Yeah, everything about primary steel mills is gobsmacking. It reminds me of the feeling I got, as a lifelong Easterner/Midwesterner, seeing the Arizon a desert for the first time. The scale of everything was beyond my imaginat ion and it actually was disorienting. My sense of distance and depth percep tion all but disappeared.
Watching them pour a heat of steel was similar. I'd watch it, and then see some puny human walk into the field of view, and it was like being in a lan d of giants. This was before continuous casting had taken off in the US.
As for quenching coke, you'd see this large steel building out by itself. F rom a half-mile away you could see the heat rising, but there wasn't much e lse to give you a sense of scale. Then the water would come in on a huge ga ntry; they pour it in the top of the coking oven, and solid-looking black s moke poured out, straight up. IIRC, the dimensions of the column were somet hing like 100 feet square or more.
Then the black smoke would get picked up by the wind and blown east. The to p of the column bent over like the top of a thunderhead cloud.