The batteries that will be made in Weirton aren't like the ones you probably use.
The batteries that will be made in Weirton aren’t like the ones you probably use.
Lithium-ion batteries are good at providing bursts of power for shorter durations. That’s what makes them good in electric vehicles and smartphones.
They’re not as good at releasing energy over a period of days, which is what you need to make solar and wind power as dependable as coal and natural gas.
That’s the problem Form Energy thinks it can solve with its iron-air batteries. They use iron, water and oxygen to store energy. Basically, it’s the process of creating iron oxide — or rust.
Matteo Jaramillo, Form’s co-founder and CEO, said it will be cheaper than fossil fuels.
“At such levels of deployment, Form’s batteries made right in Weirton will catalyze billions of dollars in savings to American electricity consumers while advancing American innovation and renewable energy independence,” he said Thursday.
Before he co-founded Form Energy in 2017, Jaramillo led battery development at electric car maker Tesla.
Gov. Jim Justice announced today that Form Energy will partner with the State of West Virginia to build its first iron-air battery manufacturing facility in the city of Weirton.
This is a developing story and may be updated.
Story updated on Dec. 22, 2022 at 2:40 p.m.
Gov. Jim Justice announced today that Form Energy, out of Massachusetts, will partner with the State of West Virginia to build its first iron-air battery manufacturing facility. The plant will be built on 55 acres of property in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, along the Ohio River, in the city of Weirton.
Justice said the fully non-carbonized plant is guaranteed to create a minimum of 750 new full-time jobs and will represent a total investment of up to $760 million.
“The funds put toward this project are guaranteed, secured, and collateralized through ownership of all land and buildings by the state. The West Virginia Economic Development Authority allocated $75 million toward the purchase of land and the construction of buildings in Weirton this morning,” Justice said in a press release. “I plan on working with the West Virginia Legislature and our federal partners to obtain an additional $215 million needed to finalize our agreement.”
The release notes that Form Energy is an American energy storage technology and manufacturing company that is developing and commercializing an iron-air battery capable of storing electricity for 100 hours at system costs competitive with legacy power plants. The company’s pioneering multi-day battery will reshape the electric system to reliably run on 100 percent low-cost, non-carbon, renewable energy, every day of the year.
Mateo Jaramillo, co-founder and CEO of Form Energy told those gathered at the West Virginia Culture Center for the announcement that Weirton was the ideal site for the company’s first U.S. plant.
“After a year-long nationwide site selection process that started with identifying over 500 candidate locations across 16 states, it became abundantly clear that Weirton, West Virginia – a historic steel community that sits on a river and has the rich heritage and know-how to make great things out of iron – is the ideal location for our first commercial battery production factory,” Jaramillo said. “We look forward to working with Weirton community leaders in the coming months to determine how we can best support the needs of local residents in the area through lasting community partnership and engagement.”
Sen. Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, offered some heartfelt comments about his hometown.
“I grew up in downtown Weirton, less than half a mile from the site where this facility is going to be. All of my grandfathers worked at Weirton Steel. An announcement like today’s is something that is very personal to me,” Weld said. “This is an enormous day on a path to rebuilding downtown Weirton, a path to being what was the crown jewel of manufacturing in the state of West Virginia.”
Justice said West Virginia must always support its coal and gas, natural resources industries. But he said the state is moving to the forefront of energy diversity.
“Today is further testimony to us moving into a into an economy to where we’re diversified even more,” Justice said. “We want goodness across the board. We want West Virginia to be known forevermore as that energy state that always figured it out.”
Form Energy expects to start construction of its Weirton factory in 2023 and begin manufacturing iron-air battery systems in 2024 for broad commercialization.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., added to the expectation of more such facilities and jobs to come.
“Once again, West Virginia has won a highly competitive process to bring new jobs and opportunities to the Mountain State,” Capito said. “Today’s announcement was truly a collaborative effort, and I want to congratulate Governor Justice, Secretary Carmichael, and the leadership of the West Virginia Senate and House of Delegates in working together to bring Form Energy to our Northern Panhandle. If West Virginia is going to continue to be an energy state, we must embrace new technologies, but also tell our story on a national and global level. I look forward to working with the visionary leadership of Form Energy as they ramp up their production in West Virginia, and look forward to more positive developments for our home state in the future.”
