U. S. Steel Confirms Blast Furnace Incident at U. S. Steel Kosice

United States Steel Corporation (NYSE: X) confirmed today that on January 5, at 11:22 p.m. local time (5:22 p.m. EST), an explosion occurred in the top gas exhaust pipe of the No. 3 blast furnace at the company's U. S. Steel Kosice subsidiary in Kosice, Slovakia. There were no injuries as a result of the incident.

Operation of the furnace was immediately halted and the furnace isolated from the gas system. The extent of the damage and cause of the event are under investigation. The area was secured and continuous gas monitoring is being performed in the vicinity of the furnace to ensure the safety of all workers engaged in that investigation.

U. S. Steel Kosice has three operable blast furnaces. At this time, the scope of repairs and the length of the No. 3 furnace outage are not known. U. S. Steel Kosice will continue to operate its No. 2 blast furnace during the outage and has begun the several-week process to restart its currently idle No. 1 blast furnace.

U. S. Steel also announced that it has restarted the No. 6 blast furnace at its Gary Works in Gary, Ind., following completion of repairs. The restart of the No. 6 blast furnace at Gary Works is not related to the incident at U. S. Steel Kosice.

(For more information on U. S. Steel, visit our Website at http://www.ussteel.com/.)

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SOURCE: U. S. Steel

Contact: John Armstrong, +1-412-433-6792, or Mike Dixon,
+1-412-433-6860, both of U. S. Steel

Website: http://www.ussteel.com/

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