Speaker 1: Pushkin too quick.
Speaker 2: No, it's perfect Pushkin stuff. You got it. Hey, it's
Speaker 2: Jacob Business. History is on a break this week, so
Speaker 2: we're going to play you an episode of another Pushkin
Speaker 2: show called Cautionary Tales. The show is hosted by the
Speaker 2: great Tim Harford, and this episode is the story of
Speaker 2: a factory, in particular, the story of what seemed like
Speaker 2: a small thing leading eventually to a terrible disaster.
Speaker 1: Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England, sparsely populated and
Speaker 1: largely rural. Few great moments of history have been made here.
Speaker 1: Large towns are also few. People tend to live in
Speaker 1: small villages, engaged in such bucolic activities as potato farming
Speaker 1: and pig husbandry. It seems hard to believe that Lincolnshire
Speaker 1: is on anyone's radar. The county is famed for something though,
Speaker 1: being flat, and that flatness has given Lincolnshire a geopolitical significance.
Speaker 1: It's perfect for air bases. In the early summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, Lincolnshire is home to v Force of
Speaker 1: the RAF, the giant Vulcan bombers screaming up this long runway,
Speaker 1: a part of Britain's nuclear deterrent. If the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: launches a surprise atomic strike, these Royal Air Force crews
Speaker 1: have just a few minutes warning to get into the
Speaker 1: air and hit back, devastating karl Markstadt, Minsk or Moscow
Speaker 1: in retaliation. The Vulcan pilots would doubtless have much on
Speaker 1: their minds given the mission ahead, but few wasted time
Speaker 1: in thinking of their return home. The quite reasonable assumption
Speaker 1: is that the Russians would pulverize Lincolnshire and its runways
Speaker 1: while they were away. It's late on a Saturday afternoon
Speaker 1: and farmer Gordon Atkinson is working in a sugar beet
Speaker 1: field near the hamlet of brandy Wharf, but a distant
Speaker 1: noise prompts him to look up from his labors. I
Speaker 1: heard this rumble and thought it's going to be a thunderstorm.
Speaker 1: He said that that rolling boom was no act of God,
Speaker 1: Its origins were man made. An enormous explosion has just
Speaker 1: ripped across northern Lincolnshire. And if that wasn't obvious to
Speaker 1: Gordon Akin, it was all too clear to his elderly mother.
Speaker 1: She's been spending a quiet afternoon at home twenty miles
Speaker 1: near at the epicenter of the detonation. Her house was
Speaker 1: now as shambles. The blast ripped the front door off
Speaker 1: its hinges and sent it rocketing up the staircase to
Speaker 1: the four above. If she could see, missus Atkinson might
Speaker 1: have despaired at the state of her lounge, littered as
Speaker 1: it was with shards of glass and tatters of curtaincloth,
Speaker 1: But she couldn't see. The blast wave had come whooshing
Speaker 1: down the chimney stack, filling the house with a blinding,
Speaker 1: choking veil of soot. People ten, twenty, even thirty miles
Speaker 1: from the explosion stopped in their tracks to look in
Speaker 1: the direction of missus Atkinson's village. Flicksborough teenager Leduena Beckers
Speaker 1: was watching the football on TV with her four brothers,
Speaker 1: rushing to look out the window. The family joked about
Speaker 1: what the source of the noise might be. But then
Speaker 1: we saw the mushroom cloud, dark and ominous in the sky,
Speaker 1: said Ladreena. All laughter in the Beckers household stopped. Had
Speaker 1: World War IIE really begun? I'm Tim Harford and you're
Speaker 1: listening to another cautionary tale. You've probably never heard of.
Speaker 1: Polycaprolactum even by its snappier monica nylon six. But I'll
Speaker 1: bet there's some nylon six within arms reach of you
Speaker 1: right now. It's used in all manner of items. It
Speaker 1: makes the bristles of toothbrushes and the strings of tennis rackets.
Speaker 1: You can find it inside almost every electrical gadget, and
Speaker 1: since nylon six is used to fashion medical implants, you
Speaker 1: might even have some inside you. Nylon six is strong,
Speaker 1: hard and tough. It won't conduct electricity and doesn't taint
Speaker 1: foods it comes into contact with. It's useful stuff, and
Speaker 1: it would be hard to imagine our world without it.
