roofed stock houses and oblong engine rooms; cranes perched on towers or cantilevered across truss bridges; elevators; conveyors; storage tanks; railroad trestles.

Each structure contributes to the making and shaping of steel. The furnaces produce up to 800 tons of hot metal an hour. The sparkling orange steel is cooled and moved to the finishing mills, where powerful rolling machines flatten, squeeze, pound, chemically and electrically treat, slice, spin, and smooth the metal into hundreds of products that are used by American industry and American consumers.

Auto plants depend on wide, thin steel coils rolled in the hot-strip mill. Tinplate is sold to toy, can, bottle cap, and Venetian blind makers. Bridges, boilers, and office buildings are held together with steel plates. Every year, the wire mill chops up 100,000 miles of steel wire to make three billion nails.

Like most major steel centers, Sparrows Point is a city unto itself. A 165-member police force, given full law enforcement powers by the state of Maryland, patrols the grounds. The plant has its own fire department and hospital-dispensary. Although the company town no longer exists, many of its traditions remain. A private country club continues to serve as a protective cocoon for management; and black workers, in numbers above what should be expected, still wind up in the coke ovens and in other hot, dirty jobs.

Twenty-thousand people work at The Point. When the shift changes, cars and vans by the hundreds flow from the company parking lots – big American-made ones: Impalas and LTDs, aging Cadillacs, Mustangs and Malibus, rainbow-colored Chevy vans on jacked-up chassis. They gun up Seventh Street to Bethlehem Boulevard or wind along Tin Mill Road. Within moments, they become thin pencil marks against the huge sweeps of steel, brick, and smoke.

Sparrows Point was the crowning achievement of Charles M. Schwab, an entrepreneur of enormous ambition. The mill was established in 1887, but grew slowly until Schwab came to Baltimore in 1916. A protégé of Andrew Carnegie, Schwab helped Carnegie and J.P. Morgan form the world’s biggest company in 1901 – U.S. Steel Corporation – then left its presidency to take over a small steelmaker in northern Pennsylvania.

Within a decade, Schwab had transformed Bethlehem Steel Corporation into the second-largest steel producer (after U.S. Steel) and the nation’s preeminent munitions manufacturer, “equipped to turn out every instrument of warfare used on land or sea,” in the words of a New York newspaper.

Money was the great motivator for Schwab – he spent it ardently, using it to build, among other things, the most lavish private residence in Manhattan – and money was the key to his management system. When he took over Bethlehem, he introduced a bonus plan that directly rewarded an employee on the basis of daily output. Because base pay determined bonus pay, a hardworking employee received rather small bonus increments. But incentive pay could double the salary of a mill superintendent. And in a good year, the top executives at Bethlehem made out handsomely, receiving bonuses that ranged from $100,000 to $500,000.

With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, Schwab foresaw the economic advantages of a tidewater steel mill. Rich iron-ore deposits in Chile and Cuba could be shipped cheaply to Sparrows Point, and finished products could be sent through the canal to the steel-hungry West. After purchasing the mill in 1916, Schwab announced that Bethlehem would pour $50 million into plant expansion. He called the commitment the largest single investment ever made by an American company.

During the next 40 years The Point grew relentlessly, becoming a pacesetter of the industry. By 1957, it was the largest steel complex in the world, employing 30,000 workers. But as steel industry profits dipped in the 1960s and Japanese mills outstripped American efficiency, expansion at The Point halted and the workforce was pared down. In 1971, steel output was cut, and several thousand employees were laid off.

The Fatal Output

Accidents have always been a fact of life at Sparrows Point. Until recently, though, they did not have to be reported to the government, and Bethlehem never volunteered the information. “If a man got killed or badly hurt, it was pretty much kept quiet,” remembers a 74-year-old woman who was born in the company town and worked in the tin mill.

In the old days, the coffin and the mourning party were transported from the company town to cemeteries in Baltimore on a streetcar named Dolores. In 1918, she and her family took Dolores to a Catholic cemetery in West Baltimore. They were burying her brother, a waterboy who had died of lockjaw after his leg was mangled in a mill accident. He was 14.

