JENNIFER C. YATES
Associated Press Writer

CLAIRTON, Pa. - An oven at a U.S. Steel plant near Pittsburgh exploded Wednesday, injuring 15 workers and causing a fire that burned for hours afterward, emergency officials said.

The blast in the coke oven at United States Steel Corp.'s Clairton Coke Works happened around 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Allegheny County spokesman Kevin Evanto said.

Fourteen workers suffered burns and another suffered chest pains, Evanto said, but none of the injuries was believed to be life-threatening.

Aerial television video showed smoke rising from the sprawling plant Wednesday. The fire was still burning at midday, Evanto said.

A maintenance worker died at the plant in a September 2009 explosion. A company spokeswoman and a union official said they couldn't immediately comment on Wednesday's explosion.

The Clairton plant is about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh along the west bank of the Monongahela River. U.S. Steel calls it the biggest coke manufacturing facility in the U.S. with production tallies of about 4.7 million tons of coke a year.

Coke, a raw material used in steelmaking, is coal that is baked for a long time at high temperature to remove impurities.

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