It was just a few months after moving from Louisville to Middletown, Ohio, four years ago that Vivian Adams’s six-year-old daughter’s asthma problem worsened.

“My daughter was born prematurely so she already had lung issues,” she says, “[but] it’s gotten worse. She stays sick and coughing and can’t breathe. She’s had to go on everyday medication for her asthma, plus she has a rescue inhaler.”

All the while, pollution from the coal-burning Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant several hundred yards behind her home has been ever-present.

It’s the same plant that James Vance, the grandfather of the US vice-president, JD Vance, worked at for years. Vance, born and raised in Middletown, has repeatedly referred to clean energy projects as a “scam”. As an Ohio senator, his election campaigns were partly bankrolled by fossil fuel companies.

But for Adams, given her family’s proximity to the steel plant, anything is better than what she has to deal with as soon as she steps outside.

Adams says: “We sit on our chairs and there’s a bunch of black stuff on them, on our vehicle, it’s soot. It’s on their toys, so you can’t leave them outside.”

Recent events mean that none of this is likely to change for her or the hundreds of other Middletown residents who live in the shadow of the big, coke-burning steel plant.

New permitting documents on the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s website show Cleveland-Cliffs is planning to reline the blast furnace at its Middletown facility – a several-hundred-million-dollar move that would usher in fossil-fuel burning at the facility for at least another 15 to 18 years.

Local residents are aghast.

“It’s horrible,” Adams says. “The smell some days is absolutely awful.”

Last summer, Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs, used Donald Trump’s verbiage to announce to investors that he envisioned a “beautiful coal, beautiful coke” upgrade to the plant. The No 3 blast furnace, first installed in the 1950s, uses hundreds of thousands of tons of coke every year to produce around 3m tons of raw steel annually.

The move follows the Trump-Vance administration’s ending of a $500m grant for the facility to replace the coke-burning infrastructure with a hydrogen-powered furnace that, by some accounts, would have resulted in the Middletown facility becoming the lowest greenhouse gas-emitting steel plant in the world.

Instead, residents could find themselves locked into decades more of dirty, chemical-polluted environmental risks. Despite the Biden administration’s attempts at cleaning up the steel industry, last year Goncalves told Politico: “I believe what Trump’s trying to do is for the betterment of the country.”

Emails sent to Cleveland-Cliffs asking whether the Department of Energy money previously designated to the proposed hydrogen-powered infrastructure was to be reallocated to pay for the cost of the reline were not responded to. Emails sent to the Department of Energy in Washington DC asking similar questions did not receive a response.

“Cleveland-Cliffs is already a large quantity generator of hazardous waste and is responsible for determining whether any waste from this work is hazardous or non-hazardous and managing it accordingly,” says Anthony Chenault of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Chenault wasn’t able to estimate what volume of waste material the blast furnace reline would generate, how the waste material would be classified or specifically where it would be disposed.

“Disposal options are selected by the facility, consistent with state and federal requirements,” Chenault says.

A 2024 report by Industrious Labs, a non-profit advocating to decarbonize heavy industries across the US, found that Middletown Works ranks among the top 10 emitters of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and other pollutants among more than 650 emitters in Ohio.

“Based off the estimated health impact of the Middletown steel mill and its coke supplier, SunCoke Energy, and assuming that pollution and population levels remain constant, we estimate over the 18 years following the relining of Middletown Works 810 to 1,476 premature deaths, 132,300 lost school days,” and a host of other health ailments, says Ariana Criste of Industrious Labs.

The site is the 11th worst emitter of carbon monoxide in the country, according to data from the EPA’s National Emissions Inventory database collected in 2020.

Next door to Middletown Works is the SunCoke Energy facility, which has the capacity to burn up to 550,000 tons of coal a year to create coke, contributing to high pollutant levels in the area.

“Together, these two facilities account for over half of Ohio’s total health impacts from steel and coke plant pollution, contributing to an estimated $1.3bn to $2.3bn in health costs annually in the state,” Criste says.

Despite the help that Trump’s tariff regime have given to US steelmakers, the industry reported growth of just 3% last year, according to figures released last month.

Last year, Cleveland-Cliffs idled an iron ore and a taconite mine in Minnesota with the loss of 600 jobs, and in January, the company announced further layoffs. In February, it announced consolidated revenue losses of $600m for 2025. Goncalves blamed automotive production issues and a “newly adverse dynamic” in the Canadian market, among other reasons, for the decline.

Steel imports fell 12.6% last year largely due to the tariffs.

Analysts argue that few beyond steel barons such as Goncalves are seeing a benefit of the tariffs regime. Industries such as automotive have seen massive layoffs due to falling demand from consumers spurred by higher steel costs.

The largest producer of flat-roll steel in North America, Cleveland-Cliffs employs about 25,000 people in Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ontario, and now, with the Trump administration’s blessing, many people in adjacent communities face many more years dealing with adverse air pollution.

Last month, the company announced its Burns Harbor Works facility in Indiana is also set to reline its blast furnace next year. The plant is situated next to Indiana’s only national park and on the southern shore of Lake Michigan within short proximity to several towns. The American Lung Association ranks Porter county, home to Burns Harbor Works, an “F” on high ozone days and 24-hour particle pollution.

For Vivian Adams and her nine-, six- and four-year-old children in Middletown, news of the blast furnace reline comes as a big disappointment because she is hoping to buy the home she now rents.

“It is everything we need or wanted,” she says from outside her home, where, on a recent Friday evening, she waits for her children to get off their school bus.

The company sends crews out to residents’ properties to pressure wash the soot and chemical dust off their houses. On one occasion, Adams says, the workers broke a door: “They do the worst job in the world.”

She says that if she could speak to Vance, who grew up four miles away, she would ask him to pursue the cleaner, hydrogen-powered system proposed by the previous administration.

She says: “If this is on the cars, imagine what’s going into our lungs?”