Last year, 5,304 injuries were reported among the 17,500 workers at the steel plant (another 2,500 work at an adjoining shipbuilding plant), or one injury for every 3.3 workers. About one-quarter of the accidents were serious enough to require an employee to temporarily transfer to another job or to stay off work. And those 649 workers who could not work needed a long time to recuperate – 30 days on the average.

This injury rate is typical of steel manufacturing. Steelmaking is as hazardous as coal mining or building construction, according to statistics compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Some OSHA officials believe that the accident toll in steel mills is even higher than the figures indicate. Certain injuries, they say, go unreported because federal regulations largely leave it up to management to determine what constitutes a “recordable” injury.

OSHA regulations do not require employers to divulge detailed accident data, but Bethlehem tabulates such statistics for an in-house newsletter at Sparrows Point. These reports show that accidents in 1978 caused the following: six deaths (each occurring in a separate incident), one coma, seven amputations, 70 eye injuries, 86 back injuries and hernias, 181 burns, 205 fractures and dislocations, and 395 large cuts and puncture wounds.

The company also compiles injury figures by the month. In 1978, the monthly total hovered around 350 during the winter, rose to 500 in the summer, and dropped below 400 by November. Plotted on a bar graph, the monthly injury rate has a similar contour to another graph that appears monthly in the newsletter – the graph of steel production at The Point.

A Clear Violation?

Earl Barley’s death from carbon monoxide poisoning shook up George Bourne. They were buddies, men who worked out of the same shop in the same craft. As millwrights, they repaired blast furnaces and related equipment. Working in hot, claustrophobic areas, often unable to speak above the noise, the men had to depend on each other’s reflexes and intuition. Bourne shared another bond with Barley. They were both raised in the mountains – Bourne in eastern Tennessee and Barley in western Maryland – and Bourne knew the code of the hills when a buddy’s honor was at stake. “From where I was born,” he said, “you don’t back down, and I got scars to prove it.”

Bourne did not believe that Barley was the victim of a freak accident. He had seen too much in the previous year when he served as chairman of a union committee that investigated accidents in one section of the mill. In March 1978, a worker drowned after the truck that he was driving slid into a wastewater pond. Then two veteran workers collapsed from heat stroke on the same day – one later died and the other suffered permanent brain damage. Then a hot blastman was killed at C Furnace. Then a pit worker at No. 4 open-hearth. Four fatalities in ten months. And there were two more deaths in the finishing mills.

In each case, Bourne’s committee found – and Maryland safety and health inspectors confirmed – that the accidents could have been avoided if Bethlehem had taken basic safety precautions. In two of the cases, the victims might have survived if the company had implemented better rescue methods.

While investigating the Barley accident, Bourne was haunted by the death of Robert Carter three months earlier. Carter was found unconscious less than 200 feet from where Barley later collapsed. Both men died of carbon monoxide poisoning. In both cases, the gas escaped from a dilapidated furnace system that had been scheduled to be shut down in 1977.

In each incident, there was no equipment in the area that could detect carbon monoxide leaks. Nor was there an alarm system to warn employees of danger, or gas masks available to protect them from the fumes. When the colorless, tasteless, and virtually odorless gas seeped from the pipe, it was up to the employee to recognize the hazard and get out of the area quickly.

In the Carter case, the company committed such flagrant violations of safety standards that the Maryland Occupational Safety and Health Agency had levied a $24,000 fine. A week before his death, Carter was exposed to carbon monoxide at the furnace. He was treated at the company dispensary but was not informed of the cause of his illness. Although company officials knew that Carter had been subjected to dangerous levels of the gas, they took no steps to stop the leakage, state officials charged.

Barley was killed when a pressurized water seal blew at the rear of the furnace, releasing gas from a pipeline into the shack where he was dressing. Bourne used his knowledge of the pipeline system to try to figure out what had happened. He knew that the company had been trying to increase gas pressure. Under his questioning, a plant official conceded that the company did not really know what effect the pressure increases might have on the pipeline. More resilient water seals were being installed, but the company had not gotten around to replacing the seal that later failed, resulting in Barley’s fatal exposure.

Bourne presented this and other evidence to state safety inspectors, but they told him that the information did not show a clear violation of a safety standard. The inspectors added that they did not have the technical expertise to question Bethlehem’s assertion that the seal should not have blown, hence the accident was a mystery.