On June 11, 1884, the state’s first Bessemer converter went into operation at the Riverside Iron Works in Wheeling. The Bessemer process made steel even stronger by introducing more air and removing more impurities from iron.
The Bessemer process was just one factor in the rise of West Virginia’s steel industry. A tariff enacted by Congress in 1890 made American tin makers more competitive with the British. It occurred just as the demand for canned foods was growing. The cans were made of thin-rolled steel coated with tin.
The steel industry in the Northern Panhandle got a boost when Ernest Weir moved his sheet and tin plate company from Clarksburg to what is now Weirton in 1909.
Weirton Steel would eventually become the largest employer in West Virginia and the largest tin-plate factory in the nation. The incorporation of Wheeling Steel in 1920 made the Northern Panhandle a steel hub.
Although the state’s steel industry continued to grow through the post-World War II years, foreign competition began taking its toll in the 1960s. Employment levels in the steel industry have now dropped to historic lows.
On August 1, 1918, industrialist Ernest Weir renamed his company Weirton Steel. He’d founded the company with J. A. Phillips in Clarksburg in 1905 as Phillips Sheet & Tin Plate. After Phillips’ death, Weir moved his company from Clarksburg to a southern Hancock County farm that would become the city of Weirton.
As part of the massive National Steel conglomeration, Weirton Steel became our state’s largest employer and taxpayer, and the world’s largest tin-plate producer. The city’s population exploded from virtually nothing to 8,000 in 1920 and 18,000 in 1940. During World War II, the company produced howitzer shells and other munitions and contributed to the atom bomb project. The company continued to grow after the war but suffered from foreign competition in the late 20th century.
In 1984, Weirton steelworkers purchased the plant in an innovative employee-ownership plan, or ESOP. The rest of the ‘80s were profitable, but business fell off dramatically in the ‘90s. In 2003, Weirton Steel, entered into bankruptcy. Since that time, the company has been sold twice and is now owned by ArcelorMittal. Employment at ArcelorMittal Weirton continued to decline. By 2010, the company ranked as the 67th largest private employer with about 1,000 workers.
Still, ArcelorMittal Weirton remained the world’s largest tin plate producer, despite having no hot metal operations. The extant parts of the mill receive coils from ArcelorMittal’s other American operation and clean and coat them.
Parts of the former steel giant, including the open hearth, blooming mill, quality control lab, and research and development structures, have been razed. A site on Weirton Heights was cleared to make way for a new Wal-Mart, a company which now holds the distinction of being West Virginia’s largest private employer.
If someone had a crystal ball, they could tell you exactly what the future holds for Weirton. Sadly, there are no magic tools to make this a short story. But, with a bit of help from the gift of gab, I’ll tell you about the current trajectory of the area.
As it’s already been established, Weirton Steel offered a seemingly unbreakable backbone of employment, high wages, and community identity to the city and the nearby stretch of the Ohio Valley. The mill helped Weirton in countless ways, from building hospitals and libraries to plowing the streets and hanging lights during Christmas time. Harold Miller, the mayor of Weirton, emphasized just how integral the mill was to maintaining the city.
“It was a wonderful company to work for. I mean, it’s just, it was unbelievable, it was a fairytale. It was a one horse town, you know, and it just, so many businesses thrived off of Weirton Steel. We built a new hospital because of Weirton Steel,” he said.
Another part of the steel backbone was the tax base the company provided to Weirton. However, the company’s fiscal agreement with the city was much different than most businesses. Weirton Steel had an “in lieu of agreement” with the city in which, rather than being taxed on operations, they paid the city a lump sum of money at the end of the year. The mayor explained this would balance the city’s budget.
“So if the city in those days had a $12 million budget, $15 million budget, and they were short $2 million, then Weirton Steel would write a check for $2 million so they could balance their budget and continue to operate the facilities,” Miller said.
After Weirton Steel’s bankruptcy, the city placed more responsibility on the citizens to support the city’s budget. This came in the form of a 2004 municipal service fee of $2 a week for anyone working within city limits. In 2016, the city council passed a one percent sales tax to stack on top of West Virginia’s six percent sales tax. Still, these measures have failed to replace the financial hole left by Weirton Steel. There are people, though, who are trying to fill this gap.
