US Steel's Edgar Thomson Plant faces an unplanned outage

Operations at US Steel's Edgar Thomson Plant were temporarily impacted by a water main break, a company spokesperson told S&P Global Platts on April 7. The Pittsburgh-area mill needed to temporarily take down its two blast furnaces to complete required repairs.

Those blast furnaces have production capacity of 2,903 mt/day and 3,175 mt/day, according to the Association for Iron and Steel Technology.

"We've already completed most of the related repairs, one blast furnace is already back on line and the other blast furnace will be back on line today," the spokesperson said on March 7. "We do not expect this interruption to affect customer deliveries or financial results."

The market has recently been very sensitive to any reports related to supply disruptions due to already extended lead times and all-time high prices. HRC lead times for most mills has already stretched into June and the spot market will receive further pressure from a series of planned outages in the current quarter.

The daily Platts TSI US HRC index was assessed at $1,345/st on April 6, up by 33% year-to-date, up by 206% since early August when prices bottomed out.