Longtime Mon Valley resident Qiyam Ansari suffered a severe asthma attack at age 16 that led to a collapsed lung and a weeklong medically induced coma. He attributes the near-death episode to poor air quality in Allegheny County.
Now preparing to become a father, Ansari, 29, who is the executive director of Valley Clean Air Now, said he is doing everything he can to reduce his child’s risk of developing asthma, including moving away from the Mon Valley before the baby is due in September.
“If you’re living here now, you’re most likely already sick and it’s too late,” said Ansari, of Homestead.
Allegheny County, especially in the Mon Valley, has a long-standing reputation for poor air quality related to its history as a large steel-producing powerhouse.
Experts say that despite improvements over the years, pollutants in the air remain unsafe and unhealthy, exacerbating preexisting diseases and leading to the development of new pulmonary illnesses.
In April, the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report ranked Allegheny County among the 25 worst metropolitan areas in the nation for particulate matter pollution, or PM, a mixture of tiny solid and liquid particles that can be harmful when inhaled.
Best is not good enough
This year, the county had its best showing in more than 25 years in the annual air quality report. However, pollution levels remained so high that it still received a failing grade.
“It is the best that has been recorded during all 27 reports that we’ve come out with for Allegheny County, but it’s still not sufficient to protect public health in the long run,” said Kevin Stewart, director of environmental health for the American Lung Association.
Currently, more than 82,700 Allegheny County residents suffer from a respiratory disease, 14,160 have asthma, 67,930 have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and 656 have been diagnosed with lung cancer, making them more susceptible to the negative impacts of air pollution, the report said.
“Those individuals will show up as more likely to end up needing medication or visit their doctor, go to the emergency room or even be hospitalized, and in some cases, prematurely die because of their exposure to air pollution,” Stewart said.
The Pittsburgh-Weirton-Steubenville metro area ranked 63rd worst in the nation for ozone pollution, and Allegheny County had an average of 4.5 unhealthy air days per year.
Ozone pollution, or “smog,” forms when gases from tailpipes, smokestacks, factories and other pollution sources react with sunlight. It is a powerful respiratory irritant with effects that have been likened to a sunburn of the lungs, according to the American Lung Association.
When air quality is particularly bad and the Air Quality Index, which measures ground-level ozone and particle pollution, rises above 100, it triggers an official Air Quality Alert.
The county’s high PM and smog levels are particularly harmful because just one day of poor air quality can seriously impact at-risk residents, Stewart said.
The at-risk population includes infants, children, teens, people 65 and older, people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pregnant women, people living in poverty and people of color, Stewart said.
Ansari said he remembers there was an Air Quality Alert on the day that he suffered an asthma attack that collapsed his lung.
According to the nonprofit academic medical center Cleveland Clinic, asthma attacks can cause a pneumothorax, a condition in which air gets inside the chest cavity and creates pressure against the lung, causing it to collapse.
Ansari’s medical records from his hospital stay were not available.
Pollution sources
Industrial plants that produce essential steelmaking materials have been concentrated in Allegheny County over the past 100 years.
U.S. Steel has three facilities in the Mon Valley: Clairton Coke Works, which produces coke for blast furnaces; the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, which produces liquid iron and steel slabs; and Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, which processes slabs into steel coils.
At the time of Ansari’s asthma attack, he was living in North Versailles, near Braddock.
“The Mon Valley Works has been a major air polluter for many decades, and it has been an issue for people living in the area,” said Alex Bomstein, executive director at Clean Air Council, an environmental nonprofit.
On Christmas in 2018, Clairton Coke Works had a catastrophic fire in the building that houses equipment that removes sulfur and other dangerous pollutants from coke oven gas, which is a carcinogenic byproduct of coal production at the facility.
Over the next four months, the facility continued to operate, generating untreated coke oven gas and releasing it into the air in the Mon Valley, violating air quality standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Clean Air Act.
The Clean Air Council and another environmental group, PennEnvironment, sued U.S. Steel for Clean Air Act violations at the three Mon Valley Works facilities in 2019. The lawsuit resulted in a $42 million settlement in 2024.
But the problem remains.
‘Pay the fines and keep on polluting’
Particulate matter damages the lungs by bypassing the body’s natural defenses and penetrating deep into the respiratory tract. Ultrafine particles can get trapped in the lungs and pass into the bloodstream, the American Lung Association said.
A study last year found that children living near major industrial pollution sources in Allegheny County’s Mon Valley experience unusually high rates of asthma and are more likely to miss school because of it. Researchers tracked attendance records for about 1,200 students between 2015 and 2018 and compared them with local air pollution levels.
Allergist-immunologist Dr. Deborah Gentile, one of the study’s authors, said 22.4% of the children studied had asthma — more than double the 8% to 10% rate researchers expected based on national, state and county averages.
“I think it’s an alarming number. We found a two-to-three-times increased risk of your child developing asthma when exposed to these pollution levels. It’s already a common childhood disease, and now you’re doubling or tripling your chances of having it,” Gentile said.
A Boston College study, released in February, found that particulate matter was a contributing factor in up to 12.5% of adult deaths in the Pittsburgh area in 2019.
“These findings indicate that air pollution levels in Southwestern Pennsylvania are too high and that strict regulation is needed, especially in Allegheny County, where we saw the very highest levels,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, an author of the study and director of Boston College’s Global Public Health and the Common Good program.
Clairton resident and former U.S. Steel electrical wireman Art Thomas, 81, lost his wife, Kathryn, to a respiratory disease in February 2025 at age 75.
Thomas’ late wife lived with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease characterized by the growth of tiny collections of immune cells in organs, most commonly the lungs and lymph nodes, for more than 15 years.
“She was a fighter, that was for sure, but some things just get the best of you. We noticed at first, when she was walking so slow,” Thomas said. “We got her diagnosed and she just went downhill.”
Thomas blames the Mon Valley’s air for Kathryn’s death.
Prolonged exposure to particulate matter may act as a trigger that contributes to the development of sarcoidosis, often showing a latency period of several years, according to a Penn State College of Medicine 2024 study.
“U.S. Steel seems to just pay the fines and keep on polluting, seems to have been their motto for a long, long time,” Thomas said.
Andrew Fulton, a U.S. Steel spokesman, said in a statement to TribLive that the county’s air quality has met certain Environmental Protection Agency standards for pollutants.
“Our employees live, work and raise families here, so air quality is more important to them than it is to activists who fundraise off of scare-mongering headlines,” Fulton said. “Air quality is improving in the county, as it has over the last two decades, and U.S. Steel will continue doing its part as a responsible neighbor to meet and exceed its legal and regulatory requirements.”
From January to March, the Allegheny County Health Department reported two days with particulate matter levels high enough to be unhealthy for sensitive groups and one day when particulate matter levels were unhealthy for everyone.
All three were recorded in Liberty Borough. Liberty’s air quality monitoring site is roughly two miles from Clairton Coke Works.
In May 2025, Allegheny County expanded its Asthma Task Force and the Allegheny County Asthma Control Program in collaboration with the American Lung Association, Breathe PA, and Women for a Healthy Environment.
“These initiatives emphasize coordination across public health, clinical care and community-based organizations,” said Ronnie Das, an Allegheny County Health Department spokesman, who called regulations a “critical public health tool.”