Two dead and 10 injured in the explosion of Clairton Steel Plant

A second person died after an explosion was torn by a steel factory in Pennsylvania on Monday, local officials confirmed.

The body was discovered after a search operation that extended until the evening on the US Steel Clairton site outside Pittsburgh.

The local police previously confirmed that another person had died and 10 others were injured in a large explosion that destroyed part of the factory.

An order that instructed residents within a radius of a mile of the site to keep their windows and doors closed on air pollution caused fears caused by the resulting fire was lifted on Monday evening. The cause of the explosion still has to be confirmed and an investigation is underway.

Five of the injured people are in a critical but stable state, according to the American partner CBS of the BBC, while the rest from the hospital has been released. No other employees are missing.

The factory is the largest coke operation in North America and is approximately 15 km south of Pittsburgh.

One of the killed men was identified by his family as the 39-year-old Timothy Quinn, a CBS branch reported. His sister Trisha told reporters that he was a father of three by Fitz Henry in nearby Westmoreland County.

The second person has not been publicly identified.

Earlier, Governor Josh Shapiro placed on social media that the emergency help services and the state of the state were deployed in the factory.

Shortly after the explosion, the American senator John Fetterman wrote on X that he was on site and witnessed ‘an active search and salvation on the way’.

The factory is an important producer of cola, a fuel based on coal used in the production of steel. According to US Steel, around 1,300 employees work at the facility.

David B Burritt, President and CEO of US Steel, said in a statement that the company “worked closely with relevant authorities to investigate the cause of the incident”.

He later told reporters during the press conference that the factory was “stable”, but “it is still an active investigation.”

“It’s just a sad day for Clairton,” Mayor Richard Lattanzi told the American news partner of the BBC, CBS.

Clairton Coke Works has been chased in the history of pollution by pollution problems and has had to pay millions of dollars in fines, fines and settlements in recent years.

The owner of the factory, US Steel, received a fine of almost $ 2 million (£ 1.5 million) last year by the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD) For problems with processing and equipment with its coke ovens.

The ACHD also fines the American steel $ 2.2 million in 2023 to exceed Pennsylvania’s standards in the field of hydrogen sulfide emissions of the Clairton factory, and ordered them to give civil servants a plan to meet the state standards.

In 2022 Pennsylvania Health officials fined a fine of US Steel $ 4.7 million after it discovered that the factory did not use a pollution control device for his cola -pushing.