page_title: Lackawanna Steel Company
section_title: Redevelopment
hierarchical_section_title: Lackawanna Steel Company / Redevelopment
caption_attribution_description: Steel Winds I, windfarm project in Lackawanna, NY as seen from Lake Erie
context_page_description: The Lackawanna Steel Company was an American steel manufacturing company that existed as an independent company from 1840 to 1922, and as a subsidiary of the Bethlehem Steel company from 1922 to 1983. Founded by the Scranton family, it was once the second-largest steel company in the world. Scranton, Pennsylvania developed around the company's original location. When the company moved to a suburb of Buffalo, New York, in 1902, it stimulated the founding of the city of Lackawanna.
context_section_description: The Lackawanna Steel plant was declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1988 after the EPA conducted a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Facility Assessment of the plant. The state of New York subsequently declared it a Class 2 Inactive Hazardous Waste Site, indicating the site poses a significant potential threat to human health and the environment. In August 1990, Bethlehem Steel (operating as Tecumseh Redevelopment, Inc.) and the EPA entered into an administrative consent order requiring Bethlehem Steel to identify the nature and extent of any releases of hazardous waste and mitigate any emergency situations that might be discovered during the course of the investigations. Bethlehem Steel and its successor corporations have been submitting RCRA Facility Investigation (RFI) reports since then. Although the RFI was due to be completed in 2004, it still was not complete as of June 2008. The plant was also declared a brownfield in 2003 under the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act of 2002. While this made the city of Lackawanna eligible for federal assistance money to redevelop part of the site, a cooperative agreement had not been signed as of May 2006.
  The city of Lackawanna redeveloped some of the former Lackawanna Steel plant land into small business zones, bringing about 700 jobs back to the town in the late 1980s.
  Steel Winds, an eight-windmill wind farm owned by BQ Energy, opened on the old plant's slag heaps in September 2006. Another 14 turbines were added in 2012.
  As of 2018, Erie County owns 240 acres of the complex. 140 acres of former brownfield have been remediated, and a bike path now spans a portion of the property.
caption: Steel Winds, a wind farm built in 2006 on the former slag heap of the Lackawanna Steel Co. plant in Lackawanna, New York.
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