Speaker 1: Flying a plane, driving a car, or even getting dressed
Speaker 1: in the morning would be a very different proposition without
Speaker 1: nylon six. Nylon six was an invention of Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: The polymer was used to make parachute canopies, tires for warplanes,
Speaker 1: and the toe ropes of gliders. But nylon six production
Speaker 1: really boomed in the post war years, with factories around
Speaker 1: the world pumping out the stuff. Depending on where you lived,
Speaker 1: it might be marketed as Perlon, Nilotron, Ultramid, or Jurathan.
Speaker 1: I won't bore you with the details of its manufacture,
Speaker 1: but this story centers around the production of caprolactum, from
Speaker 1: which nylon six is made. By the nineteen seventies, nylon
Speaker 1: six was in huge demand. The fibers were so ubiquitous
Speaker 1: that there was even a fashion for people to carpet
Speaker 1: their entire homes wall to wall with the stuff. To
Speaker 1: meet this clamor, a joint venture was launched by the
Speaker 1: Dutch State Mines and the British National Coal Board. There
Speaker 1: had been a modest factor tree at Flicksborough making fertilizer
Speaker 1: from the mucky waste from local steel foundries, but now
Speaker 1: under the name Nypro, Flicksburgh was getting into the glamorous
Speaker 1: world of polymers. The plant would be transformed at the
Speaker 1: cost of many millions of pounds, and the workforce would
Speaker 1: swell into the hundreds. Local newspapers soon filled up with
Speaker 1: recruitment ads for chemists, engineers, shorthand typists and canteen staff.
Speaker 1: It was expected the complex would use as much power
Speaker 1: as a city of half a million people, all to
Speaker 1: produce seventy thousand tons of cap prolactum per year. It
Speaker 1: would be Britain's biggest indeed, its only caprolactin plant. Nipro
Speaker 1: was essentially putting all its eggs in one basket, and
Speaker 1: to many this reasoning seemed sound. Building a single megafactory
Speaker 1: of considerable economies of scale, it would simplify transport and
Speaker 1: logistics and allow Nipro to strike bulk buying deals for
Speaker 1: energy and raw materials. So in sleepy rural Lincolnshire, on
Speaker 1: a curve of the Broad River, trend for Nypro works
Speaker 1: quickly took shape. Gargantuan cranes hoisted gleaming steel processing tanks
Speaker 1: into place. Chimneys and cooling towers went up, as did
Speaker 1: tall spindleaf flarestacks. After dark, their flames, along with countless
Speaker 1: strings of lights, picked out the silhouette of the plant
Speaker 1: against the night sky. Dennis Lawrence was one of Nipro's employees.
Speaker 1: He loved the job, he told his family the plant
Speaker 1: was just so modern, so clean. But all was not
Speaker 1: well at Nypro. The target was to produce seventy thousand
Speaker 1: tonnes of caprolactum per year, but by nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: two years into the expansion, only forty seven thousand tons
Speaker 1: were likely to leave the factory gate. For Nipro to
Speaker 1: turn a profit, they needed to make more of the
Speaker 1: stuff and quickly. The heart of the factory was a
Speaker 1: series of six identical steel reactor vessels. These cylindrical tanks
Speaker 1: were installed in a line and connected by pipework. The first,
Speaker 1: sixteen foot tall vessel was the highest in this chain,
Speaker 1: The second vessel was placed fourteen inches lower, and so on.
Speaker 1: Thus gravity would aid the flow of chemicals from one
Speaker 1: down to the next, and the chemical inside was liquid cyclohexane,
Speaker 1: which was pressurized, heated, and then blasted with compressed air
Speaker 1: as it traveled through the vessel. The bosses at Nipro
Speaker 1: had high hopes for this part of the plant, but
Speaker 1: so far its operation was proving troublesome. Nightpro worker Dennis
Speaker 1: Lawrence confided to his wife that there had been leaks.