One such person is Patrick Ford, the executive director of the Business Development Corporation of the Northern Panhandle, or BDC. Rather than focusing on one county, his organization uses a regional approach to help revitalize the valley’s economy.
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Patrick Ford, Executive Director of the Business Development Corporation of the Northern Panhandle
In 2009, the BDC used a $200,000 grant provided by the U.S. Economic Development Administration to fund a development consultation by AECOM, a multinational engineering firm. The firm’s study identified five industries that they recommended the BDC should work to recruit to the area, which were energy, chemical, value added metals, transportation logistics, and healthcare.
Targeting these five industry clusters has so far proven fruitful for the BDC. The unemployment rate has fallen drastically in the northern panhandle. This past March, Hancock County’s unemployment rate reached a decade low of 5.3 percent, which was still trailing behind the national average of 3.8 percent. Patrick explained the Business Development Corporation’s efforts as well as other economic development organizations in the area have done a lot to bring jobs to the area.
“What we’ve been able to illustrate is that in our tri-county area, my counterpart in Jefferson County, Ohio, and the BDC, has added or preserved 7,500 jobs,” he said.
About 200 of these jobs were created when two international companies that produce equipment for the natural gas industry opened up manufacturing facilities in Weirton. They belong to a larger group of companies trying to capitalize on the natural gas boom that is redefining the landscape of the Northern Panhandle and north-central West Virginia.
Since 2005, more than 5,000 gas wells for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have been permitted in the state, according to a report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail’s collaboration with ProPublica. That’s because the region sits on top of enough natural gas to power all of West Virginia’s energy needs for decades.
One of the BDC’s current objectives is to help finalize the plan to build a petrochemical ethane cracker plant in Dilles Bottom, Ohio, about 40 miles down the river from Weirton.
Cracker plants get their name from their process. The plants take ethanol, a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and use extreme heat to crack its molecules. This creates ethylene, which is further processed into polyethylene, the feedstock for plastics and other chemicals. It’s what plastic grocery bags are made from, among thousands of other products.
This proposed plant, which would be owned and operated by a Thailand-based company called PTT Global Chemical, and the Shell Oil Company cracker plant already under construction in Monaca, Pennsylvania, represent nearly $20 billion dollars of possible investment and the creation of about 500 jobs at each site. Patrick said that this could lead to up to 20,000 spin-off jobs to service the people working at the cracker plants.
“For every petrochemical company job that we create, there’s going to be anywhere from two to four service jobs that are going to be created that’s going to service that one petrochemical job,” he said. “That’s 20,000 permanent jobs. Those are people that are working at the factories and those are the multipliers, permanent jobs. Back office, hospitality, restaurants, teachers.”
And, these two plants are pieces of a larger plan to develop a petrochemical corridor dubbed the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. The storage hub would entail a multi-billion-dollar investment of hundreds of miles of pipelines along the Ohio River connecting natural gas extraction wells with underground storage facilities and processing plants, like the ethane cracker plants.
A study by the American Chemistry Council predicts the hub could bring over 100,000 jobs to Appalachia. But these estimates all seem to exclude a very real phenomenon that is changing the nature of work as we know it: automation.
The Ohio Valley has already witnessed plenty of automation. For example, when the Basic Oxygen Plant was introduced at Weirton Steel in the late 60s, it allowed 200 tons of steel to be smelted in 25 minutes. This completely knocked out the need for open hearth furnaces, which took eight hours to do the same amount. With the help of computers, the BOP required less people and could get a lot more done, which plays into the larger story of manufacturing across the country: manufacturing employment has fallen significantly, yet productivity hasn’t slowed down.
Questions about automation give some policy analysts pause about doubling down on manufacturing investments in the region. Sean O’Leary is a senior policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
“We’re offering huge tax incentives or doing whatever we can to bring these industries in, and they’re going to come in and use resources and provide a fraction of the jobs that they did in the past,” O’Leary said. “Is that a great use of our tax dollars and our resources?”
