uring a second-quarter earnings call, President and CEO Leon Topalian emphasized that Nucor Corp. is focused on becoming the world’s safest steel company. “We continue to perform well on the safety front, as we look to make 2021 our safest year ever, besting our record set just last year,” Topalian said on the July 22 call.

Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic in 2020, Nucor Tubular Products recorded a profitable year, and the company is on pace for an even better year in 2021. That success is due in no small part to its focus on safety.

Operating safely in 2020 expanded to include COVID-19 considerations. “First and foremost, our primary goal is to protect the safety of our teammates and everyone with whom we interact on a regular basis,” says Randy Spicer, general manager for NTP North and South. “As such, we continue to closely monitor the constantly evolving situation as it relates to COVID-19 and the spread of diagnosed cases domestically and abroad. As part of our efforts, we created a task force that included members of our executive leadership team, human resources, mill operations, legal counsel and others. We engaged appropriate medical resources with expertise to help us make informed decisions.”

Beyond infectious disease protocols, NTP recently invested in additional upgrades across its plants to ensure employees and visitors are safe. “We have added many safety measures to enhance our lockout/tagout, fall protection, hand safety and mobile equipment incident prevention,” Spicer points out. “Because hand injuries are common in industrial settings, we have created an intense focus on hand safety to keep our teammates’ hands out of harm’s way. Our safety action committees are proactive and focused on leading indicators to prevent the next incident.”

The company will be adding to Nucor’s large presence in Gallatin County, Kentucky, with a new $164 million state-of-the-art tube mill on the site of the Nucor Steel Gallatin sheet mill. The expansion will allow NTP to take advantage of investments that have been made to expand capacity of the Gallatin mill, including a new galvanizing line. “This mill will allow us to better serve customers in the construction, infrastructure and renewable energy markets,” says Moon, who is general manager of NTP Gallatin.

“Nucor is proud of the performance of our Tube Group, so it is exciting to announce we have entered into an agreement to purchase Hannibal Industries Inc., which will fall under the NTP umbrella,” says Giff Daughtridge, president, Nucor Sheet & Tubular. The company is a leading national provider of racking solutions to warehouses in the e-commerce, industrial, food storage and retail segments, and with Hannibal’s utilization of sheet and bar to manufacture racking products, this acquisition will result in new supply chain efficiencies for Nucor.”

The expansion plans don’t end there. NTP is commissioning a $27.2 million expansion at its location in Trinity, Alabama. “This investment includes new production, finishing, processing and packaging equipment, and we will grow our workforce to support the new operations. These projects reflect our strategy of growing and expanding beyond our core steel businesses,” says Daughtridge.