Speaker 1: She didn't like the sound of that and worried for
Speaker 1: his safety. Cyclohexane is, after all, an incredibly flammable liquid,
Speaker 1: and when it escape since the open air, it tends
Speaker 1: to vaporize, forming a deadly combustible cloud. Dennis, a part
Speaker 1: time firefighter, had told his wife that if the cyclohexane
Speaker 1: tanks ever went up, there'd be no hope for anyone
Speaker 1: on the site. The management was alive to these risks
Speaker 1: arriving workers were frisked for cigarettes, matches, and lighters, and
Speaker 1: the technicians who worked closest to the chemicals wore special
Speaker 1: shoes to reduce the risk of creating a spark. That said,
Speaker 1: it was feared that even someone shifting too quickly in
Speaker 1: a fashionable nylon shirt could produce enough static charge to
Speaker 1: ignite an explosion. Naturally, when a six foot long crack
Speaker 1: was discovered in the fifth of the six steel reactor
Speaker 1: vessels in March nineteen seventy four, the whole array was
Speaker 1: immediately closed down and allowed to cool off. It was
Speaker 1: swiftly decided that vessel five should be removed, but that
Speaker 1: a costly shutdown could be avoided if the remaining vessels
Speaker 1: were pressed back into service connected with a temporary pipe
Speaker 1: where reactor five should have been. This pipe would simply
Speaker 1: have to be designed and built on site. No one
Speaker 1: in authority thought this a reckless or hazardous decision. They
Speaker 1: were said to regard it as no more than a
Speaker 1: routine plumbing job. But unfortunately we don't always know what
Speaker 1: we don't know. A mechanical engineer might have told them
Speaker 1: that fabricating such a pipe was fraught with difficulties. But
Speaker 1: amongst all the newspaper ads for cooks and clerks and
Speaker 1: draftsmen to join the workforce at Flicksborough, there was also
Speaker 1: a situation's vacant notice for a mechanical engineer, and that
Speaker 1: position had yet to be filled. Cautionary tales were returned shortly.
Speaker 1: The plans for the temporary pipe were supposedly sketched out
Speaker 1: in chalk on the floor of the factory's workshop, and
Speaker 1: if that sounds worryingly cavalier, you haven't heard the half
Speaker 1: of it. The existing pipes carrying pressurized and scalding hot
Speaker 1: liquid cyclohexane from vessel to vessel measured twenty eight inches across,
Speaker 1: but no spare piping of that size could be found
Speaker 1: laying around the niproplant. Instead of delaying the repair to
Speaker 1: order some the handy length of twenty inch pipe was substituted,
Speaker 1: roughly half the capacity of the original. Pushing the cyclohexane
Speaker 1: from a broad pipe into a thinner one creates issues,
Speaker 1: but some rough calculations reassured the nyprobosses that the smaller
Speaker 1: pipe could take the strain. But the original twenty eight
Speaker 1: inch pipes ran straight and by removing React of five.
Speaker 1: The NPRO workers now needed its smaller replacement to accommodate
Speaker 1: the considerable drop in height from vessel four to vessel six,
Speaker 1: So they gave the new pipe a dog leg by
Speaker 1: welding two joints along its length. So now the pipe
Speaker 1: ran straight, drop down, ran straight, a bit more, drop
Speaker 1: down again, and then joined REACT to vessels six. If
Speaker 1: they'd consulted the relevant safety standards, the men putting these
Speaker 1: kinks in the pipe would have known that their welds
Speaker 1: weren't up to the task. For when you force a
Speaker 1: moving liquid to change direction, it puts extra strain on
Speaker 1: the points where your pipe bends. This is all bad,
Speaker 1: but we're still not finished. The forces acting on the
Speaker 1: pipe's two bends would also cause a so called turning moment,
Speaker 1: causing the metal work to shift and twist in worrying ways.
Speaker 1: To counteract these forces, you need to secure the whole
Speaker 1: structure firmly. But as they hoisted their replacement pipe into place,
Speaker 1: the n PRO workers perched it on some flimsy scaffolding poles.
Speaker 1: Each original pipe was fitted with a bellows joint, essentially
Speaker 1: a rubber section that could expand and move to help
Speaker 1: absorb some of the forces acting on the rigid metalwork.
Speaker 1: No one thought to ask the manufacturer of these rubber
Speaker 1: joints if they were strong enough to absorb the forces
Speaker 1: at play in this jerry rigged pipework. If the replacement
Speaker 1: pipe began to buck and squirm, would these bellows joints
Speaker 1: just split apart. A mechanical engineer would immediately have spotted
Speaker 1: all these dangers, but there wasn't one on site. A
Speaker 1: chemical engineer around the npro operation. He was no doubt
Speaker 1: highly trained in his own field, but such training was
Speaker 1: narrow back then and wouldn't have included even the most
Speaker 1: basic mechanical concepts. It was an electrical engineer who oversaw
Speaker 1: the repair crew, and he wasn't educated to degree level.