Bourne was stymied. As weeks turned into months and no violation notice was issued, he became bitter. One morning he vented his frustration at the union hall. “Barley was the type of person who was very conscious about gas. I think he knew he was getting gassed, but the man didn’t have a chance. You can’t smell the gas until there’s a lot of it. It has a musty, moldy smell. And by then,” he said, knocking his hand on the table for emphasis, “the gas is so damn concentrated that a couple more whiffs and you’re gone.”

Thickly built, with a robust beard and curly black hair wreathing his face, Bourne gives the impression of being fearless. But carbon monoxide is an enemy that cannot be seen. Even an experienced man has trouble detecting a musty odor in a smelly environment. Bourne himself once barely escaped from a gas leak and remembers what rushed through his mind with a shudder: I’m in a tunnel, in a hole, looking out, and I’m fading back real slow.

A Compensable Case

Joey Rothenberg was sitting in a wheelchair at the Sparrows Point dispensary, in severe pain, when the foreman told her to look at the bright side. “He came over and said, ‘At least now you can work daylight through the Christmas holiday.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘You know, you can come in and sit around the office, and if you feel like it, you can help with the paperwork.’”

The 28-year-old crane operator whose mouth had just been smashed in an accident begged off. But the offers kept coming. Twice in the next two days, a higher-ranking foreman called her at home. “He was very friendly, the big father-figure, and said, ‘I hate to see you hurting before the holidays. Why don’t you come in the office and help us with the paperwork? If you want to, you can sleep.’” Not only did the supervisor offer to drive her to work, Rothenberg said, “He told me he could give me a better pay rate.”

Instead of going to work, she went to a doctor, and he ordered her to stay home. After that the calls stopped. Rothenberg said he was not surprised. She had become a “compensable” case; that is, 72 hours had lapsed and the company had to report her injury to the workmen’s compensation board.

She was off work for three weeks, nursing a shattered front tooth, stitched-up lip, and bruised hand. She had plenty of time to contemplate the irony that the foreman who tried to avoid reporting her accident could have prevented it.

Rothenberg was assigned to operate a long-mothballed crane to handle an increase in orders. The crane constantly broke down and had no emergency brake.

On the night of December 12, 1978, Rothenberg was having trouble with the crane’s lifting dog, but was told to continue working. As the crane neared the end of its tracks, the motor suddenly cut off, automatically shutting down the braking system. Without emergency brakes, the 25-ton crane glided forward and slammed against the rail stops, flinging Rothenberg against the cab window. She was helped down to an ambulance station where she began to hallucinate: I was back in that cab, lying on the floor, unable to move.

After being treated at the dispensary, she was placed in a wheelchair. It was then that her foreman came in and made his offer. About the same time, electricians began working on the crane. They were putting in an emergency brake “on orders from above,” a member of the crew later told her.

The Human Element

The day after Joey Rothenberg’s accident, the general manager of Sparrows Point, Russell R. Jones, discussed the relationship between profits and maintenance at the plant. He spoke at the private country club on the outskirts of the steel mill.

“Both maintenance forces and costs must follow operational levels,” he said. “In other words, when we are in periods of high production and we are making money, we can spend it. The converse is also true. When production levels are down and we are not making money, we cannot spend it.” He conceded that “obviously this is not the best situation for maintenance,” but to do otherwise would be “contrary to financial reality.”

Jones did not discuss the relationship between plant maintenance and safety. Instead, he called Sparrows Point’s safety record exemplary and attributed the rise in injuries to “extenuating circumstances.”

His speech came at a time when accidents had claimed the most lives in a year since 1962. The injury toll was the highest since 1974, when the mill had several thousand more employees. In five of the six fatalities in 1978, state safety officials had charged Bethlehem with “serious” or “willful” violations of safety laws and fined the company $62,800. Another $10,400 was assessed for exposing coke oven workers to excessive amounts of coal tars and benzene, two cancer-causing agents.

Jones, a husky, distinguished-looking man in his mid-50s, would not talk to the press about the accidents or fines. But speaking from the podium at the Sparrows Point Country Club, he made it clear to his subordinates that Bethlehem would not stray from the economic course it had charted since the late 1960s.

