Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Weirton, WV

Weirton is an incorporated city that straddles Hancock and Brooke counties in West Virginia's northern panhandle, lying along the Ohio River in a strip of land bordered by Ohio to the west and Pennsylvania to the east.

The city's roots reach back to Fort Holliday, a Revolutionary War fortification built in 1776 along Harmons Creek, and to Hollidays Cove, a village founded on the site in 1793 that now forms downtown Weirton.

Weirton is named for Ernest T. Weir, who arrived from Pittsburgh in 1909 and built the steel mill that became the Weirton Steel Corporation; the unincorporated settlement that grew up around the mill was said by 1940 to be the largest unincorporated area in the United States.

The modern city dates to July 1, 1947, when the incorporated towns of Hollidays Cove, Marland Heights, and Weirton Heights merged with the remaining unincorporated area to form the city of Weirton, with Weirton Steel executive Thomas E. Millsop as its first mayor.

The 2020 census counted 19,163 residents in Weirton, making it the seventh-most populous city in West Virginia.

The 2020 census counted 8,673 households and 9,515 housing units in Weirton.

Across the Ohio River from Steubenville, Ohio, and linked to it by the Veterans Memorial Bridge carrying U.S. Route 22, Weirton is the principal city of the Weirton-Steubenville metropolitan area, which had 116,903 residents in 2020, and lies about 35 miles west of Pittsburgh.

Weirton covers about 19.3 square miles and is nicknamed the "Gateway to the Valley."

Weirton Steel was once the largest private employer and the largest taxpayer in West Virginia, employing more than 12,000 people at its peak; in the 1980s its workers bought the mill through what was then the largest employee stock ownership plan in the nation.

Cleveland-Cliffs, which acquired Weirton's tin mill in 2020, permanently closed it in February 2024 with the loss of about 800 jobs, ending more than a century of steelmaking that had made the plant one of the largest tin-plate producers in the United States.