And, just as automation has led to economic deserts throughout this area in the past, there’s a good chance it could again. With artificial intelligence and other technological advances, anything robots can do better than humans, they probably will. Jobs with routine and predictable tasks, such as those in production, food services, and transportation, will become further susceptible to having their labor done by robots.
A recent report by the Brookings Institute predicts that nearly a third of all jobs in the Weirton-Steubenville metro area are highly-susceptible to automation, meaning that 70 percent or more of the tasks completed at these jobs can be automated with technology available today. Rob Maxim, a co-author of this report and senior research analyst in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, said that while robots won’t eliminate all of the jobs in this high-risk category.
“What you would see, the vast majority of them, were able to be eliminated and you’d probably have a few workers basically overseeing, you know, the robots or the software where the pick and choose your kind of automation technology that would be doing the tasks instead,” he said.
And, Maxim explained that the multiplier effect, or the calculation used to estimate how many spinoff jobs will be created to service one high-paying, industrial job, doesn’t take automation into account.
“My impression of those analyses is, they tend to be good directional models, but I’m not aware of any kind of multiplier exercises that incorporate automation,” he said.
This means that the thousands of jobs that the Business Development Corporation and the American Chemistry Council predict to be created from the petrochemical industry could actually end up being far fewer than expected.
Additionally, it’s important to remember that the petrochemical industry is tied to a boom and bust cycle. This brings speculation around its long-term economic impacts on the area, as O’Leary explains.
“When you have your economy based on non-renewable resource that price fluctuates strongly,” he said. “If you’re going to have booms and busts and … eventually the well runs dry.”
Aside from automation, another part of the debate over the future of the Ohio Valley are the environmental impacts of the petrochemical industry. Pollution in the valley used to mean economic security. If smokestacks were billowing gray clouds and soot covered your front porch, your parents probably had a good paying job. But now, with the mills and plants offering less and less jobs, some residents are questioning if the economic benefits can outweigh the environmental costs.
I met with Beverly Reed, a lifelong resident of the Ohio Valley, at her family’s bicycle shop in Bridgeport, Ohio. Bridgeport is just across the river from Wheeling, West Virginia, and a little over 10 miles north of the proposed PTTG cracker plant.
Beverly is an intern for the Sierra Club, and works with the FreshWater Accountability Project as well as the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. All of these groups have a shared goal.
“The biggest thing we would like to do is to stop the PTT Global Petrochemical Complex from coming to Belmont County, Ohio,” she said.
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Beverly Reed
Beverly is a registered nurse, and she said one of her primary concerns with the cracker plant is the effect it could have on the health of both humans and the environment.
Last year, the Ohio EPA granted the project an air pollution permit. It allows the proposed cracker to emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases each year. It would be like putting 365,000 cars on the road. The permit also allows for the emission of almost 400 tons of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, each year. VOCs are a group of gases that react with sunlight and nitrogen oxides to create ground-level ozone, or smog. Not all VOCs are detrimental to human health, but many are known carcinogens, such as benzene, which can leak from the valves and equipment used in cracker plants. Reed said that the Sierra Club and three other environmental groups are challenging this air permit.
“We’re appealing it because it was woefully inadequate and not protective of human health,” she said.
With only nine percent of plastic recycled worldwide, Beverly is also troubled by the plant’s possible contribution to an already established plastic crisis.
“It’s toxic. We don’t need more of it. It’s killing the oceans, it’s killing all the marine life. It’s killing us. It’s found everywhere,” Reed said.
Ultimately, even though the region desperately needs high-paying jobs, she doesn’t believe that this should be the path forward for the Ohio Valley.
“People think that this is going to be our knight in shining armor. It’s gonna bail us all out. We’re going to be thriving and everything, but that’s not going to be the case. It’s not plain and simple. It’s not,” she said. “It’s going to be short term economic gain while the plant’s being built.
Reed said she doesn’t believe the short-term economic boom is worth it.
“I mean, we’d probably see business in here, you know, but I don’t care, you know, my family doesn’t care,” she said. “We care more about future generations and the environment.”
