ALLEGHENY COUNTY — The Allegheny County Health Department announced today that it issued a $1,842,530 fine against the United States Steel Corporation’s Clairton coke plant for 153 hydrogen sulfide (H2S) exceedances between January 1, 2020 through March 1, 2022.
According to a release from Allegheny County, H2S emissions produce a rotten egg smell and have resulted in longstanding quality-of-life complaints from affected residents.
“While Allegheny County has been in attainment with federal air standards for two years, we still recognize that there is much to do to ensure that we continue to improve the quality of life of those who call this county home,” County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said in the release. “I commend the Health Department for taking this extraordinary step that was over a year in its making and thank them for continued commitment and efforts to hold polluters accountable.”
The release said that the exceedances were recorded at the Liberty Borough air monitoring station (Liberty Monitor). The fine is the first penalty issued by the Health Department against a single source for H2S exceedances.
“As Health Department Director, I’ve made it a priority to empower our Air Quality (AQ) Program staff to aggressively protect the rights of all county residents and visitors to clean, healthy air,” said Allegheny County Health Department Director Dr. Debra Bogen in the release. “All sources of pollution are held to the same standards, and we will continue to hold accountable any company or facility that does not meet those standards. I applaud the hard work and diligence of our AQ team in collecting and analyzing the voluminous amount of data that resulted in today’s action, and I hope residents do, too.”
Pennsylvania’s ambient air quality standards limit concentrations of H2S to 0.005 parts per million per 24-hour period, according to the release. These ambient standards are incorporated into ACHD’s regulations.
The release also said that data analyzed by the AQ Team identified 46 days of violation in 2020, 94 in 2021, and 13 from January 1 to March 1, 2022.
According to the release, the $1.8 million penalty was determined by several factors, including the number of violations, the severity of each violation, Title V major source status, and the company’s compliance history.
The enforcement order is publicly available on the Air Quality Enforcement Actions page of the Health Department’s website.
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