Allegheny County Health Department Director Karen Hacker (Photo by Nick Childers/PublicSource)
As her tenure comes to an end, a review of the director’s efforts to address air quality, opioids and lead while facing political pressure, legal limits and organizational dysfunction.
When an electrical fire broke out on June 17 at the Clairton Coke Works, damaging the plant’s pollution control equipment, it was a defining moment for Allegheny County Health Department Director Karen Hacker.
She had just announced that she was leaving at the end of July to become director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], almost exactly six years after she was hired.
And so her response to this second fire at the plant in six months would likely be the exclamation point to the changes she’d brought to the health department during her tenure — or highlight how much more was yet to be done. The health department had received some of the most significant backlash of her tenure after a similar fire at the plant on Dec. 24 because it didn’t notify the public for 16 days that the plant’s increased pollution could harm vulnerable members of the community.
When Hacker first took the job, she said she was advised that she needed to figure out what she was legally allowed to do. This meant that many times when she wanted to address a public health issue, her staff told her no. She couldn’t pass a sugar tax to address obesity. The political will wasn’t there. She couldn’t pass a more complete ban on smoking because the law was under the state’s jurisdiction.
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How Karen Hacker worked to resuscitate the Allegheny County Health Department
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