CLEVELAND, Ohio -- ArcelorMittal will reopen a portion of its steel mill in the Flats, bringing 150 new jobs to the area.

"Despite the restart of Cleveland's west side, ArcelorMittal USA continues to operate below pre-crisis levels," the company said in a written statement. It added that it still has unused capacity at the mill and could add more work and more jobs in the near future if market demand for steel remains high.

Arcelor has about 1,700 hourly and salaried workers at the Cleveland site, and all of the people who were laid off in 2008 and 2009 have either returned to work or retired. A company spokeswoman said all 150 positions to be filled by re-starting the west side of the plant will be new positions.

The plant's west side is a finishing and refining area. Molten iron from the company's two blast furnaces goes to a basic oxygen furnace on the west side. In that oxygen furnace, workers mix the molten iron with scrap steel and other materials to create new steel. A ladle metallurgy furnace on the site further refines the steel, and a caster converts the molten steel into slabs.

ArcelorMittal shut down the west side of its operations in 2008 as the global economy collapsed.

During the downturn, the company shut down both of its blast furnaces, massive furnaces that melt iron ore or scrap iron, putting the plant on a skeleton crew than handled only maintenance.

In mid-2009, it restarted one of the blast furnaces and brought back nearly 1,000 workers. The second restarted a few months later.



At the time, the company said it had to restart production well before the economy improved because it takes a long time to get steel plants back to production. So if it had waited until the orders started rolling in, it wouldn't have been able to fill those orders for many months.

In its statement, ArcelorMittal said restarting the west side of its plant could increase its steel-making output by about 480,000 tons per year. It also said that orders from its customers are increasing, and it expects that trend to continue.