That course meant that high-speed machinery went without repair until it broke down and had to be fixed. Jobs not tied to production were eliminated or combined with other jobs. After several poor years, company profits reached $225 million in 1978. Although respectable, the profit margin was “still short of our goal,” Lewis W. Foy, chairman of Bethlehem Steel told stockholders, adding that his objective for 1979 and 1980 was to “move further toward the goal of attaining rates of return at least equal to the average returns of all manufacturing companies.”

Was there a connection between the productivity drive and the number of accidents at Sparrows Point? Chairman Foy fumed at the question, and only later acknowledged that the rate of serious accidents at other company mills was rising.

In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Foy did not lament the injuries of his workers but called the accidents “a tragedy from the standpoint of our safety record.” Employing artfully vague prose, Foy made it appear that management accepted responsibility for workplace safety while simultaneously implying that workers were to blame for the accidents. His was a variant of the old argument that malingering workers cause machines to malfunction. Or as he put it, “We are taking every measure we can possibly think of to increase the intensity of our safety program…. We are inspecting all of our equipment and machinery down there to make sure that it is safe from every human element.”

For ten years, Walter Coonts watched the “human elements” get hurt on machines that made heavy-duty wire at the Point. In 1973, he thought he was in position to do something about it.

Appointed secretary of a union safety committee, Coonts began to document the hazards of the 85 wire machines. He knew them well; in the 1960s he had trained on the machines, and “they were so dangerous I wouldn’t work the job.” The danger stemmed from the absence of shields over the rotating disks, which pulled wire through cutting dies at speeds of up to 1,500 feet per minute.

Shortly after Coonts joined the committee, there was another bad accident. A worker’s hand got caught in the rushing wire and was mutilated in a “ripper block.” Several of the employee’s fingers had to be amputated. Coonts wrote the first of several memos to the company safety department urging the placement of shields “so employees are out of reach and danger of all moving parts.”

Nothing was done. He argued for the shields at the monthly labor-management safety meetings. Finally in August 1974, Coonts was informed that “supervision is presently developing plans” to install the guards, according to the minutes of the meeting.

But 1975 dawned and only one of the 85 machines was shielded. Several meetings with supervision produced more assurances. Then he found out that the “front office” had vetoed the project. With production levels down, Coonts was told, the company could scarcely afford the $80,000 price tag.

Even before this rebuff, Coonts said that the committee work was wearing him down. Day after day he dealt with foremen ­– some sympathetic to safety, others indifferent – who were rewarded only according to the tonnage rates that their departments produced. He haggled with safety officials who admitted that they were just filling a position. He talked with employees who were worried about working conditions and employees who invoked the issue of safety to settle a grudge with a supervisor.

“Sure, some guys take short cuts. The foreman looks the other way; he wants them to,” Coonts said, sitting in the living room of his modest ranch house. “There’s pressure on you all the time, from the company and from yourself. It’s always keep up, keep up, got to catch up.”

Coonts left the safety committee in 1975. He continued working in the rod and wire mill, often within earshot of the ratatat screech of steel wire being drawn through carbide-cutting dies at 1,500 feet per minute.

Death on the Wire

On June 16, 1978, at 11:15 a.m., 29-year-old Robert E. Hall was pulled into a wire machine. He died instantly. There were no reported eyewitnesses. Investigators reconstructed the following events: Hall was working on No. 8 bull-block when his gloved left hand became entwined in the running wire. He was swept off his feet and flung headfirst into a metal spool. Halfway around the spool, his body set off an emergency switch, and the machine stopped.

Early that same afternoon, two officials from Bethlehem notified Midge Hall of the accident. They provided few details. Seven months pregnant with her fourth child, she was comforted by her sister while her deceased husband’s father and brother drove to Sparrows Point. The brother almost got into a fight when a company official said that the accident was caused by operator error.

After an investigation, the Maryland Occupational Safety and Health agency fined Bethlehem $27,200 for “serious” safety violations. Each violation involved the absence of shields around the wire machines. Had No. 8 bull-block been shielded, Hall would not have been pulled into the machine and killed, the agency’s chief inspector reported.

In late August, Midge Hall gave birth to Stephen, a healthy seven pounder. Several days later, a newspaper article disclosed that the Maryland safety agency had withdrawn a violation notice the previous year that would have required Bethlehem to place shields around the wire machine. The notice and a $150 fine were dropped after company officials protested the notice at a private meeting with safety agency officials.

