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Oct. 25, 2006 The structural steel industry makes up only a fraction of the steel industry in general. Steel mills make steel for a wide variety of uses, such as automobiles, trains, machinery, appliances, pipe and wire. Structural steel fabrication plants manufacture components for buildings, bridges, power plants and other structures. They receive already rolled plates, wide-flange sections, angles, bars and channels from the mills. From these raw materials they fabricate girders, trusses, columns, beams and bracing. The operations whereby they build these structural components include cutting, drilling, punching, grinding, bending, assembly, bolting and welding. They may also ship and erect the finished pieces in the field, or alternatively that part of the work may go to other contractors, depending the their capabilities as well as the provisions of the original contracts. The size of finished pieces ready for shipment may vary from three or four feet up to over two hundred feet in length. Shipment may be made by truck, rail or barge, depending on geography. I worked in the structural steel industry from 1955 to 1982, in steel mills, fabrication shops and engineering offices. In most of those years, the structural steel industry was booming. I could get all the jobs I wanted. People from the generation before me said that the industry had been even more dynamic during the 1940’s, because of military contracts. Anyone who had been around the great steel mills in northwestern Indiana and the south side of Chicago in those days would have stood in awe of the leviathan. One would have thought that they were imperishable and inexpugnable. They would stand for 1000 years. I can’t say much about the wider steel industry, but I have a good feeling for what happened to the structural steel industry, whose shops have been shut down one after the other, until it has become a mere vestige of its former self. Thinking it over all these years, I can discern four major factors that spelled the death knell of the fabrication shops. The first was the rise of reinforced concrete. Of course, reinforced concrete structures consume steel too, in the form of rebars, but this is an entirely different matter. In the old days, bridges and buildings almost always had a skeleton of structural steel beams and columns, such as the ones that were contained in the World Trade Center. Nowadays, however, buildings, especially smaller ones, like hospitals, schools and hotels tend to be built almost exclusively of reinforced concrete. Another factor that hurt structural fabrication shops was the movement away from nuclear power stations that took place in the late 70’s and 80’s. Nuclear power stations require much more steel than fossil power stations because they are built to be explosion-proof. A beam that might have been 24 inches deep graduates to a 6-foot girder. A factor that caused the wider steel industry to take a pejorative turn was the government’s adoption of anti-pollution legislation. This cost the mills considerable sums of money and caused steel prices to escalate, which in turn excerbated the other factors that showed the fabrication industry. And finally competition from foreign fabricators, especially those in Japan, weighed against American fabricators. I recall that one of the last jobs I worked on was a Commonwealth of Kentucky bridge. Half the bridge was awarded to Allied Structural Steel Company in Chicago. The other half went to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan. That they could ship the steel 6300 miles and still be competitive pricewise was a little ominous. Still none of this fazed me. I didn’t take it seriously. When you’ve been doing something and doing it well for a number of years, you begin to get feelings of indispensability and invulnerability. As events would show, such feelings were illusory! For me, personal problems arising from my divorce, the loss of my house and the issuance of a warrant that made it necessary for me to leave Illinois complicated the matter of the declining structural steel industry, and after 1982, I could no longer find a job in that line, resorting to other means of earning a livelihood. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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