Steel Mills

BRS: Week-Long Maintenance Outage Slated for Q4

July 13, 2021

Big River Steel plans to take a week-long plant-wide maintenance outage in October at its mill in Osceola, Ark., a company spokeswoman confirmed.

The planned outage, for normal preventative maintenance and mill reliability, is scheduled to start on Oct. 10, she said.

The scheduled maintenance includes both electric-arc furnaces (EAFs)—with annual production capacity of 3.3 million tons of flat rolled steel—as well as the casting, heating, and rolling lines.

Although the weeklong maintenance outage is slated for early Q4, lead times are presently 8-12 weeks out and the disruption may be felt by a tight marketplace.

Big River Steel makes hot-rolled, cold-rolled, pickled, electrical, and hot-dipped galvanized steels for a wide range of downstream industries, including automotive, appliance and distribution.

By David Schollaert, David@SteelMarketUpdate.com

David Schollaert

David Schollaert is a senior analyst for Steel Market Update. David joined SMU after more than a decade in the metals and mining industry in a myriad of different roles. Much of his early experience and expertise were within the coverage and analysis of steel-making raw materials and served previously as senior editor of the CRU Prices Service. Most recently, however, before his return to market analysis, David held roles as a metals buyer and an operations manager for raw material suppliers. Based in CRU’s Pittsburgh office, David can be reached at david@steelmarketupdate.com or 724-720-1008.