Beaver County’s growth lags behind that of the rest of the state despite the huge construction project.
Six miles from Shell’s site, Mayor Dwan Walker runs Aliquippa, once a storied steelmaking town, from a bare-bones City Hall on a street lined with empty storefronts. With tattooed arms and a red Aliquippa polo shirt, he’s ready to welcome just about anything that will bring back jobs and revenue. But he sees Shell’s plant as a mixed blessing. “The good news is the cracker plant’s coming. Guess what the bad news is: The cracker plant’s coming,” he says. “There’s a lot of questions I have.
Like Gdula, Walker is ambivalent about the industry. Would he prefer to have seen different opportunities for his constituents? “Yes and no,” he says. It wasn’t up to him, but now his job is to make sure those in charge don’t forget Aliquippa.Belmont County, Ohio, has similar hopes. It’s a little over an hour’s drive downriver from Shell’s site, along a stretch of the Ohio River lined with the rusting skeletons of abandoned factories.