California Steel Industries (Fontana, California)

 factory, production, steelworks

14000 San Bernardino Avenue
Fontana, CA 92335
(909) 350-6300
www.californiasteel.com/index.php

During World War II Henry J. Kaiser built the only fully integrated steel mill west of the Mississippi River at Fontana.

The northern half of the steelmill complex (blast furnaces etc) has been demolished and turned into the California Speedway. The southern half (rolling mills etc) shown here, became California Steel Industries, a joint venture between Japan's JFE Steel Corporation and Brazilian iron miner Vale.

The plant currently includes an 86" Hot Strip Rolling mill, hot rolled strip finishing facilities (build-up, shear, and slitter lines), a 62" Continuous Pickling line, a 5-Stand Cold Reduction mill, two hot-dip Galvanizing lines, cold rolling equipment of Annealing and Tempering mills, and an Electric Resistance Welded Pipe mill.

With just a few hundred workers (a fraction of the thousands that worked at Kaiser Steel during the war), this is still one of the largest steel operations on the West Coast.

The plant, built inland from the coast to stay out of the range of enemy fire from the sea, was upgraded and modernized after the war, with a new 23 story high, $287 million plant built as recently as the 1980's. After three years of use, this most modern plant was bought by the Chinese at bargain basement rates. A team of 300 Chinese workers came to Fontana in 1993 to disassemble it, and ship it to China, where it was reassembled. Kaiser is no longer in the steel business.


As one of the few remaining heavy industry sites near Los Angeles, the site is a common filming location. It was used as a location for the film Black Rain, and for the Schwarzenegger showdown with the cyborg in Terminator II. The film Pearl Harbor was refused permission to film at the site because the current operator of the plant, California Steel, is partially owned by Kawasaki Steel, a Japanese company.