Sparrows Point outage shuts down two furnaces

Plant working to resume operations this week

The Sparrows Point steel mill experienced an outage late last week that caused the suspension of both the basic oxygen steelmaking furnace and the blast furnace, Bette Kovach, a spokeswoman for the mill's owner, RG Steel LLC, said Tuesday.

Kovach said that customer orders would not be affected and that the plant was working to resume hot metal operations "as soon as possible later this week." Kovach declined to provide additional details about the incident.

RG Steel is a new subsidiary of the Renco Group, owned by financier Ira Rennert, which bought the steel mill from Severstal North America in March as part of a $1.2 billion deal involving three steel mills. The deal was the fourth ownership change at the plant since Bethlehem Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001.