USS Suffers Short Term BF Outage at Gary Works

With lead times extended and supply constrained any surprise outages, or the rumor of an outage, could have a dramatic impact on an already spooked flat rolled market. On Sunday, US Steel suffered a short term unexpected outage on their largest blast furnace, #14 at Gary Works. The two day outage is projected to have cost the company approximately 18,000 tons of pig iron which, when processed through their BOP (basic oxygen process) and combined with scrap would produce more than 20,000 tons of steel.

With each passing day the rumor of an outage at US Steel spread around the flat rolled buying community. There were some who worried that the fallout would affect their orders whether with US Steel or elsewhere.