Kaiser Steel: The Furnace That Built the Pacific War

In nineteen forty-one, Fontana was a quiet agricultural town on the edge of the Mojave. By nineteen forty-three, it held the largest integrated steel-making facility on the entire West Coast.

Henry J. Kaiser had already made himself indispensable to the war effort through his shipyards, where he was mass-producing Liberty ships at a pace nobody had thought possible. The problem was steel. The nearest major steel mills were in Pittsburgh, half a continent away. Kaiser decided to build his own, here, in the desert.

Workers fired up the first blast furnace on December thirtieth, nineteen forty-two. They named it Big Bess, after Kaiser's wife. Within a year the mill was rolling out steel plate that went directly to Kaiser's West Coast shipyards. Those ships were crossing the Pacific carrying troops and war materiel while the steel that built them was still cooling in molds forty miles east of Los Angeles. The mill produced more than one million tons of steel for the war effort.

After the war, Kaiser Steel became the economic engine of the Inland Empire. At its peak it employed more than eight thousand workers at wages high enough to transform Fontana from a farm town into a blue-collar city. The plant ran for forty years.

The last blast furnace shut down at the very end of nineteen eighty-three. Foreign steel, outdated equipment, and three hundred million dollars in recent losses had made the math impossible. Kaiser Steel Corporation filed for bankruptcy in nineteen eighty-seven. The closure threw eight thousand high-paid workers into unemployment and left behind a contaminated site that required decades of cleanup.

The California Department of Toxic Substances Control eventually certified eleven hundred fifty acres as clean. The site now holds a NASCAR speedway, a large distribution center complex, and California Steel Industries, the only steel fabricator still operating on the West Coast, working on the same land where Big Bess once roared.