» Lurid Work Stories

Hot Steel Suicide
My first real job after school was as an apprentice in a steel factory in South Africa. The process could be roughly divided in to four parts: smelting of iron in blast furnaces, conversion to steel in the steel mill (basic oxygen process), casting in to rough shape, and finally forging or rolling in to the final shape. The iron was transported to the steel mill in huge open pots which crusted over in transit, but the product of the steel mill was pure molten steel, moved around by crane in open pots which didn't crust over. Sometimes large drops of molten steel would fall in to puddles of rainwater (the roof leaked), and it went off like a bomb, shaking the whole building.

You can probably guess where this is going: the story I was told was about a worker who committed suicide by jumping, from a significant height, in to an open pot of molten steel. One counter-intuitive point to note is that molten steel is still steel, nearly 7x as dense as water: the result being that (even at high impact velocity) packages of meat and water don't go "splash", or even "splot", they just go "thud" and float on top.

I don't believe anyone stopped to check whether he survived the actual fall, given that he was soon melting / burning / disintegrating at temperatures exceeding 1500°C. The worst part? That whole vat of steel was contaminated and had to be recycled, costing thousands of Rand.
(Sat 7th Sep 2013, 19:38, More)

» Lurid Work Stories

Another Shocking Tale
This is one that should be told as a Lurid Work Story, but it's no myth: it happened about a week before I started at the company in question. I saw the scars, both physical and emotional, on the people who worked there.

As part of the apprenticeship I mentioned in "Hot Steel Suicide", in South Africa, I was seconded to other parts of the company, and this was the last such secondment, to a subsidiary on a different site. This was a company which used massive arc furnaces to smelt metals to produce specialised alloys. When all the furnaces were going at full whack - which was most of the time - the place used as much electric power as a medium-sized town (they said).

Slightly techie bit: the electricity comes in via 33kV (high voltage) lines, and is fed in to massive transformers (bigger than shipping containers) where it is stepped down to a much lower voltage (200-300V) but at a MUCH higher current. A 220V kettle draws around 9 amps, but the current going to each furnace was measured in hundreds of kiloamps, with solid steel beams as conductors (basically). The transformer power handling capacity was measured in megawatts (MW), and occasionally one would blow up spectacularly (but safely, since they were away from people).

So here's the scene: a furnace is offline, and a team needs to work on top of a transformer. They have safety procedures, and so the high voltage side is isolated, tested, and tested again. No-one's going to get shocked today. You'd think.

The problem was this: a welder, with an electric arc welding machine, is fixing a flaw on the low voltage side - those massive steel conductors I mentioned. And those are still connected to the transformer. So the low voltage from the welder gets stepped *up* to a high voltage, which is then fed in to the people working on top of the transformer. The current was fairly low, but it doesn't take much current to hurt people. One was killed, and three more suffered burns and injuries by falling off, including the supervisor.

I guess that's how safety procedures evolve: by trial and error. It did cast a shadow on my time there, made worse by my immediate boss having severe health problems and dying of cancer not long after I left. That and the sheer filth of the place. They actually hired me after my apprenticeship was over, but I lasted only a couple of years before I said "sod it" returned to the UK.
(Sat 7th Sep 2013, 20:35, More)