Tyrell Anderson thinks that sometimes local organizations can get siloed in their work.
That’s why he thinks Decay Devils’ involvement in a local art installation this weekend is important, especially with some unlikely partners.
“I think sometimes we can think our way of communication is the only way that’s effective,” said Anderson, a Gary native and president of Decay Devils. “I feel as though this is where being an artist and storyteller comes into play.”
On Saturday, Decay Devils and local environmental organizations Just Transition Northwest Indiana and Gary Advocates for Responsible Development are partnering to showcase an exhibit titled “Our Mill, Our Home: A Community Photography and Storytelling Exhibit” from 2 to 5 p.m. at Gary’s Gateway Park. The groups are working with other partners, including Industrious Labs, to put together an artistic and informational event about Northwest Indiana’s steel industry.
“We came up with the concept of combining storytelling and photography and weaving in people’s steel stories or personal histories with the steel industry,” said Lisa Vallee, organizing director of Just Transition Northwest Indiana.
Decay Devils took portraits of 20 people and JTNWI facilitated interviews, Vallee said.
“The people that were interviewed were current steelworkers, former steelworkers, families of steelworkers and then fenceline community members,” Vallee said. “So they were asked about their personal history with living in a steel community or working in a steel community and what that has been like.”
GARD President Dorreen Carey is featured in one of the portraits. She called the gallery “a great partnership” between local organizations to show how steel has impacted the region.
Carey has lived in Gary for more than 45 years, and she worked at Gary Works for about seven years before being laid off in 1983. She has been involved in environmental work for more than 40 years.
“This is a bit of a way to communicate the commitment I have carried and the way I have spent my life here, advocating for community health, a clean environment,” Carey said. “It’s just good to be part of that group of people that are communicating their story.”
Anybody who worked in the steel mill understands the dangers, Carey said, and she believes a lot of people have accepted the risk of harm to public and environmental health.
“I think there are more people now who are making that connection and understanding that working in the mill and living in the community is not just about having a job,” Carey said. “It’s being recognized that work also affects people out of the mill who don’t have a job there, and it’s important that we look at the benefits of having the mill and hopefully a better way to integrate with the community.”
In addition to the portrait showing, the free event will also feature a live DJ, poetry, button-making, children’s activities and refreshments from Grindhouse Cafe.
Gary resident Beverly Lewis plans to read a poem at Saturday’s event, she told the Post-Tribune, which she wrote as a member of Industrious Labs’ Sustainable Steel Community Cohort. The cohort educates community members about green steelmaking technologies to help advocate in the future.
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Lewis said she wrote the poem as a final project to tell her story with steel. The poem tells more of her story as a Gary resident who lives not far from the mill and how she’s noticed pollution’s effects on her day-to-day life.
“I think it’s important that people who are native to this area and who have lived through these experiences are allowed to share their stories,” Lewis said, “because this allows other people to maybe start thinking in terms of health challenges that they may have experienced that they would not have connected to the steel mills.”
GARD previously found that exposure to pollutants can cause respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, cancer risk and premature death. The American Lung Association found that, in 2020, Indiana had a lung cancer rate of 72.5 per 100,000 people, with Lake County as one of the state’s counties with the highest cancer mortality rates. A 2016 report from the JAMA Network also found Gary as one of the five U.S. cities with the lowest life expectancy at one point.
The exhibit is part of JTNWI’s clean steel campaign that’s focused on bringing cleaner steelmaking technology to the region. JTNWI and GARD are committed to bringing direct reduction and electric arc furnaces to the area steel mills.
According to the Association for Iron and Steel Technology, direct reduction creates sponge iron, which “is produced in a reactor by direct reduction of iron ore in solid form, utilizing natural gas as the reducing agent to produce pellets or briquettes.”
Direct reduction by itself cannot create steel, according to a previous statement from U.S. Steel, and direct reduced iron is a feedstock used in electric arc furnaces to produce steel. U.S. Steel previously told the Post-Tribune that a new electric arc furnace-based steel facility would need to be built “from the ground up.”
GARD has previously found that U.S. Steel could install electric smelting furnaces at Gary Works, which could then melt direct reduced iron and remove its impurities. The molten iron could then be fed into the facility’s basic oxygen furnaces to create steel, according to the report. U.S. Steel has said that is not being done anywhere nationally or at the scale needed for Gary Works.
Vallee said she thinks it’s important for environmental organizations to have an event like theirs on Saturday.
“A lot of times people who work in the industry, whether it’s at the refinery or at the steel mills or at a coal plant, often see us as the enemy because they assume that we want to take jobs,” Vallee said. “That couldn’t be further from the truth for our organization. We want to keep good paying union jobs in our communities, but we do believe that we can keep those jobs in our communities and have better health outcomes for our community members.”