Speaker 1: And the workmen themselves can hardly have been expected to
Speaker 1: spot the flaws in the design lots more, they were
Speaker 1: working at breakneck speed to complete the job. The crack
Speaker 1: in Vessel five had been spotted on March the twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four. Once it had been lifted clear, the design,
Speaker 1: building and installation of the replacement pipe had taken just
Speaker 1: thirty hours. There followed a rather half hearted attempt to
Speaker 1: test the dog legged assembly, gas rather than liquid, was
Speaker 1: pushed into the pipe that pressures approximating the normal operation
Speaker 1: of the system. The normal operation mine no thought was
Speaker 1: given to an abnormal spike in pressure. The system, of course,
Speaker 1: had a safety valve to release pressure if such a
Speaker 1: spike became too much and threatened to burst the vessels
Speaker 1: and original pipes. The replacement pipe was never tested to
Speaker 1: see if it would fail before this safety valve kicked in.
Speaker 1: So on April Fools Day nineteen seventy four, just five
Speaker 1: days after the vessel cracked, Flicksburgh was back at work
Speaker 1: oxidizing highly flammable cyclohexane. The management and board of Nipro
Speaker 1: were no doubt delighted by this performance. The outward flow
Speaker 1: of capro lactum could resume, and so too could the
Speaker 1: inward flow of money. Whenever you centralize production, when you
Speaker 1: put all your eggs in one basket, as Nipro had,
Speaker 1: you can realize considerable gains, but this always comes with risk.
Speaker 1: In a recent episode of the new podcast Business History,
Speaker 1: host Jacob Goldin looked at the success of the American
Speaker 1: Airline Southwest. Southwest began as a budget regional carrier out
Speaker 1: of Texas, but It's no Frill's approach soon made it
Speaker 1: a major national airline, able to turn a profit each
Speaker 1: and every year for forty seven years. That's an unrivaled
Speaker 1: feat in the aviation world. One of the secrets to
Speaker 1: this success was standardization. While other airlines might have mixed
Speaker 1: fleets of Boeing seven or seven jumbo jets or Airbus
Speaker 1: A three eighties or smaller short haul aircraft, Southwest has
Speaker 1: only really ever operated the Boeing seven three seven. This
Speaker 1: made life much easier and cheaper for Southwest. Pilots, flight attendants,
Speaker 1: and ground crew only had to learn the foibles of
Speaker 1: a single aircraft type. Thus training time was reduced. When
Speaker 1: staff went circor planes broke down, substitutions were easier and
Speaker 1: flights could continue. But in twenty eighteen came the first
Speaker 1: of two deadly crashes involving a Boeing seven three seven Max.
Speaker 1: Neither flight was operated by Southwest, but the authorities grounded
Speaker 1: all aircraft of that type. Seven three seven Maxes made
Speaker 1: up a third of Southwest's fleet, a crippling blow to
Speaker 1: its operation that lost it nearly a billion dollars in revenue.
Speaker 1: So what you gain in savings can be lost in resilience.
Speaker 1: At Flicksborough, night Pro had discovered the risks of building
Speaker 1: one mega factory to make caprolactum. A single cracked reactor
Speaker 1: vessel had halted production, disappointing important customers and further delaying
Speaker 1: the day when the troubled plant would turn a profit.
Speaker 1: It's the wonder then, that a solution was hurriedly decided
Speaker 1: upon and a temporary fix the bodged together dog leg
Speaker 1: pipe installed. In fact, Nipro was so desperate to get
Speaker 1: back to work that the cause of the crack in
Speaker 1: Vessel five wasn't investigated, nor were the other vessels checked
Speaker 1: for the signs of any impending failure. So throughout April
Speaker 1: and May of nineteen seventy four, cyclohexane was driven through
Speaker 1: the oxidizing system without mishap. The temporary fix the bent
Speaker 1: pipe knocked up on site became permanent. The temporary fix
Speaker 1: was folly, but not seeking to upgrade it compounded that error.
