To escape a surge in Chicago’s gang violence, Natalie Ammons and her family moved in 1979 to a home just a few hundred yards from one of the world’s biggest steel mills.
On some nights, when the Gary mill pounded its red-hot steel slabs into thin sheets, she’d see flames shoot up through the smokestacks. She’d go to bed to the sound of rumblings from the mill and the smell of rotten eggs. In the morning, she’d find greasy, black particles scattered on her lawn, sidewalk and car.
Ammons, 71, said she never thought much about air pollution, not even as her coughing and chest colds got worse and worse. She was too busy catching the train to Chicago to run document retrieval for a big law firm.
What really scared her — and transformed her into a clean-air activist — was the first time she saw the breathing machines that her three great-grandchildren, Adonis, Alivia and Eli, use to recover from asthma attacks that doctors say are more common among children in Gary than nearby towns.
That was two years ago. Adonis is now 5 years old. Twins Alivia and Eli are 4.
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“You have not lived until you see the three of them sitting there on masks and they can’t move until they get the treatment,” she told a Gary rally last month. “Or to watch a 3-year-old who knows what a breathing machine is and who says, ‘If we don’t have this machine, we can’t survive.’”
Ammons is part of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, a group pressing U.S. Steel to bring its cleanest technology to the 118-year-old Gary Works. Without it, activists say, the city’s steelmaking days are numbered.
According to an April study by Indiana University, globalization, automation and the rise of alternative steelmaking technologies have reshaped what was once the heart of American industry.
The steel mills that line Lake Michigan’s southern shoreline — Gary Works and the Cleveland-Cliffs mills in East Chicago and Burns Harbor — are still among the largest employers in northwest Indiana and a pillar of Chicago’s regional economy despite having lost more than 55,000 jobs since peaking in the 1970s. There are now about 9,000 jobs, according to the IU study.
The three mills are also major contributors to airborne soot, smog and greenhouse gases, ranking among the top 15 emitters of PM2.5 pollution out of roughly 240,000 manufacturers in the country, IU researchers said.
Most of these emissions are legal under Indiana operating permits and federal rules.
After President Donald Trump approved the Nippon Steel acquisition of U.S. Steel last year, the Tokyo-based company said it planned to invest $3.1 billion in Gary, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Activists and residents say they hope these investments include cleaner steelmaking methods that can lead to job creation and health improvements. Specifically, they want direct reduction, which emits fewer pollutants as it removes impurities from iron ore without fully melting it.
Now, U.S. Steel is spending $1.9 billion for a new direct reduction facility in Osceola, Arkansas — but not in Gary.
Installing this iron-purifying technique in Gary would be too risky and expensive, said U.S. Steel spokesperson Amanda Malkowski in a June 11 statement, because it’s never been deployed on a scale large enough to keep what’s still the country’s biggest steel mill going.
Members of Gary Advocates and Just Transition Northwest Indiana, an environmental justice organization, say that without the new technology, U.S. Steel is condemning Gary to more pollution and economic uncertainty.
Malkowski said it’s “categorically untrue” that the mill’s future is at risk without new techniques in Gary.
“The investments coming to Gary Works position the facility as a premier supplier of next-generation steel products,” she said.
Gary’s mill is the sixth-largest stationary source in the U.S. of the particulate matter pollution known as PM2.5, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.
The complex chemistry of PM2.5 includes airborne particles so small they can pass through human lungs and enter directly into the bloodstream, which can cause asthma, heart attacks, strokes, preterm births and impaired cognitive function.
In April, the American Lung Association reported that Indiana’s Lake County, where Gary Works is located, was one of only 20 counties nationwide to receive failing grades for short- and long-term PM2.5 particle pollution and ozone.
Ammons and other activists say they believe the region’s environmental and public health statistics are enough reason for cleaner steelmaking in the city.
“When I look at this mill, and what they’re doing down in Arkansas, I think it’s a travesty,” she said. “They don’t want to give us clean air.”
According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, the Gary advocacy group and others, emissions from Gary Works contribute to ground-level ozone that exceed EPA standards.
Ozone can cause respiratory irritation, trigger asthma attacks, worsen lung disease, harm lung tissue and even cause premature death.
