BusinessTN

Alcoa's Tennessee operations are struggling to wake up from its worst nightmare. A fateful lightning strike in mid-April knocked out power to the plant's gigantic smelting facilities, in which heat was cut off from the 164 massive pots used to extract aluminum from its ore. Without power, the hot molten aluminum cooled and hardened, leaving a mess of Biblical proportions for one of the world's largest producers of primary and fabricated aluminum.

The division's location manager, Brett McBrayer, walked into his new position in May not expecting his first objective to be a cleanup job — or a demolition effort, considering the immense size and scope.

"We had to dig [the metal] out of the pots, repair the damage, then reassemble each one piece by piece," McBrayer says of the line of smelting pots that produces about 107,000 metric tons of aluminum per year, roughly half of the facility's annual output.

It had been 32 years since Alcoa's Tennessee operations, located south of Knoxville in the City of Alcoa, had experienced a meltdown resulting from a power outage of this magnitude — and some of the 600 current smelter employees are still around to tell the tale.

Fortunately for Alcoa, this year's event is now itself one for the history books. Not for the damage, but for the speed at which the in-house teams were able to get the smelters back online. Against the odds, Alcoa was able to restart part of its potline after about eight weeks of rehabilitation, projecting a full recovery by the end of June.

"It was certainly not good for the financial statements. That was enough reason to pull this thing back together as quickly as possible," McBrayer says, especially as Alcoa was recently denied a $33 billion bid for Canadian aluminum rival Alcan.

Another quarter's results will show exactly how much of a hit the publicly traded company will have to absorb. The company's New York headquarters did estimate that this incident, coupled with another temporary smelter shutdown at a Texas facility, would total about a $45 million loss in the second quarter.

That may seem minimal to a $7.9 billion metals giant. But true to the nature of aluminum, Alcoa will recycle as much recovered metal as possible and resmelt it — to recoup its costs and pay out thousands of overtime hours.

For Alcoa, the nightmare is almost over. They'll just have to hope that lightning doesn't strike twice.