Paige Williams at The New Yorker:
U.S. Steel mines iron ore in Minnesota and sends it across Lake Superior on freighters a thousand feet long. At Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the ships enter the Soo Locks, which provide passage to the lower Great Lakes. Five hundred billion dollars’ worth of ore (and ninety-five per cent of the United States’ supply) annually moves through the locks, which have been managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1881. The Minnesota ships travel the long, dangling length of Lake Michigan and dock at its southern tip: Gary, Indiana.
Two days after Christmas, a ship called the Presque Isle sat in the slip at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in North America. “Looks like it just came in—it’s riding low,” Daniel Killeen, the vice-president of Gary Works, told Eddie Melton, the mayor of Gary. Melton and I were in a company van, touring the steelyard—eternal mud, crisscrossed with the tire tracks of massive machines. We passed conical piles of raw materials—the plant uses manganese, limestone, sinter, coke—and neat stacks of the finished product, steel slabs. Each slab measures about nine inches thick, six feet wide, and thirty feet long, and can be heated to twenty-four hundred degrees and pressed like pasta dough to make panels that are used in automobile manufacturing.
more here.
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