“Many Gary residents, including members of one or more Plaintiffs, suffer from various adverse health impacts resulting from chronic exposure to air pollution which the (mill) contributes,” said the lawsuit, which seeks a response to the groups’ objection to the renewal of Gary Works’ environmental permit.
Dr. Wassim Shwaiki, a Munster, Indiana, pulmonologist, examined Ammons on Wednesday, according to medical records provided to the Tribune.
Ammons never smoked cigarettes, the records show. However, Shwaiki concluded she’s been exposed to both secondhand smoke and environmental pollution and suffers from chronic bronchitis.
When asked about health complaints, U.S. Steel spokesperson Andrew Fulton said in an email, “What gets ignored in the discussion about air quality is the fact that Northwest Indiana is a hub for industry, and not only steelmaking.”
‘Very intense’
In Gary, U.S. Steel still relies on blast furnaces to make the unrecycled iron that is the essential ingredient in high-strength steel that automakers like General Motors and Toyota crave.
The furnaces resemble thermos bottles hundreds of feet tall. At 3,000 degrees, they’re so hot inside they can never be turned off, except during maintenance shutdowns.
Blast furnace workers wear silver-colored suits resembling those worn by astronauts to protect themselves from flames, and long underwear even in the summer to protect themselves from heat, said retired steelworker Bob Tribble, 62, who spent 31 years in and around the Gary blast furnaces.
Workers feed iron ore, coal and limestone into the furnaces’ top and use long sticks to punch open holes for purified molten iron to flow out from the bottom. They transfer the iron into steel furnaces and then into rolling mills that pound the slabs into sheets.
“It’s very hot in there and very intense,” Tribble said. “I don’t know what you’d liken it to.”
He paused and said, “Maybe hell.”
Blast furnaces need new bricks about every 20 years because the heat causes them to wear out. Of Nippon’s promised $3.1 billion Gary investment, the company is spending $350 million to reline the biggest of four blast furnaces with new, heat-resistant bricks.
To do this, workers use what U.S. Steel calls one of the world’s largest overhead cranes to replace pressure values and other key components at the top of the furnace. They build a temporary floor inside the furnace and then raise the floor higher and higher as they replace more bricks, Tribble said.
SteelWatch, a Netherlands-based organization focused on climate change and the steel industry, described the Gary relining as a step backward, in a March report.
Part of a network of environmental groups, SteelWatch, Gary Advocates and other northwest Indiana activists say the blast furnace, once it is relined, will pump vast amounts of pollution into the region for another 20 years.
They also predict that, as the fight against global warming escalates, advanced countries will not build or reline blast furnaces by the end of that period.
If industry-leading iron capabilities have by then shifted to Arkansas and the South, northwest Indiana will lose its automotive steel dominance, said Jack Weinberg, a former steelworker and a technical adviser to the Gary advocacy group.
“Unless Gary Works has already installed modern (direct reduction) furnaces before its last blast furnace is finally shut down, the mill will become unable to produce the high-performance flat-rolled steel products that Gary now specializes in making,” Weinberg said in an interview Monday.
Losing the mill would devastate the half-million residents for whom the Gary area still feels like a company town. Many are descendants of immigrants who came from Europe, Mexico and the southern U.S. to work in the mill.
“We’re the people who migrated here to help build up the steel mill, and that’s the best you could do for us after all these years?” Ammons asked.
‘Billions upon billions’
Direct reduction furnaces purify iron ore without fully melting it. They operate at lower temperatures, and burn natural gas instead of a condensed form of coal known as coke, cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half and lowering PM2.5 and other pollutants by an even larger percentage. Where natural gas is abundant, they can be cheaper than blast furnaces.
U.S. Steel’s Fulton said shifting Gary Works to direct reduction would require tearing down the mill.
But Weinberg said U.S. Steel could instead begin the process by replacing just one of its four Gary blast furnaces with direct reduction. The company could use an electric smelter to melt and purify the iron before feeding it into Gary’s existing oxygen furnaces or into the kind of electric arc furnace already built in Arkansas.
ThyssenKrupp plans to open a German mill using electric smelters in 2028, and Nippon is trying them out in Japan. But U.S. Steel says the technology is too experimental and expensive for Gary.
