there was a serious steel production in my home town suffering from the same problems. They hauled liquid steel in railway cars through the city for decades...quite impressive but not economic any more in the nineties. One of my fields was close enough to one of the plants I could turn off my combine lights at night when they discharged one of the furnaces. The sad part of the story is, everything was modernized and in good shape when they sold it to china...just before the steel boom. The good part, all the places are currently being cleaned up and the land will be re-used. Some parts of the factory were over 150 years old, and were destroyed and rebuilt several times. They have to dig out contaminated soil and fundaments very deep.

I saved that pic some years ago when it appeared in the local newspaper.  It´s one of the chinese workers taking down the steel plant. Only a few months later the same plant was busy again on the banks of the yellow river.

(kaiserstuhl.JPG)

kaiserstuhl.JPG (64KB - 56 downloads)