Steel Plant

Jan. 20 of last year, Joseph Nelson, 57, fell 15 feet to his death during steel-making operations at Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s Sparrows Point plant.The Maryland Occupational Safety and Health agency fined the company $5,000, saying that the poor condition of a floor may have contributed to the accident.For several years, the Sparrows Point plant has been a frequent target of MOSH inspectors. Few other workplaces have been investigated so often in the wake of fatalities and other serious accidents.

The 1.8 million drinking, showering, cooking, dish-washing residents of metropolitan Baltimore typically use about 300 million gallons of water every day.Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore County uses that much water every day.This is a lot of water. Three hundred million gallons would fill Oriole Park to the brim and dump 80 million gallons of overflow onto Russell Street.It would fill the Ravens' PSINet Stadium. Twice.As Marylanders and others across the parched mid-Atlantic states are playing golf on thirsty fairways and letting dirt become permanent features of their cars, Bethlehem makes quite a case study in water consumption.

The tin mill operation at the Sparrows Point steel plant in Baltimore County will begin its shut down later this month and be entirely suspended by the end of April, according to a letter from the top union representative for the tin mill. "I met this morning with management to discuss the present and future plans for our Tin Mill," wrote Michael Baskerville in a letter with Friday's date to mill workers. "The Tin Mill is being put into what is called Asset Preservation Mode, because of the loss of annual contracts.

I couldn't help but think of the sad irony when the giant cranes recently arrived in Baltimore ("Giant cranes arrive safely in port," June 21). Cranes that were imported from the other side of the world and parked at their new home that is almost next door to a closing steel plant. Imported cranes that will improve the port's ability to import more goods from other countries. What a telling symbol of our evolving economy. Scott Richardson, Winfield

A 3-alarm fire inside a building in the tin mill area at th Bethlehem Steel plant at Sparrows Point in southeast Baltimore County late last night and early today sent five plant employees and two firefighters to hospitals for treatment of injuries and smoke inhalation.The conditions of the men were not immediately available, but all were expected to survive.Three company workers were treated for severe smoke inhalation in the hyperbaric chamber at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center.Two other employees, along with two county firefighters, were treated for smoke inhalation and injuries at the Francis Scott Key Medical Center.

The struggling Sparrows Point steel plant will resume operations of its "L" blast furnace Saturday after it was temporarily shut down for routine maintenance, the company said. In a letter to customers Friday, RG Steel chief commercial officer Jerry Nelson said the temporary outage that began Wednesday would not have a "detrimental effect on our delivery performance. " Earlier this month, RG Steel told managers and executives, including those at Sparrows Point, that it is cutting their salaries because of weak economic conditions.

Russian steelmaker OAO Severstal, which closed on an $810 million deal to buy Sparrows Point in May with promises to invest significantly in the steel plant, said its first major project will be to upgrade the blast furnace. The $10 million renovation will begin in late summer and the blast furnace, which creates raw steel from ore, would be shut down for about 14 days. It was unclear what would happen to employees during the shutdown. The upgrades would allow the plant to produce more steel and in turn increase profitability, the Severstal executives said.

The father of modern steelmaking, Henry Bessemer, dreamed 130 years ago of a quick one-step recipe for steel: Just boil together coal, iron ore and limestone.But so far, steel plants have been stuck with a reality of a slow, cumbersome three-step process of heating and reheating that makes mills among the worst air polluters in the country.That may be about to change.In a corner building of an abandoned cement plant in this suburb of Pittsburgh, two dozen scientists, engineers and steelworkers are experimenting with equipment that can already cut out the most polluting steelmaking step, and may someday make Mr. Bessemer's dream a reality.

Fires force employees to flee steel plant at Sparrows Point 2 Two fires in an ore-handling building at Severstal Steel Co. at Sparrows Point on Tuesday afternoon forced the evacuation of several employees and brought nearly two dozen pieces of fire apparatus from several Baltimore County fire stations and the steel plant to the scene, said a Fire Department communications officer. There were no injuries. About 2 p.m., a fire was reported in a screen machine on the third floor and was extinguished in about 30 minutes.

Three months after losing their import quota protection, the nation's six biggest steel companies are scheduled today to file the largest collection of unfair-trade cases against foreign steel producers.The heads of the steel companies and the United Steelworkers union, which represents their workers, plan a news conference at the U.S. Capitol to announce trade cases involving sheet steel, galvanized sheet and steel plate, said Henry H. Von Spreckelsen, a spokesman for Bethlehem Steel Corp.