“To keep the Gary Works’ capacity the same, it would require multiple (direct reduction) facilities, multiple smelters, infrastructure changes and demolition, with an estimated cost of billions upon billions of dollars,” Malkowski said in her June 11 email.
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That investment would require “massive government subsidies that add nearly $1,000 a ton to the cost of finished steel,” Malkowski added. If customers had to pay this increase, their steel prices would increase by about 10%, according to FocusEconomics.
These potential costs would come at a delicate time for Nippon, according to a Nikkei Asia report. In Tokyo, the company’s shares sold for 543 yen Friday after reaching nearly 700 yen in February, the news service reported.
Nippon’s investors are increasingly concerned, Nikkei said, that the company will need to borrow more money to deliver its promised U.S. Steel investments, and that rising interest rates will make this more difficult.
In Japan, Nippon takes full advantage of government subsidies, which include $1.75 billion to build an electric arc furnace in Kyushu and consumer rebates up to $300 for cars and trucks made from low-carbon steel, according to industry newsletters.
State and federal authorities in Arkansas have already kicked in $700 million in grants, tax incentives and subsidized financing to build the Osceola facility, according to Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
U.S. Steel received just $12.5 million in tax credits and training grants from Indiana between 2007 and 2020, according to Good Jobs First.
Meanwhile, Indiana is spending $655 million in data center tax abatements, according to WTHR-TV in Indianapolis. The state has also earmarked $1 billion in incentives to lure the Chicago Bears to Hammond.
Charlie Tinkle, spokesperson for the Indiana Economic Development Corp., confirmed the value of the U.S. Steel subsidies. He declined to comment on whether the state should provide more assistance to U.S. Steel in Gary.
Weinberg hopes Indiana rethinks its priorities.
“If the business-friendly leadership of Indiana doesn’t want to support its manufacturing industries and is happy that their Republican friends in Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama are getting jobs Indiana has now, there’s not much we can do,” he added.
‘Do right this time’
Industrious Labs, a nationwide clean air advocacy group, reported in 2024 that people living near steel mills are 12% more likely to develop cancer. Within a 3-mile radius of Gary Works, 97% of residents are people of color and 62% are low-income.
Gary resident Beryl Fitzpatrick lives with the health impacts of air pollution every day.
The 71-year-old is chief operating officer of Community HealthNet Health Centers — a federally subsidized network of nine clinics in and around Gary that serve 20,000 patients a year regardless of their ability to pay.
Fitzpatrick’s father worked at Gary Works, and her mother was a schoolteacher. She remembers her father’s excitement as the family donned their best clothes for an annual mill tour.
And she remembers her mother’s grumbling that they came home so dirty they looked like they’d spent the day making steel.
Her parents never dreamed, she said, that she would be the third of four children to suffer from cancer. Two of her siblings have died from cancer, she added.
In 2016, Fitzpatrick had a 15½-hour surgery where doctors reconstructed half her tongue, using veins and arteries from her arm and thighs.
“I had to learn how to talk again. I had to learn to eat,” she said.
In 10 years, Fitzpatrick said she’s had seven cancerous tumors removed from her right kidney. Rush University, which removed the tumors, analyzed each one.
The reports she got back, Fitzpatrick said, say environmental factors were the primary cause of her cancer. Fitzpatrick’s doctor, Kerstin Stenson, confirmed the link in a June 25 email to the Tribune.
“It’s almost certain that her place of residence, with the high pollution and other industrial output, contributed to her cancer,” said Stenson, who’s in charge of head and neck cancer treatments at Rush University Medical Center.
Dr. Mihir Bhayani, another Rush researcher, didn’t treat Fitzpatrick. However, he and other scientists are closing in, he said in a May 20 interview with the Tribune, on proving a causal link between air pollution and a type of mutant gene associated with head and neck cancers.
The evidence of such links is already widespread, he said.
“If you’re a child born in Gary, you’re much more likely to develop asthma and may get lung cancer as an adult, both due to airborne exposures,” Bhayani said. “A lot of our patients with head and neck cancers live or work in areas with high levels of air pollution, sometimes near heavy industry, like in northwest Indiana.”
