Italian steelmaker Ilva has announced that as of 5:50 a.m. on Saturday, December 8, its blast furnace No. 1 at Taranto has been turned off in order to allow reconstruction work to be carried out. Meanwhile, starting from Thursday, December 6, the company has turned off its coke oven batteries Nos. 5 and 6. The reconstruction work is scheduled to last 18 months for the blast furnace and 12 months for the coke ovens.
The work in question is being carried out within the framework of the Environmental Integrated Authorization (EIA) issued by Italy’s Ministry of Environment. Ilva stated that the total investment will amount to about €270 million.
At the same time, Ilva did not make reference to any possible consequences on employment levels. Ilva’s president, Bruno Ferrante, previously guaranteed that workers at BF No. 1 would be relocated to other areas of the steel complex.
On the other hand, after the storm which hit Taranto in late November only three cranes for raw material unloading are currently in operation out of a total of eight. The three cranes have been equipped with remote controls as crane operators refuse to get back into the control cabins due to an accident which left one of their colleagues dead.
Ilva recently stated that it needs to unload 40,000 mt of steelmaking raw materials each day in order to feed its blast furnaces which are currently in operation (i.e., BFs Nos. 2, 4 and 5).