Steel Mills

Electrical Outage at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor Triggers Emergency Flare System

February 6, 2019

ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor called firefighters to help control a towering blaze from a coke oven battery late Tuesday night.

ArcelorMittal spokeswoman Mary Beth Holford said the plant “experienced a high voltage power interruption for a short duration” about 10:05 p.m. Tuesday. The outage triggered an emergency flare system that burned off excess coke oven gas, resulting in flames that were visible from U.S. 12.

Holford said the plant required about 12 hours to re-establish operations. “No employees or contractors were injured during the incident, and the interruption will not impact ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor’s ability to meet customer demand,” she said.

Nick Meyer, spokesman for Northern Indiana Public Service Co., said two outages of less than a minute duration occurred—one at 10:05 and a second at 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday.

“While initial assessments are not showing issues on NIPSCO’s system, indicating it operated as designed, we’re working with ArcelorMittal to help pinpoint the root cause of these two interruptions,” Meyer said.

A firefighter from Porter, Ind., was transported to the hospital and treated for heat exhaustion.