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Understanding Potential Harms to your Community
Since Part II I made many changes to my story on the harms of steel production. First, I changed my target audience to local government officials. This changed the scope of my story and better aligned with the content that I was pulling together. Next, I added visualizations to show enforcement actions that the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD) has taken against US Steel measured in US Dollars. This was to provide context in to the amount that US Steel has violated regulations, to argue that the County should set stricter standards or increase the penalty associated with violations. I also added information about the recent explosion at Clairton Coke Works to show that harmful accidents could continue to happen, so regulations should be set in place to reduce the amount of accidents and the harm from these accidents. I also added images to provide emphasis on the health risks associated with steel production.
My target audience is policymakers/local government officials and specifically those in communitites affected by pollution from the steel manufacturing process. I decided to make this switch primarily because of the insights I gained during the interview process. The individuals that I interviewed provided perspectives that I had not considered like the fact that residents might not understand how to advocate for themselves and making policymakers the target audience eliminates the middle man between residents and elected officials. Targeting policymakers removes a further burden on the residents. Finally, the advice that really made me realize I should change my target audience to policymakers was the advice that that residents of frontline communities already know the health risks that they are experiencing due to steel production. They don’t need to hear the story of it because it is THEIR story.
I intentionally kept the color scheme as navy blue, orange, white, and black because I felt that those colors accurately represented the vibe of the steel industry. I kept the visualization colors gray and orange to provide emphasis on what was important and also skip with the color theme. I wanted to include a map to show the range of locations of steel mills across the country. I also did this to show which states had the highest concentration of steel mills. I chose a bar graph to show the top 50 Asthma Capitals (by city) in the US because I felt it was a good way to quickly see the range in scores. I highlighted in orange the cities that are on the list and also are home to steel manufacturing facilities.
I used Allegheny County and Southwestern PA as a case study to highlight higher cancer rates due to air pollution from steel production. I did so with a map that shifts in and out of the state of PA to provide context as to where the region was in comparison to the rest of the state. I included two visualizations to represent enforcement from ACHD in US dollars in the last 5 years. The first was a yearly total shown with an area graph and the second was the amount by quarters per year with a scatterplot. The area graph was to help visualize the magnitude/size of the total amount of fines in the last five years. The scatterplot was to highlight the spike in fines in Q1 of 2022.
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Overall, the scope of this topic can be really broad. For the time frame for this project, I wanted to focus on the asthma and cancer risks associated with steel production. I had personal experiences and prior knowledge of the harms in Allegheny County, so I chose to narrow the scope even more with aspects focused on that. US Steel is also headquarted in Allegheny County. It would have been interesting to look at how other countries handle steel production and the harms that come with it, but due to the scope I chose not to.