There are many trajectories that the Ohio Valley could follow. One anticipates billions of dollars of investment, thousands of jobs and national importance, as there is only one other petrochemical hub in the United States. A lot of money and political power are backing this route, but its disregard for automation could leave its economic revival looking far less human than anticipated. And, the environmental factors involved make some afraid it could turn the area into a cancer alley. All of which are narratives and realities the Ohio Valley is already familiar with.
Another vision comes from the environmentalist standpoint, and sees the valley as a hub of green energy and localized farming. Yet, with a much smaller budget and a lack of political support, the puzzle of how to supply sustainable jobs for the valley is still one to be solved.
One truth that needs no speculation is that Weirton and the Ohio Valley deserve justice for its economic pain and suffering. No one will ever serve jail time for the mill shutdowns that led to a mass exodus from the area, broken families, and financially driven suicides. I’m not calling for some sort of retribution, but a question I continually asked myself throughout this series was, “why did we deserve this?” This same question is probably asked all across the American Heartland, as more and more people are left wondering how their prosperity came crashing to an end.
And yeah, I know, life isn’t fair. But there are reasons why mills close, and there are reasons why there are no safety nets for those who slip through the cracks.
What Are Your Hopes for Weirton?
Earlier this year, I went to the Festival of Nations at the Millsop Community Center in downtown Weirton. The very first festival started on May Day in 1934 during tense labor strife, as the mill’s management attempted to make peace with the workers following a strike the year before.
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Traditional Indian dancers perform at the Festival of Nations
For several years, the festival served as a celebration of the many ethnic groups that came to town to work in the mill, but it died out during World War II. The Weirton Area Museum and Cultural Center brought it back in 2009, and ever since the gathering has brought together hundreds of Weirton citizens to celebrate their community once more.
The average age of the population in Weirton is about 46 years old, and it showed in the crowd. I only saw one other girl around my age, and she happened to be the daughter of one of the organizers. Still, the mood was lively as people enjoyed dancing from a range of groups, like Ukrainian folk dancers and traditional Indian ensembles.
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Clemmie Frierson engaged in conversation at the Festival of Nations
My original plan was to stay for an hour, but the conversations I had kept me going until the food vendors were packing up. From young to old, everyone had an opinion about their hopes for the area. I wanted to end this episode by leading out with the voices of the people I spoke to, the voices of those from Weirton, a mill town in West Virginia.
(The following are direct quotes from attendees of the Festival of Nations in Weirton on March 16, 2019.)
Carrie Stephenson:
I am just hoping for a better community for our area and Weirton, West Virginia.
Jack Provenzano:
I hope they could go back to the old Weirton, what it used to be.
Susan Buteri:
I would like to see all the companies come back into Weirton.
Caleb Owen:
I’m hoping that since they just took down the steel mill, they actually turn that into something that can kind of like, you know, bring some entertainment to the town.
Emalee Hbizdak:
I just hope we’re going to keep going like in the right direction. More jobs and more community like activities and stuff. Get people involved.
Tonya Parker:
If they can bring something into that area that will create jobs for this area, that would be a good thing, in my opinion.
Ernest Nicholas Sr.:
We shall continue to grow up. We’ll come back to life. We’ve got the right people and we will prosper.
Janet Barbario:
Yeah, we’d like more businesses to come to the area. So many kids can only work at Mcdonald’s, you know.
Missy Mikula:
I’m hoping to see revitalization here in town now that we’ve lost our Weirton Steel. So, we hope to see new industries coming in and certainly new housing, we need it.
Linda Stear:
My hopes for Weirton are that it’ll continue to grow and we’ll see a lot of growth in jobs and housing and just the future looks pretty bright right now for the Weirton community. And we’re pretty happy about it.
Makenzie Stear:
My hopes are for Weirton, well, that we expand and we try to clean up downtown.
Diana Magnone:
I would really like them to do things to bring back the millennials and the Gen Xers to have them have a reason to come back. Um, one thing that may help that is more of a build up things like green spaces.
Kalpana Gupta:
With the steel mill going down, the only way to replace it is to have new businesses come in.
Sneha Gupta
Having people realize that the people of Weirton actually have a lot to offer, too. Yeah, I think, I think it’s, it’s looking like a bright, bright future.