Speaker 1: Look around your home or car or workplace, you might
Speaker 1: well see a fixture or appliance somewhere that broke and
Speaker 1: was quickly repaired in a less than ideal perhaps afraid
Speaker 1: electrical cable was wrapped up with adhesive tape, or an
Speaker 1: important office IT system that fell over and was brought
Speaker 1: back online with a temporary workaround for every complex problem,
Speaker 1: wrote the essayist hl Mencan. There is an answer that
Speaker 1: is clear, simple and wrong. Mencan had a point. So
Speaker 1: called band aid solutions are tempting, but in the long
Speaker 1: run can prove to be more damaging than the problems
Speaker 1: they were meant to solve. Take the example of patching
Speaker 1: up an IT system. You may get everyone in the
Speaker 1: office back up on their computers, but a rushed line
Speaker 1: of code, like a rotten brick in a wall, can
Speaker 1: make the whole edifice less sturdy, and a cheap fix
Speaker 1: often proves expensive in the longer term. Bodgies and band
Speaker 1: aids make it harder to maintain an IT network, then
Speaker 1: weeks or months down the line, a catastrophic outage destroys
Speaker 1: your business. It's the same at home. If you're ever
Speaker 1: tempted to wrap her frayed electric cable with some tape, don't.
Speaker 1: Here's the advice of the London Fire Brigade. Always replace
Speaker 1: faulty leads. Is it worth risking your loved ones? And
Speaker 1: your home for the sake of a few pounds. That's
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of advice Loduena Becker's father, who might
Speaker 1: have endorsed teenage Loduena and her four brothers remember were
Speaker 1: settling down at home on June the first, nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four to watch football on TV. Their dad, who was
Speaker 1: setting off for work at the night Pro plant, but
Speaker 1: paused because he noticed something amiss. Loduena doesn't recall what
Speaker 1: it was, a rattley door handle perhaps, or a loose
Speaker 1: paving stone, but she does remember her dad stopping immediately
Speaker 1: to put it right. He was always meticulous with keeping
Speaker 1: things in good working order, she said. The fix completed,
Speaker 1: who began his slightly delayed drive to Flicksborough and his
Speaker 1: plant for Who Becker's was Nightpro's general manager and the
Speaker 1: man who had green licked that dog legged pipe. Cautionary
Speaker 1: tales will be back in a moment. Dennis Lawrence was
Speaker 1: also on the afternoon shift at Nypro that sunny June Saturday.
Speaker 1: It was his term to supply refreshments, so he'd stop
Speaker 1: to pick up some tea and sugar. Dennis enjoyed the
Speaker 1: camaraderie of working in the plant's control room. At forty eight.
Speaker 1: He was older than the other lads, who called him Granddad,
Speaker 1: but he was a popular member of the team. Indeed,
Speaker 1: he was so avuncular that he had played Santa Claus
Speaker 1: at the staff party the previous Christmas. Dennis was in
Speaker 1: a particularly good mood that Summer's day. He had weathered
Speaker 1: some financial difficulties, but had just made the final repayment
Speaker 1: on his bankruptcy debts. He was in the clear at last.
Speaker 1: The control room was the brains of the plant and
Speaker 1: it never stopped making Capra. Lactam was a twenty four
Speaker 1: to seven business, but on a Saturday there was no
Speaker 1: need for nypros, draftsmen, clerks and cooks. Instead of three
Speaker 1: hundred workers, only around seventy people were working across the site.
Speaker 1: There were men in workshops, storehouses and laboratories dotted all
Speaker 1: over the estate. Thomas Cook's the security was on duty.
Speaker 1: A tanker truck driver had parked up at the factory too.
Speaker 1: A day or so earlier, several leaks had been detected
Speaker 1: in the five remaining reactor vessels. These leaks came and went,
Speaker 1: seeming to fix themselves. No inspection was made since the
Speaker 1: special spark proved tools needed to work so close to
Speaker 1: the flammable cyclohexane had been locked away and couldn't be accessed.
Speaker 1: In the control room, Dennis Lawrence was making the tea
Speaker 1: while his colleagues were diligently monitoring their dials and meters,
Speaker 1: keeping up the constant balancing act to maintain the right
Speaker 1: pressure and right temperature to convert cyclohexane into caprolactum. But
Speaker 1: things were much more relaxed in a workshop to the north.
