re: #10 Decatur Deb

Whole lot of stuff that OSHA/NIOSH hate. CO would be the least of it, and some could be recovered in the later plants for use as chemical precursors. Mostly, we just breathed it. Some of the coke itself wound up chemically bonded to different kinds of steel, melted in with limestone. After skimming in the furnaces, the incandescent slag would be loaded into railcars and hauled miles, to be tipped over the elevated railbed. A trainload would look like lava pouring down the dump.

Morning. MIssed this thread as I was reading last night.

I still remember lying in bed and waiting to about 10 PM on a Friday night for the sky to glow bright red when they did the big dump at the big steel mill where I grew up. There was a little creek that ran across the road at about the same place they did the dumping on the side of the hill. It was always a bright orange in color from all the rust coming off the slag hill.