Clemmie Frierson:
I’m upset because I like the city council. But there’s no females, there’s no people of color on the city council. I’m on the board of transportation as a director. I’m the only person of color and it bothers me that they’re not really reaching out to the community the way they should. So like in terms of Weirton, Weirton could grow. But they need the input from a different set of people.
Gaetano Provenzano:
I like the idea of diversity in the valley as the valley continues to grow.
John McCugh:
I think, speak honestly, I think a lot of people in this town need to realize progression and change is good. So, let loose of what we were in the 70s and let’s move into the future.
Dan Greathouse
I expect a lot of great things to happen to Weirton over the next five years. I see us growing.
Rachel English:
I would like to see the valley come alive again.
Colton Kolanko:
My hopes for Weirton are that, everyone can, I guess, achieve their pursuit of happiness, whatever that may be. And that… everyone has the opportunity, I guess that they deserve, because everyone deserves opportunities. Even Weirton, even the small town of Weirton.
The consequences of deindustrialization manifest in many different ways.
Sherry Linkon and John Russo, two prominent scholars in working class studies, have written several books and articles about this topic, and at this point, they find you can easily make a list of what will happen when industry leaves. Let’s run down it.
In most cases, there’s a decline in population, a loss of jobs, a loss of homes, a loss of healthcare, a reduction in the tax base and therefore cuts in public services. There’s usually an increase in crime, depression, suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. You’ll find more instances of family violence and divorce, and a loss of faith in public institutions.
And, as the landscape decays and buildings crumble, there’s even a loss of personal identity. It’s not a pretty picture. So how has it been painted in my hometown, Weirton?
I went to talk to one of my middle school teachers, Melanie Donofe. She’s been in the Hancock County school system for 29 years. I wanted to know how she’s seen the area change from a teacher’s perspective. We sat down for tea at her dining room table, and she was quick to start relaying everything she’s noticed change over the years.
“You hate to say the culture of the students and the backgrounds of the students, but that’s the biggest change I’ve seen because they were used to having everything handed to them by the mill. You know, their parents a job, their grandparents a job, and that’s not there. Economically, that’s been the biggest change,” she said.
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Melanie and Gerry Donofe at their dining room table
Donofe currently works at Weirton Elementary School. First opened in 2014, the school took the place of three primary schools in Hancock County. She said that this consolidation makes the economic changes much more glaring.
“Right now, Weirton Elementary School having that many students. We have over 60% are free and reduced lunch.”
In January 2018, the Hancock County school district began providing all students with free breakfast and lunch through funding from the federal government. Still, Donofe related that this doesn’t guarantee children will have food when class is dismissed. So, Weirton Elementary School has a backpack program that gives the very low socioeconomic students ramen noodles or macaroni cups to take home with them.
“It breaks your heart to see that, you know, and you know that they’re going to get hot lunch and you know, they’re going to get breakfast… but they leave at 3:30. When they going to eat again?” she questioned.
Donofe said that in addition to kids having less, she’s also noticed that there are a lot less kids.
“Look at Brooke High School and Weir High School. I mean, my graduating class was 347,” she said. “I mean, you’re lucky if you got 347 in three classes now. Last year they graduated less than 150.”
While a decline in the student body can be disappointing, the rise of opioids and their impact on students who remain is much more disturbing. The city of Weirton and Hancock County as a whole haven’t been hit as hard by opioids as say, somewhere like Cabell County, but the area is far from unscathed.
“I’ve had a student this year that actually saved his mother’s life,” Donofe said. “She overdosed and he called 911 and they were able to give her Narcan and she was okay. So, I mean, as a 10-year-old, a 10-year-old shouldn’t have to deal with that.”
In 2002, only one Hancock County resident died from a drug overdose. The numbers have risen ever since. According to the West Virginia Health Statistics Center, between 2013 and 2017, the amount of drug overdose deaths a year in Hancock County per 100,000 residents was nearly three times more than the national average. For Donofe, all of this points to the fact that kids in Weirton have a much different childhood experience than the generations before them.
“The kids are the ones that are suffering because their parents don’t have, and it’s because they don’t have the mill to rely on anymore,” she said.