Fitzpatrick said she’s grateful to be alive, but she’s not stopping there. She’s pressing Nippon to avoid what she calls race-based disinvestment in Gary.
In 1960, when the city’s population peaked at 178,320, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, 60% of Gary’s residents were white. By last year, the population had dropped to 67,555 and less than 10% were white.
U.S. Steel employment in Gary, meanwhile, dropped to 4,300 from 30,000 in the 1970s, according to a 2024 New York Times report.
The company plans to add 1,000 jobs with its Nippon investments, Fulton said.
Sitting in a sun-drenched room among chairs arranged in a circle for Community HealthNet’s expectant mothers, Fitzpatrick addressed Nippon executives.
“It’s my understanding that Nippon, the new owners, have expressed an interest in knowing what the residents of Gary think,” she said.
“Well, I want you to make 21st century steel in Gary with the same investment you’re making in Arkansas. … Be the leaders that you were in the 19th and 20th centuries, and do right this time.”
U.S. Steel didn’t answer a Tribune question about whether Gary’s Black and brown communities should get its cleanest technology after enduring many years of pollution, other than to say the company is committed to environmental excellence and providing good jobs.
The company referenced its Indiana Economic Impact Report, which says U.S. Steel generated about $1.8 billion for Indiana’s economy in 2024. The report doesn’t address Black and brown communities.
‘Huge money to spend’
An intertwined drama is playing out at Cleveland-Cliffs’ steel mills in East Chicago and Burns Harbor.
The company is rooted in iron ore mining in Minnesota and northern Michigan but jumped into steelmaking by acquiring AK Steel and ArcelorMittal’s U.S. operations in 2020.
Cleveland-Cliffs lost money in the last two years and, in September, announced a “strategic partnership” to help POSCO, Korea’s largest steelmaker, expand in the U.S.
Patricia Persico, a Cleveland-Cliffs spokesperson, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In an April earnings call, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves said the agreement had become less urgent for him because the U.S. war with Iran had driven steel prices higher. He said the agreement became more difficult for POSCO because the war also elevated Korea’s energy costs. He still hopes to finalize an agreement this summer.
U.S. mills were buoyed by a 6% price increase during the first two months of the war, according to federal government data.
The U.S. is the only place where a pickup truck containing a ton and a half of steel costs an average of more than $66,000, according to December data from Cox Automotive, an Atlanta-based research firm.
But U.S. steelmakers still need tariff protection, according to U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt, who spoke at the Detroit Economic Club in March.
The global steel market is now about 2 billion tons each year, Burritt said. China accounts for half the market, selling over 1 billion tons annually. But China has another 600 million tons of excess capacity it can dump into the global market at any time, he said.
In 2025, U.S. mills shipped 91 million tons of steel and imported 25 million tons, according to the Washington-based American Iron and Steel Institute.
It was only a few years ago that U.S. Steel was dialing back on its investments in legacy mills to focus on so-called minimills relying mostly on recycled scrap, Burritt said.
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The Nippon acquisition allowed U.S. Steel to switch gears and to promise Trump $11 billion in new investments for its domestic operations, including in Gary.
“I am so pumped up,” Burritt said. “The dog caught the car. We’ve got some huge money to spend.”
Burritt’s enthusiasm may have been fueled by the $72 million paycheck he’d negotiated if the new owners fired him.
In any case, it may have a limited impact in Indiana.
Months before his Detroit speech, he told a Little Rock audience, including Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, about his growing fondness for Arkansas.
“Mississippi County, Arkansas, is now the No. 1 steel-producing county in the entire United States,” Burritt said. “Did you know that? No. 1! Not somewhere in Indiana.”
‘About the pace’
Nippon may not be rushing to invest in greener steel.
In March, Nippon ranked 17th among 18 global steelmakers in its efforts to transition away from coal-based technologies in time to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to SteelWatch.
The SteelWatch report described Nippon’s plan to capture carbon dioxide from its blast furnaces, or to reduce CO2 emissions by burning more hydrogen and less coal, as long-term propositions at best.
“The fight is really about the pace,” Roger Smith, the top advocate for SteelWatch in Asia, said in a May 14 interview with the Tribune. “We’re trying to get them to hurry up and do this in the early to mid-2030s and not in the mid-2040s.”
