Beth Steel Furnaces

[Music] the blast furnace for over a hundred 25 years the blast furnaces of the Lehigh Valley made the iron that helped build and defend America here's a look at the iron making process as it was in the summer of 1995 [Music] the PD any railroad delivers rail cars loaded with raw materials to the ore yard each car is loaded with up to a hundred tons of iron ore pellets from Canada or limestone from anvil Pennsylvania an electric mule engine moves the cars up to the tip one car at a time is placed in the tip for dumping [Music] [Music] the tip holds the car securely and turns it over dumping the material onto a great empty cars roll out of the tip are coupled together and are positioned by gravity on holding tracks to be picked up by the railroads and returned to the dock or quarry for reloading pellets and stone dropped from the tip onto a belt below and are loaded out into a side dump car the side dump car places the material in a trough where it can be reclaimed by the or bridges the two or bridges are each 578 feet long and can place raw materials anywhere in the 11 acre or yard material is stocked in the yard for use as needed the yard can hold enough ore in stone for four to six months of furnace operation the bridges can load material from the yard directly into the transferor cars or onto the ore yard conveyor the conveyor carries material to the top level of the track hopper building filling the bins below [Music] the bins discharged into bottom dumping transfer cars which typically carry a load of more than 125 tons the transferor cars move raw materials from the ore yard to the furnace trestle a run of nearly a mile most of it over elevated track [Music] at the furnace the transferor car discharges its load into the stock house bins below the trestle coke comes to the Trussell by railroad from the Bethlehem coke works it to is discharged into stock house bins in the stock house pellets limestone and a mixture of recycled steelmaking byproducts are pulled is needed to be charged into the furnace when a stock house gate is open the material drops into the scale car below loading it to a predetermined weight the scale car then moves to the ore chute and discharges the material into the skipped tubs which carry it to the top of the furnace coke is discharged into the skip from way hoppers which are filled by a computer-controlled system that takes into account weight and moisture content the two skips are raised and lowered by a powerful electric skip hoist located at the base of the furnace although various improvements have been made over the years this hoisting equipment basically represents pre-world War two power and control technology yet it hoists over 800 skips per day as a full skip goes up the empty comes down at the top the full skip tips over and discharges coke iron ore pellets limestone or other materials into the furnace this process goes on almost continually while the furnace is in operation replacing the materials burned or melted at the bottom of the furnace and maintaining a constant level at the top inside the furnace itself preheated blasts of air burn the coke in the lower section eat and gases from the coke rise through the furnace and reduce the iron oxide pellets to iron which then melts as the liquid iron builds up in the heart at the bottom of the furnace it is periodically cast and taken to the steelmaking furnace impurities from the ore as from the coke and fluxes melt and are removed as slag all the while the process of adding raw materials at the top of the furnace continues [Music] the blast of hot air for our blast furnace it's generated by the engines and turbo blower in the powerhouse the cold blast is piped to the stoves which stand beside the furnace the stoves burn natural gas and by-product gas heating the blast to 1,600 to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit there are three stoves at the furnace stoves are rotated from gas firing to blast about every 90 minutes a hot blast line carries the heated air from the stove to the bus'll pipe which surrounds the furnace near its base 18 queers branching off the bus'll pipe inject the hot blasts into the furnace a view through the peep sight shows the combustion taking place inside at nearly 4000 degrees Fahrenheit water sprays cooled the furnace jacket to keep the furnace structure from distorting in the intense heat the tears and other internal coolers were made at Bethlehem structurals brass foundry of high purity copper for maximum heat removal efficiency the furnace is opened by drilling five feet through the clay plug in the tap hole the furnace is cast approximately every two and a half hours each cast produces about 275 tons of molten iron the iron flows through a trough in the cast floor and into runners that directed into the hot metal ladles placed beneath the cast floor in the latter portion of the cast the slag flows with the molten iron but is skimmed off the top of the trough slag runs into cinder trucks also beneath the cast floor at the end of the cast the furnace is closed in with the mud gun and molten iron again accumulates in the heart the railroad takes the labels to the steelmaking furnaces or foundries slag is taken to the slag dump for further processing during furnace operations particular care is taken to protect the environment furnace gas is captured cleaned and recycled to the stoves and boiler house water used to clean the gas is filtered in the door plant to remove flue dirt and recycled to the scrubber throughout the blast-furnace department from start to finish maintenance and equipment repair play a key role in keeping the operation efficient and productive these are the sights and sounds of iron making at Bethlehem in the summer of 1995 best wishes to all the men and women of the blast furnace department in the ore yard powerhouse furnace operations equipment repair maintenance and the offices a special thanks to all those people who have supported this supply tiss consumed our products and in any way helped keep the fire lit all these years [Music]

Channel: Donald Dunn

Views: 344,277

Rating: 4.9081779 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ZdzDKa1_6ro

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/bigwebs]

Man this is wild. I can’t imagine how it must have been to work near those furnaces.

[u/tacoskoolie]

I grew up in Bethlehem, so this was awesome to see. My aunt worked as a BS employee for about 30 years. They really helped the war effort tremendously. Its cool to see this footage. My first thought was yeah that is a lot of material handling.

[u/teastain]

OMG way too much material handling.

In JIT, Just In Time, it would go from the rail car to the furnace hopper.

[u/A2the9olds]

This place is now a backdrop for an event venue with a restaurant and bar

https://www.steelstacks.org/

[u/BB611]

My grandfather was a Bethlehem Steel employee for a few decades, when I was in my teens someone (a local nonprofit IIRC) was running tours by driving coach buses around the plant, and I went with him on one. He had a huge wealth of knowledge the tour guide didn't and kept pointing out and explaining various parts of the works, and sharing a lot of his experiences at the plant for the benefit of the people on the bus sitting near us. Eventually the rest of the bus started asking him to speak up, and then very quickly pressured the tour guide into handing over the mic for the rest of the tour.

He was extremely pissed when BS took away the promised use of their golf course for retirees, it was one of his funnier complaints about the company's decline and bankruptcy.