By Bridget Halloran
LACKAWANNA — Ten years ago this week, Michael Murray stepped outside his house on Pine Street and saw the sky over the old Bethlehem Steel plant turning black.
“I came outside and you could see all the smoke,” Murray, who has lived on the street for 48 years, told WKBW this month. He told his daughter to get dressed and leave, packed up the animals and went to his son’s house.
The fire that started the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, inside a building at the Steelworks Industrial Park off Route 5 became the largest in Lackawanna’s history. It burned for 11 days. About 300 homes in the Bethlehem Park neighborhood were evacuated, Route 5 was closed from Ridge Road to Lake Avenue and a state of emergency was declared.
A decade later, the site has solar panels, a jury has blamed the building’s owner and its tenant, and the question of what the neighbors are owed has not been answered in public.
What the jury found
In October 2024, an Erie County jury unanimously found the owner, Great Lakes Industrial Development LLC, and its tenant, Industrial Materials Recycling LLC, negligent and grossly negligent, according to WKBW and WGRZ. The tenant ran a plastics recycling operation in the building.
The residents’ law firm, Vinal & Vinal, described the evidence in a statement after the verdict.
“The testimony showed that the defendants were storing a million pounds of ground plastic and plastic to be ground, in a building with no sprinklers or smoke or heat detectors and no alarms,” the firm said. It said the defendants knew 1,000-watt industrial bulbs had exploded before, and that the plastic was stored in thick cardboard boxes, about 1,000 pounds each, stacked three high on wooden pallets.
The official cause of the fire is listed as undetermined, WKBW reported, but court records indicate a hot light bulb fell onto the stacked material.
Jeanne Vinal, the attorney who represented 87 families in the class action and now serves in the Erie County Legislature, said this month the building was not maintained.
“The main reason was they didn’t have the sprinkler system or fire alarm to give adequate notice to the fire to the fire authorities to come and try to put it out,” Vinal told WKBW.
She called it a lesson for everyone involved. “Whether we’re the building inspector, the property owner, the tenant. You know that we have to do a better job taking care of each other, and I think that highlighted that for me,” she said.
Firefighters didn’t know what was inside
Former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield Jr., whose department took command of the scene, told WGRZ the hardest part was not knowing what was stored in the building.
“Some of these things you can’t use water on, and so not you know having a thorough understanding of what we were fighting, what we were facing, that was difficult,” Whitfield said.
Murray described the same uncertainty from the other side of the fence. “Anticipation of what might be over there. You know, you had no idea,” he said.
Former Mayor Geoffrey Szymanski said ordering residents out was the hardest call. “That one bothered me the most of this entire fire because you never want your residents inconvenienced, especially when you have to ask them to leave their homes, but they did it,” he told WGRZ.
Solar panels where the smoke rose
Part of the property has changed. In 2025, a 10-acre community solar array called Bethlehem Solar Park was built on the Steelworks site, with 4,300 panels and about 2 megawatts of capacity, WGRZ reported. Its developer, Good Energy, said it could produce enough electricity for 300 homes and that government subsidies and credits covered about half of its $6 million cost. It hoped to be fully operating by April 2026, pending regulatory approval.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz pointed to the change. “That site now has solar panels on it, across the street, we have all those new businesses that have gone in like Welded Tube, TMP Technologies, Max Advanced Brakes,” he told WGRZ. “If you told people that 10 years ago, they wouldn’t have believed it.”
What we still don’t know
The 2024 verdict settled who was at fault, not how much the neighbors would receive. Damages were to be decided in separate proceedings, WKBW reported at the time. The Buffalo Chronicle could not find any public report of a damages award or settlement in the two years since.
It also isn’t clear from public reporting whether the building that burned was rebuilt or what fire protection is required in the industrial park’s remaining buildings today.
Comment is being sought from Vinal & Vinal on the status of the damages cases, and this story will be updated with any response. Elsewhere in the city this fall, the restoration of the Our Lady of Victory Basilica dome is nearing completion.
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