In addition to the relining, U.S. Steel has promised to spend up to $220 million in Gary to upgrade rolling mills that pound 9-inch slabs into automotive steel less than a tenth of an inch thick, and to reopen a tin line for making cans.
The company has not said how it will spend the remaining $2.5 billion earmarked for Gary.
But Nippon’s ability to run the Arkansas direct reduction furnace on either natural gas or on hydrogen made from renewable power could lead to major strategic shifts.
“This is the first (direct reduction) project that Nippon is in charge of, and it’s in a country, the United States, that has renewable energy capacity and actual renewable energy,” Smith said. “It could influence their operations globally.”
But Trump has added his own pro-coal proclivities to the mix. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords in January and, on June 5, announced $850 million in grants to build and modernize coal-fired power plants.
Trump delayed a $500 million subsidy for Cleveland-Cliffs to begin producing direct reduced iron at its Middleton, Ohio, steel mill, and now the company wants to use this money to reline a blast furnace. He delayed a $1 billion subsidy for a northwest Indiana hydrogen hub that would have provided hydrogen for a Cleveland-Cliffs blast furnace.
“I’m not going to give up on bringing those tax incentives back,” said U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan, D-Highland, in a May 27 interview.
Trump also reinforced his anti-labor bona fides, Mrvan said, by canceling collective bargaining for 450,000 federal employees.
That sets the stage for uneasy talks when contracts expire between the United Steelworkers and U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs in September.
Roxanne Brown, the union’s new president, said in a May 20 interview that the future of northwest Indiana steel mills will be a big part of bargaining.
“There are $11 billion in commitments to go across the various sites, and our strategy and our goal is to hold them to these commitments,” she said of U.S. Steel. “The steel industry right now is doing well, and so that should be reflected in the contracts.”
Still, many workers are anxious.
Northern Indiana Public Service Co., the region’s gas and electricity utility, locked out 1,600 steelworker members in April. They returned by May 5.
At the Midwest’s largest oil refinery in Whiting, BP locked out more than 800 steelworker members in mid-March. They haven’t returned, and the refinery is still operating.
Not enough requirements
Steelmaking has always been a dirty business.
By itself, steelmaking accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Global Energy Monitor, a Covina, California-based environmental group.
In 2021, Gary Works was the steel industry’s largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in North America, according to climatetrace.org, an emissions tracking site.
Despite the danger airborne particles pose to human health, many have been released legally into the atmosphere. U.S. Steel says its “compliance rate remains greater than 99%,” at the Gary site.
“Like other manufacturers operating in Northwest Indiana, Gary Works must operate within the bounds of our environmental permits. We are subject to regular inspections by IDEM, who closely monitors our environmental compliance,” Fulton said in a June 16 statement.
On Tuesday, the ELPC and other environmental groups sued the EPA over its slow response to objections to the Gary permit.
They filed objections a year ago and haven’t heard anything back, even though federal rules require a response in 60 days. EPA spokesperson David Shark said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
Permits are nothing more than “permission to pollute,” according to Robert Michaels, managing attorney for ELPC.
“Each facility has a pollution limit,” Michaels said in an interview. “But we can’t know whether (U.S. Steel) is in fact complying with these limits because there aren’t enough requirements in the permit for monitoring, record-keeping, and reporting.”
‘Invested in Gary’
Ammons gets daily reminders of how elusive her goal of clean steel remains, which include her great-grandchildren’s breathing machines.
“Every time they go outside and come back in, they’re out of breath and they’ve got to get their breathing treatment,” she said.
Ammons works now as the station manager and talk-show host for WHLT radio in Gary. She still stays on the city’s north side, just across I-90 from Gary Works.
At the May 28 rally, Ammons vowed to remain on the front lines and call attention to what’s happening in her city.
This includes talking about searing memories of the death of her husband John, who worked for five years in the Gary blast furnaces. He died in 1999 at 47, just three months after being diagnosed with bladder cancer.
“My husband made me promise. He said, ‘When I go, … can you just go back to California with your family?’” Ammons recalled in an interview. “But I didn’t want to do that. I’m just invested in Gary. And I like Gary.”
John Lippert is a freelance reporter.