Multi-million dollar investment to transform old warehouse in Etna

ETNA, Pa. — It’s one of the first things you see coming off Route 28 and entering Etna. A giant old steel mill holds a lot of history to the town, but the hope is now it will bring a lot more to the business district.

“We were a mill town truly we had the oldest running mill in the country 1828,” said Mary Ellen Ramage who’s the Borough Manager.

But for years that old mill has sat empty off Bridge Street as jobs were lost and homes disappeared.

“We have a lot of big buildings like this and that’s the problem. As manager I rode by and go how do we ever get the money to tear it down because it sat vacant for so long, the windows broken on the back,” Ramage said.

Soon that will all change. Westinghouse plans to rehab and open the building as a clean energy plant for its nuclear battery technology. An opportunity, the governor said, will bring electricity to communities who need it.

“What they are building here in Etna are real small nuclear energy suppliers that are zero waste that can been deployed anywhere, trucked into an area that may otherwise not have energy,” said Governor Josh Shapiro.

Bringing new life to this community and with that new jobs and a potential for even more opportunity.

“The people who work here will want to eat, get lunch go to the dry cleaner, etcetera. Bringing jobs into this community is wonderful because we are so densely built out that we don’t really have places for new development so this to me is the ultimate recycling,” Ramage said.

While there is still more construction to happen on this building, the hope is to have some offices up and running by the end of the year with manufacturing starting mid-next year.

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