Like many who have lived in Weirton for a while, Donofe also remembers when the mill was a reliable safety net.
“They were always there for us, and I think the community really got used to that, that they would do anything. You know, go ask Weirton Steel. Ask them for a donation. And then they’d flip you some money. You can’t do that anymore. Basically, the benefit of them being here was there were jobs for our parents. And not minimum wage jobs. Good paying jobs,” she said.
Hancock County’s unemployment rate has fluctuated a lot over the last two decades. After a low of 3.8 percent in 2001, it peaked at 13.7 percent in February 2010, following the Great Recession. It’s been creeping down ever since, coming to just under 6 percent this past January. Still, according to a 2017 report by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, about one in every four jobs in Hancock County offers low wages amounting to $1,250 a month or less.
While we were talking, Melanie’s mom, Gerry, walked into the room. She’s lived in Weirton her entire life and was a tin flopper at Weirton Steel in the 50s.
I asked her how she’s seen the area transform, and for her, the most noticeable difference is the loss of small businesses.
“To look and see how the businesses… they’re gone. Weisberger’s, Ray Diniti’s, the Smart Shop. Five and Ten. Ravoto’s Jewelers. The Five and Dime. No more theaters,” she said. “It’s just so changed and you know, buildings gone and something else in ‘em now, it’s, it’s just crazy.”
“When the Mill Went Down, it’s Like Everything Faded”
I knew the change she was talking about. It was one of the reason’s I disliked Weirton. The last time downtown Weirton got a facelift was when the J. J. Abrams movie Super 8 was filmed here in 2010. Production crews repainted buildings and covered up the blight, literally bringing Main Street back to life. Everyone came together to help the film crew; I was lucky enough to be an extra. It brought back a sense of community that hadn’t been felt in a long time.
I decided to go downtown to Weir Cove Taxi, more often known as the Weirton Bus Terminal. It used to be a stop for Greyhound buses, but they stopped picking up passengers there decades ago. There’s a luncheonette inside where you can grab a coffee or a burger and fries. I figured I might find some people there who could talk about the decline of the area, and I was right.
It’s a bit dingy on the inside. The ceilings are lined with yellowed fluorescent lights and mismatched panels, some dark green, some white, a few broken. The fridge behind the counter hummed like an unbalanced fan, and the old box TV sitting on top of it played endless commercials. You could occasionally hear some electric bells ringing from the video lottery machines in the back room.
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An empty row of seats lines the counter of the Weir Cove Taxi cab stand
The first person I spoke with was Chip Ray. He’s a life-long Ohio Valley resident and has been working at Weir Cove Taxi for five years as the director of safety. He helps hire new drivers and manage operations. It was easy for him to point out the changes in the area. He started by motioning outside to Main Street.
“Every building had something in it. A restaurant, a store. All the houses up on Weir Avenue in those little houses built on the hillside were all built for people working in that mill,” he recalled. “Now, a lot of them are abandoned now. It’s a direct manifestation of that mill, this area right now and the state that it’s in. Without having that there, walk down the street, there’s a lot of empty buildings, lot empty houses.”
I asked him if he had been affected by the opioid epidemic, and I got the answer I was expecting.
“It’s a serious epidemic around here. I know a lot of people that were impacted by it, people that I know. People that I graduated with, people that I went to college with. I can name 10 people that have died from opioids or heroin that I graduated with or a who’s close to my age. It’s a shame. It’s terrible. It’s really impacting the area,” he said.
We kept on talking and soon the subject switched to how the taxi company was still in business. Chip explained that the natural gas industry has helped with their diversification.
“We have cabs, but our trucks are water trucks. They’re not here at the cab stand, they’re at our garage in Steubenville. But that’s the future of the area around here because the steel mills… I don’t see the steel mills coming back,” Rax explained. “And, so, you got to do something. That seems to be the big industry around here. I know we alone employ about 40 truck drivers that work for the oil and gas.”
A woman named Ashley Shaffer listened to our conversation from behind the counter. Her family moved here from Charlotte, North Carolina in 1997, when she was still in high school. I turned to her next. She started talking about how it was a lot easier to find employment when she was younger.
