When speaking to residents and workers in Whyalla, one word you'll often hear is "resilient".
The blast furnace closure hasn't come as a surprise to locals — workers have been pushing against the odds to get the 60-year-old plant back online since April.
Mayor Phill Stone said it was a sad day for Whyalla, but it would allow people to move forward.
The Whyalla steelworks is Australia's biggest manufacturer of structural steel, used for rail lines, bridges and industrial buildings.
In a 2025 press conference, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it accounted for 75 per cent of Australia's structural steel.
A part of the process is the now-closed blast furnace — a coal-fired oven used to smelt iron ore, transforming it into pig iron that is used to make steel.
Whyalla began as a mining settlement at the turn of the 20th century, when BHP began mining nearby iron deposits.
In the late 1930s, the first blast furnace was built, and as Australia went to war, BHP added a shipyard.
The shipyards saw Whyalla boom, and in 1976 it was South Australia's biggest regional city with a population of 33,000 and a plan to expand to 100,000.
In 2016, owner Arrium collapsed into voluntary administration.
A saviour came in the form of British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, who promised to keep local jobs and even add to them.
His pledge came with a projection of population growth to 80,000, as Mr Gupta said he would build a "next-gen mega steel plant" that would be one of the biggest in the world.