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On January 4th, Corus Strip Products relit No 5 blast furnace at Port Talbot in South Wales, just 14 months after the disastrous explosion which destroyed the previous furnace.
Normally, a blast furnace rebuilt requires two to three years of meticulous planning to get everything in place ready for the dismantling and reconstruction of the furnace. In such circumstances, times of 90 days have been achieved between blowing down the old furnace and relighting the new.
At Corus Port Talbot works, such preparation was impossible. On 8th November 2001, a disastrous explosion ripped through the lower section of No 5 blast furnace, killing three workers and injuring twelve. The cause of the explosion has been attributed to a build up of gas and steam resulting from a water leak, but the full enquiry has not yet reported on the sequence of events causing the explosion.
The loss of 1.3Mt/y of iron production from No 5 blast furnace, one of two operating at Port Talbot, left Corus with an acute shortage of hot metal for the steel plant. This shortage was compounded by the earlier closure in June of all hot metal production at nearby Corus Iianwern which now required slab for its rolling mill to be supplied from elsewhere, partly from Port Talbot.
However, the decision to rebuild was not automatically taken. Alternative plans involving the buying in of merchant slab on the international market and increasing output from Corus' other integrated plants at Teesside and Scunthorpe in UK and IJmuiden in Holland, were investigated to supply both...