The Mon Valley holds its breath as the latest U.S. Steel settlement promises a fresh approach
PublicSource
John Perryman walks down the stairs of his Clairton home as an air filter (left) whirs in the background, on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, in Clairton. “I asked the Allegheny County Health Department– who’s going to file the charge of murder when I die?” said Perryman, who points to the city’s high rates of environmental disease. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
After years watching “punch-card” penalties and “pay-to-pollute” strategies yield little for public health, communities around the Clairton Coke Works hope the 2018 fire pact is different.
Before he moved to Clairton, John Perryman led a Walter Mitty life: a teenage hatmaker in Seattle, then itinerant dock worker and eventual union head, traveling everywhere from Saudi Arabia to the Soviet Union before retiring to Pittsburgh and co-founding an orphanage in Ethiopia. Perryman “has experienced the American work scene from the bottom up,” reads a newspaper clipping he keeps in storage, “and can spot a phony a mile away.”
Then one day in 2019, he collapsed walking up the stairs. “My doctor told me if I want to live I’d better get out of Clairton,” Perryman said from home one recent afternoon, surrounded by artwork and kombucha brewing paraphernalia.
Now two batteries strapped to his chest power a mechanical heart pump for 17 hours at a time before an alarm goes off and he has 15 minutes to swap them out.
