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ОглавлениеSparrows Point
Sparrows Point Road
January 21, 2013
20. Everything Must Go
On a cold, muddy, morning outside the former United Steelworkers Local 9477, men sip complimentary coffee in paper cups before stepping onto chartered buses for a tour of the property that once housed the world’s largest steel mill. Hilco Trading, which bought
Sparrows Point in a bankruptcy sale, is offering previews of the mill’s vast stock of heavy equipment, machinery, trucks, and tools for an online auction of “an industry,” as one visitor—a former Bethlehem Steel worker here—puts it.
At the first stop, everyone exits the bus and two Colorado reps from EVRAZ North America, which operates several smaller mills, inspect 200-ton transport trucks known as “slab haulers.” A rep from O&K American Corp, headquartered in Japan, is also aboard—along with several retired or laid-off Sparrows Point workers, coming for a last glimpse of the corrugated warehouses, tin mills, machine shops, rail cars, and loading docks.
“I came here in 1962, right out of Kenwood High School, into an apprentice program,” says Lawrence Knachel, glancing out a bus window. “We had 27 softball teams. Shipping side used to play the steel
side after work.”
Inside a drafty repair shop, a former steelworker, in the hot tin mill for 39 years, mans a security post, earning a few last, nonunion wages before the place becomes completely barren. A Midwestern manufacturing rep asks what caused the plant’s closure. The ex-steelworker gives the question some thought and shakes his head inside a yellow hard hat. “Everyone has a different reason,” he says finally.
“I’ll tell you, though, the other day I got home and my wife was crying. ‘My grandfather worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘My dad worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘You worked there all those years and now you’re [there] shutting it all down.’”
(Postscript: In 2018, Amazon opened a new 855,000-square-foot “Fulfillment Center” at Sparrows Point.)
