Posted on 19 Sep 2018
US steel mills in the path of Hurricane Florence are coming back online, and market sources report minimal disruption as a result of the mega storm, Kallanish understands.
Both Nucor and Gerdau have resumed operations at their facilities on the southern US East Coast. Neither company suffered significant damage to their facilities during the storm, which made landfall late last week as a Category 2 after being downgraded from Category 5.
"We were fortunate, and our facilities were not damaged," says a Gerdau spokesman. "They are operating as normal with no anticipated impact on our customers."
With the caveat that it is still fairly early in the post-storm operations resumption, multiple market sources are saying that Hurricane Florence did little but snarl traffic, as far as the steel industry goes.
"The main highways are pretty clean," says one buy-side source. "They had steel stored in safer places."
A source at one top-tier mill that was not directly impacted by the storm says some difficulties are likely to emerge in the next few days as the market ramps up. No big impacts have registered just yet however.
"It feels too early to tell completely," he says. "I would suspect it is a function of getting equipment in the right place; perhaps some is stranded in hard-to-move places."