Speaker 1: Instrument technician John Irvin hadn't had much to do since
Speaker 1: clocking on at three five PM was fast approaching, so
Speaker 1: he thought he'd start on his packed lunch of sandwiches
Speaker 1: before anyone could call to report a faulty gauge. It
Speaker 1: made scant progress when a noise boomed across the plant,
Speaker 1: followed by a whoosh like the approach of an express train.
Speaker 1: Through the workshop window, John could see men running into
Speaker 1: the control room while others left it with equal urgency.
Speaker 1: The technician put down his sandwich and made for the
Speaker 1: door to join those fleeing. The first boom John had
Speaker 1: heard was the temporary pipe between reactive vessels four and
Speaker 1: six breaking open. The woosh was pop cyclohexane, escaping into
Speaker 1: the air and forming a vast flammable cloud drifting across
Speaker 1: the chemical works. It was only a matter of time
Speaker 1: before cloud encountered a spark or flame. You see the
Speaker 1: explosion before you hear it, said John, A tsunami of
Speaker 1: flame coming towards me at great speed. That's when I screamed,
Speaker 1: and then there was a tremendous gust of wind, and
Speaker 1: I remember being lifted off the ground and then something
Speaker 1: hitting me on the head. When John regained consciousness, the
Speaker 1: workshop had collapsed on him. The ceiling was down, the
Speaker 1: walls punched in, windows shattered, and the contents of the
Speaker 1: room flung around. Fortunately, some sturdy workbenches had withstood the
Speaker 1: blast and sheltered the young technician from being crushed. They
Speaker 1: also offered him an escape route, a tunnel to exit
Speaker 1: the building. Thus began and a hellish journey. Every one
Speaker 1: of John's fingers had been broken, but on hands and
Speaker 1: lacerated knees, he crossed the glass and sharp rubble. I
Speaker 1: crawled and I was screaming, but I couldn't even hear
Speaker 1: my own screams. The blast had deafened John. That wasn't
Speaker 1: his most urgent problem, though, because the explosion also left
Speaker 1: him blinded. He scrabbled madly from room to room, eventually
Speaker 1: finding himself outside. He knew the layout of the plant,
Speaker 1: but now stumbled sightless through an unfamiliar landscape, repeatedly crashing
Speaker 1: into unexpected obstacles. Disoriented, John most feared plunging into an
Speaker 1: acid storage pit he knew was somewhere along his route. Miraculously,
Speaker 1: he negotiated the catwalk over the acid pool without tottering in.
Speaker 1: At that point, I got hopelessly lost, said John. I
Speaker 1: stood up a few times and waved my hands around
Speaker 1: and shouted for help. No one answered his cord. Blinded
Speaker 1: and surrounded by raging fires, a badly wounded technician slumped
Speaker 1: down in the rubble, defeated. I just thought I was
Speaker 1: going to die. John then felt a hand on his shoulder.
Speaker 1: On seeing the explosion, two off duty night pro workers
Speaker 1: had rushed to the plant, using a broken down door
Speaker 1: as a stretcher, and carried John to safety. A volunteer
Speaker 1: ambulance crew had also hurried the disaster, and without anesthetic,
Speaker 1: began to stitch up the worst of the many wounds
Speaker 1: across John's face. They managed to clean me up as
Speaker 1: best they could, said John, who assumed it was just
Speaker 1: the blood from these cuts that was obscuring his vision.
Speaker 1: His injuries would, however, prove to be life changing. Twenty
Speaker 1: two year old John Irvin would never see again. Five
Speaker 1: miles away, the family of Dennis Lawrence gazed dumbfounded towards
Speaker 1: the explosion. Had nypro really gone up? People were phoning
Speaker 1: up to say, that's exactly what had happened. Dennis's daughter
Speaker 1: was sure he'd be fine, But missus Lawrence had no illusions.
Speaker 1: Your dad isn't coming back, she said, calm as silence
Speaker 1: descended on the family home. She was right, and Dennis
Speaker 1: wasn't the only fatality. Thomas Crooks, the security guard, was dead.
