Whyalla Steelworks has reached an important recovery milestone, and GFG Alliance Executive Chairman Sanjeev Gupta witnessed the progress in person.
He visited the site to see headway on the blast furnace, which was restarted on the weekend after being offline since mid-March.
Engineers and project managers delivered a briefing during the visit, explaining the cause of the damage, current progress, and the projected timeline for normalisation of operations.
Whyalla residents have been reassured the plant will be brought back to normal production as soon as possible, Mr Gupta saying the furnace’s shell repair is complete and hot metal is flowing from the emergency tap hole.
“We’ll monitor it day-by-day every day, and each day will give us a better idea, but the expectation now is we’ll be back to fully normal – i.e. sending hot metal to the steel plant – within June,” Mr Gupta says.
The hard work of the restart team and resilience of workers was acknowledged during the visit.
“It’s always an amazing pleasure to come to Whyalla, even in such difficult circumstances… It always lifts my spirit to see the resilience of the workers, and I’ve had a good chat with some of them… and they voiced many concerns to me, but I can clearly see their commitment in their eyes.”
Mayor Phill Stone and other key community stakeholders were included in detailed updates regarding the blast furnace, Steelworks, and community wellbeing development projects.