After reading the article, Midge said she became very upset. Her in-laws and neighbors urged her to sue Bethlehem Steel. She hired a lawyer suggested by a friend, but after researching the state law, he said a lawsuit would be folly. Like most states, Maryland requires a plaintiff to prove that a company “willfully and deliberately” intended to injure an employee. To establish gross negligence or violation of safety laws was not enough, he said, adding that a suit could jeopardize the funds that she would receive as a widow under workmen’s compensation.

How could a law be written like that? She wondered. How could a judge let them get away with it? Midge talked, and still talks, about a suit. The money doesn’t matter. “I want them to know he wasn’t just a number.”

Midge Joseph met Bob Hall in 1970. She was down from Cumberland, Maryland, to visit her sister, and Bob came over. “I guess that was it.” She was 19, and they were married within a year. A photograph shows both with radiant smiles. Midge was the shorter of the two, with a round face and large dark eyes. Bob had curly blond hair and was thin. He came from a family of steelworkers. His father, mother, and two older brothers all had worked at The Point. Shortly before he met Midge, he got a job at the mill.

They saved, made it through a layoff, and in 1976 bought a two-story brick rowhouse in Middle River, about 10 miles from the plant. In 1978, he put in a transfer from the blast furnace to the wire department.

“He wanted to spend more time at home with the kids, and he thought it was a cleaner and safer job,” she says. “He saw a lot over there [at the furnaces]. Just before he left, he saw a guy step into a bucket of whatever it was, and it burned his boot right off his foot. And he didn’t want to go through another summer there. When it’s 100 degrees outside, it’s gotta be pure hell for the men. He’d come home black as the ace of spades and go right to sleep.”

The children occupy Midge’s life now. “They’re pretty good, but I lose my temper. I realize it’s all on me. I’m full boss.” Eight-year-old Lori talks about her father, but doesn’t cry anymore. Tara Lynn, 6, prods her mom to buy her another daddy, and Bobby, who recently turned five, still goes through crying jags. “He tells me he’s my man,” Midge says, holding two-year-old Stephen, who has his father’s blond hair and angular face.

On a bad night, when Midge retreats to the downstairs couch, her thoughts go back to the place where her husband worked for eight years. Since the day when the two company officials came to her door with news of her husband’s death, she has heard nothing from Bethlehem Steel.

Walter Coonts did not know Bob Hall and did not hear of his death until the day after it happened. “It kind of stunned me. You know, I had the feeling it was gonna happen and finally it happened.” Coonts’ mountain twang is drawn out, hard to hear.

What effect has the accident had on safety? “Well, it’s put them over a barrel, that’s what it’s done. Of course, they say they’re sorry and hope it don’t ever happen again, and that they’re going to do everything they can to make the department safe. But I don’t think their attitude has ever changed.”

Why? Coonts’ blue eyes flicker and he lets out a chuckle. Accidents will happen because it is cheaper for Bethlehem to pay safety fines and workmen’s compensation benefits than to fix its machinery and change its production system. His reasoning, expressed by many other steelworkers, has long been discounted by safety professionals as incorrect. But with accident rates showing few signs of significantly receding, some prominent regulators are beginning to wonder.

Ray Marshall, secretary of the U.S. Labor Department, admitted last year to a Senate committee that safety does not necessarily pay. The low cost of workmen’s compensation benefits – less than 1.5 percent of the average employer’s payroll – “provides few economic incentives,” Marshall said, especially when the cost can be absorbed in the price of a product. Fines by OSHA or state safety agencies rarely exceed $10,000. Such penalties are negligible to a Bethlehem or U.S. Steel whose larger mills boast payrolls in excess of $500,000 a day.

Nine years after the passage of the OSHA Act, the federal agency has issued reams of regulations, but has done little to force industry to alter the practices and pressures – the noise and dust, the speedups and equipment breakdowns – that lead to accidents.

After accidents claimed another two lives at Sparrows Point in 1979, the union newspaper made a modest proposal. It recommended that General Manager Jones leave his office at quitting time and go over to the clockhouses. There, the paper said, he could personally “congratulate employees for making it through another day at the steel mills.”