Speaker 1: The visiting tanker driver dead too. Across the plant, twenty
Speaker 1: eight people had perished. The toll was heaviest in the
Speaker 1: control room where Dennis had worked. There were eighteen people
Speaker 1: in there. None of them survived, and lost with them
Speaker 1: were all the records of what happened leading up to
Speaker 1: the blast. It was estimated that the cyclo hexaane ignited
Speaker 1: with the force of around thirty tons of TNT easily
Speaker 1: the biggest peacetime explosion in British history. It's a miracle then,
Speaker 1: that no one beyond the factory goes was killed. When
Speaker 1: farmer Gordon Atkinson arrived home close to the plant, he
Speaker 1: found his mother shaken, but thankfully alive. It was like
Speaker 1: a ghost village, he said. There were curtains blowing out
Speaker 1: of broken windows, roofs lifted and set back wrong, fire
Speaker 1: raged on at night. Pro for ten full days, and
Speaker 1: specialist coal mine rescue teams were drafted in to recover
Speaker 1: the buried dead. Factory workers helped in this grim task,
Speaker 1: but were sent away for a cup of tea whenever
Speaker 1: the corpse of a colleague was uncovered. Nobody got counseling
Speaker 1: in those days, said one NCRO employee. He just had
Speaker 1: to grin and bear it and get on, and that's
Speaker 1: what we did. Questions immediately arose about the wisdom of
Speaker 1: Nypro building a cap prolactum megaplant. Stockpiling such vast quantities
Speaker 1: of chemicals on a single site undoubtedly resulted in the
Speaker 1: huge scale of the explosion. The shockwaves of the disaster
Speaker 1: spread far beyond rural Lincolnshire, with its sole caprolactum maker
Speaker 1: reduced to rubble, the already shaky UK economy tottered iiO
Speaker 1: Vast sums were wiped off the stock market as chemical companies,
Speaker 1: textile weavers and carpet makers faced a draft of raw materials.
Speaker 1: There was even a run on nylon stockings in the
Speaker 1: shops as consumers panic boart ahead of looming shortages and
Speaker 1: expected price rises. Hoobe Becker's, the general manager at Nipro,
Speaker 1: had missed the explosion by a few minutes thanks to
Speaker 1: a decision to stop for a little bit of DIY
Speaker 1: before leaving home. He now set about defending the safety
Speaker 1: culture at his plant, likening it to the stringent procedures
Speaker 1: observed at say, a nuclear power plant. When a court
Speaker 1: of inquiry was convened, Hoop gave detailed evidence and supplied
Speaker 1: copious notes about the decision to replace reactor Vessel five
Speaker 1: with a temporary pipe. He argued that all necessary protocols
Speaker 1: had been followed. The inquiry, though hampered by the total
Speaker 1: destruction of data from the control room, concluded that there
Speaker 1: had been a litany of errors in the design, construction
Speaker 1: and installation of that pipe. The integrity of a well
Speaker 1: designed and constructed plant was thereby destroyed redits report. In
Speaker 1: other words, a cheap band aid solution had devastated a
Speaker 1: multi million pound operation, claiming many lives in the process.
Speaker 1: No one faced prosecution for the blast. Health and safety
Speaker 1: legislation was still being debated in Britain's Parliament, but the
Speaker 1: night pro blast informed the formulation of these new laws. Henceforth,
Speaker 1: no one could install such a flimsy pipe and still
Speaker 1: claim they'd followed the rules. The Flicksburgh plant was rebuilt,
Speaker 1: this time with greater attention to safety and survivability. The
Speaker 1: control room, for example, would be placed further from danger
Speaker 1: and built to withstand any future explosion, and the new boss,
Speaker 1: same as the old boss. Hooper Becker's stayed on as
Speaker 1: the general manager, and his family remained in the area.
Speaker 1: His teenage daughter Luduena enrolled in the local college. Walking
Speaker 1: into the common room, she noticed another student in a
Speaker 1: T shirt. One of his arms was extremely scarred, she
Speaker 1: remembers from his hand right up to the sleeve. Loudweena
Speaker 1: asked the boy what had happened. His reply was simple
Speaker 1: and direct. Your dad's factory did that. For a full
Speaker 1: list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford
Speaker 1: dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford
Speaker 1: with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
Speaker 1: by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
Speaker 1: original music of the work of Pascal wise Bender. Dafhaffrey
Speaker 1: edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible
Speaker 1: without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like
Speaker 1: the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It
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Speaker 1: A t R e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club.
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