“So, when I was 23, I was working at William’s Country Club up on Marland Heights. I mean, work was good then, and now it’s just like you can’t, I mean you can barely find a job,” she said. “I personally, myself, I don’t like it. Going from Charlotte, where there’s absolutely everything and anything you could do. You know what I mean? Hot air balloon rides, everything, to coming up here to half my friends that I graduated with are passed away or hooked on some sort of drug. It’s just not, not what it used to be.”
Shaffer and her parents originally moved away from Charlotte to escape the city’s crime problem. Now, she’s considering moving back because there’s more opportunity there for her son.
“I have a 13-year-old son and honest to God, like, I think about moving back down to Charlotte because I don’t want him around this area. Like he’s at the age right now he can go either way. You know what I mean? Yes, kids experiment stuff and they do things growing up. That’s just the way that it is. But I want him to have a good life and I want him to be able to go to school and college and have a family. You know what I mean? And be comfortable. Not struggle,” she said.
As we were talking, another woman walked in. Shaffer asked her if she wanted a coffee, and the woman sat next to me at the counter. Shaffer began to explain why I was there when the woman cut her off.
“Why don’t you let her talk? Shut up,” said Dianna Calandros.
Calandros is a very straight-forward woman. She worked in the cab stand for 17 years, but recently had to stop after she was diagnosed with cancer.
Calandros told me the town still holds a special place in her heart, even though she doesn’t hope for much.
“I love Weirton. I mean I really do. I love Weirton. It’s just that when it, when the mill went down, it’s like everything faded. It’s like, you know, it’ll never ever be with like it was and that’s, that’s, that’s sorrowful. If you’re from around here, it really hurts your heart,” she lamented.
I asked her if she had any hopes for Weirton.
“No, not at all. I’m 66 years old, what the hell can I hope for,” she quipped.
The two men sitting near the door who periodically added onto the conversation were, at this point, waiting for me to walk over to them. Jimmy Colalella helps with clerical work for his brother who owns Weir Cove Taxi. He thinks the area’s decline can be attributed to a lack of diversity in the local economy.
“It relied heavily on that industry, the steel mill. It’s like with anything in life, you can’t, you gotta have, you know, balance, diversity, and, you know, people didn’t have the vision. So, that’s why you see, you know, maybe not everybody prospering here like people used to prosper,” Colalella explained.
Henry Valentine is a non-emergency medical transport driver for Weir Cove Taxi. He helps recovering drug users get to suboxone appointments. I asked him what he hopes for Weirton.
Credit Ella Jennings
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Henry Valentine looks over his paycheck at Weir Cove Taxi
“Just to get more jobs, to get more work, more opportunities so people can do things besides be on drugs and opioids,” Valentine said.
Someone else I spoke with was a woman named Joan Sims. She kept to herself at a table in the back corner of the luncheonette. Joan used to work across the river at the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Mill in Steubenville, but she’s lived in Weirton her entire life. She pointed out that not everything about the decline is bad.
“The best thing that ever happened on Weir Avenue was all the bars went out. That was the best thing that ever happened. Every place you went it was a bar. Here and next door. That was more bars in this town probably than two towns. Three towns. Yeah. But when the bars went out, you could tell there wasn’t no money,” Sims said.
While she was happy the bar scene faded, she was upset about the lack of people attending church in the city.
“Churches don’t have nobody. Her church went down to 10 people. And there used to be, we lived on County Road, used to be lines of cars up and down County Road going to church,” she said.
Sims left me with a question that I wasn’t able to answer: “Where is God today? What have they done with him? We don’t hear about him. Churches are closing. He’s gone.”
Even though everything has changed so much, and the good times can only be felt through memories, there’s still an attachment that’s hard to let go of. Today, the Weirton Bus Terminal lives on as a reminder of what it used to be: a bustling diner filled with regulars and mill workers grabbing a bite before their shift began. And this is what seems to keep people around, even when there isn’t hope for the future. It’s what’s familiar that matters, like the same comfort you get when coming home. I don’t think you can blame anyone for longing for that.
Although not everyone in Weirton will share the same views as the people I spoke with, I think it’s apparent where their opinions come from. In the next episode, we’ll explore what’s in store for the future of Weirton.
