JSW Steel is pouring $500 million into Mingo Junction, a plant about 40 miles west of Pittsburgh that has not produced steel for a decade.
March 18, 2019
Part of an occasional series, Recasting American Steel
MINGO JUNCTION, Ohio
On a December day in this quiet village of 3,000, John Hritz angled his phone in anticipation. A vat of molten steel tipped and an eruption of sparks burst as if to mark the occasion.
His photo of that first pour — along with one showing the first glowing-orange slab of steel melted, cast and rolled here in a decade — would soon illustrate JSW Steel USA’s holiday cards sent to employees and customers.
The magic of Christmas had arrived for Mr. Hritz — a steel industry veteran and believer in a coming renaissance for American mills. It’s a sentiment not uncommon among industry supporters, especially after President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on foreign steel last year to try to stem a flood of cheap imports coming from China.
But Mr. Hritz’s dreams are backed by something more: the deep pockets of JSW Group Limited, an Indian infrastructure-building conglomerate that has committed to spend $1 billion at Mingo Junction and another mill in Texas.
“We’re putting in the finest technology in the world,” boasted Mr. Hritz, who started his career in the 1970s as a U.S. Steel engineer in Youngstown, Ohio, and moved among companies as a corporate lawyer, consultant and executive. Today, he is the CEO of JSW Steel USA.
Previous Mingo Junction owners “tried to extract as much money out of it as they could, then it either went bankrupt or shut down,” he said. “The whole idea now is to reinvigorate and grow the steel industry — and put in jobs that will last for decades and decades and decades.”
But there’s a lot at stake for JSW Steel, with goals that extend beyond the walls of the mill and into Mingo Junction, a faded industrial town still coping with the mill’s closing in 2008.
As the news of the investment trickled out in the last year, it was considered something of a miracle:
- A restarted furnace and plans to construct a second one.
- The promise of 1,000 good-paying jobs.
- More money to hire police officers, rebuild schools, and fund bingo at the senior center.
- Street paving projects, expanded parks, businesses to fill vacant storefronts along Commercial Street.
In effect, the company is launching an unprecedented effort to find a lasting formula to “bring back” the American steel industry — to borrow words from Mr. Trump’s April 2016 campaign stop in Pittsburgh that resonated with many blue-collar workers who had watched jobs in steel, coal and manufacturing disappear.
![Laborer April VanHorn, right, 40, of Mingo Junction, Ohio, shoots pool in a pool league, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2019, at Spuds Parkview Inn in Mingo Junction, Ohio. “Everybody’s hopeful,” said VanHorn of JSW Steel restarting the mill in town. Her father worked in the mill before it closed, and she is applying to work there as a laborer as well.](https://i0.wp.com/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/20190317smsMingo15.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1)
“Everybody’s hopeful,” says April VanHorn, who is applying for a job as a laborer at the mill, where her father once worked.
Mingo Junction will be a testing ground for whether putting money back into steel can make the business work again and restore the sense of community and shared mission yearned for by so many residents.
“I just wish I was 30 years younger so I could go back in there and work,” said John F. Buchmelter III, 81, who retired in 1995 after four decades in the mill.
“We were all tied together, if not by blood, then by the work,” he said, recalling a Commercial Street packed with people after their shifts — a cacophony of accents like Slovak, Polish, Italian, Scottish, Russian, German. “The mill, though it might have had all the noise and the dirt and everything, it still was our little gold mine.”
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