Quote:
Originally Posted by llamaorama
Mississippi County, Arkansas is possibly the largest steel producing county in the US if you count electric arc furnaces converting scrap to raw metal.
|
Wikipedia says it's the #2 county for steel production, but I can't source that claim.
I have to believe that Lake County, IN is #1 (see below), if such stats are even tracked reliably at the county level. I've only ever seen this data tracked at the state level, and Indiana has been #1 for a long time now, overtaking Pennsylvania sometime back in the '70s I believe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamaorama
If Gary or Pittsburgh still had those plants, I bet the neighborhoods near them would have still gradually died out.
|
But that's just it, Gary
DOES still have its steel mill (the largest in the nation, in fact), along with Indiana Harbor (#2) several miles west, and Burns Harbor (#3) roughly 10 miles east in neighboring Porter County.
They are the 3 largest integrated steel mills in the US (of only 7 remaining), making NW Indiana the nation's steel center, and together producing well over half of the nation's primary steel.
But as was pointed out earlier in the thread, due to radical amounts of industrial automation, it just doesn't take nearly as much manpower (a 90% reduction in Gary Works' case) to make steel as it did decades ago back in Gary's heyday, so despite the fact that the big local plant never closed down, Gary still lost tens of thousands of solid middle-class, family-providing, union-backed jobs.
Everyone automatically assumes that the rustbelt's woes are exclusively a story of factories closing and jobs being offshored, but industrial/manufacturing automation (and its resulting job losses) are also a big part of the story too, as clearly illustrated by Gary, IN and its giant steel mill that no longer needs many people to run.
If the big plant that props up an entire small city closes down and loses 100% of its "good jobs", it's devasting.
If the big plant that props up an entire small city remains open but loses 90% of its "good jobs", it's also devasting.