9. Local Heritage
Officially a part of Pontypool, but with its own identity, New Inn straddles the old road from Newport to Pontypool. The community, or “village” as it’s commonly know as, is a triangular region whose inner frame is formed by the road, the river Afon Llwyd, and the Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal. These delineating features have helped New Inn to retain a character and that character is reinforced by traditional institutions such as the village hall, which was our rallying point in the campaign against Rechem. The sign on the building actually reads Panteg Public Hall because the name Panteg signifies New Inn’s inclusion in the larger district that also embraces Griffithstown and Sebastapol across the railway line. The word Public on the hall tells of more than its purpose, for it relates to the founding of the building from donations made by the local public.
At the roundabout the alongside ReChem, the river bends and the village rises to the north east in the windward direction from the incinerator site. On more level ground, the turbulent, tree-lined Afon Llwyd runs parallel with the service road of the industrial estate situated at the plant’s eastern boundary. Across that road from ReChem, on the village’s side of the river, a flat paddock stretches to the Caldicott family’s home before the land rises along a quaint row of tiny terraced houses towards the “New Inn” public house.At the edge of a field between the pub and the Rechem, the Caldicott’s renovated farmhouse has a stone inscribed “Pontyvelin House 1889”, spelt with a v, yet The incinerator sits alongside the modern, same sounding, yet more politically correct Pontyfelin Road, where its f makes the v-sound in Welsh. One explanation of why the older inscription should have the anglicised v is simply the incidence of carving carelessness at a time when the Welsh language was on the wane. The name means something like Bridge over the Mill, which may have referred to a mill on the Afon Llwyd, the Grey River. That title is thought to have arisen long before the water was discoloured by the effluent of the iron and coal industries, which stretched down the Eastern Valley from Blaenavon to Pontypool. The name makes some sense now, but it’s too kind to the colour of the 1960’s, when I sometimes played football in Pontypool Park and when the water looked like liquid coal. Prior to the Industrial Revolution there was an earlier name and it was a fitting description for the remarkably well-restored modern river. The clear, tumbling torrent flowing down through the valley was originally called the “Torfaen”, which has become the official name of the local government district.Torfaen means Breaker of Rocks and, coincidentally, west of the river above Griffithstown stands the end of a 5-mile ridge that peaks at the 1500 feet Mynydd Maen or Stone Mountain. Poking up at the other end of the ridge is Twmbarlwm, a prominent bulge on the site of an old hill fort also said to be a former burial mound.It was this long mountain ridge overlooking the river that provided the backdrop for my sightings from home, of smoke as it rose from the incinerator in the valley.
Before toxic waste came to my attention, my only previous connection with New Inn was as a young lad on a train-spotting mission. I once went to the station in Pontypool Road after hearing from friends that I might see steam locomotives of a type never encountered in Newport. As well as the significant station buildings there was a large junction at the southern end of the line where some engines turned around. This haven for trainspotters buzzed with activity. I got what I went for when, on the intertwining tracks set aside for the exchange of locomotives, I spotted a big one from the Midland Region and I caught the bus back home a happy boy. Not far away, in Griffithstown, there was a goods shed of the Great Western Railway. After a recent period as a railway museum it still stands, befittingly, near the 1880 birthplace of the national rail trade union ASLEF. The railway museum was founded by a local man, Martin Fay, who before that time had a Rechem connection that was vital to me. In my probing, soon after I became interested in the incinerator in 1984, I sought contact with Martin. I was told he was an ex-employee of the company who might be willing to talk, so I traced him to his home in Cwmbran and we spent many evenings together sketching the plant and writing descriptions of the processes and chemicals. Martin was in a good position to be informative, having worked on the incinerator itself and having served on ReChem’s Health and Safety Committee.The downside of the acquisition of my new knowledge was that some of Martin’s accounts of practices and incidents would have been so politically explosive that I knew they would be impossible to utilise.
Martin described a procedure for preparing a PCB-containing electrical capacitor for the furnace. To expose its ingredients to air in the incinerator, it was common for the capacitor to first be pierced manually with a steel pick. I already had concerns about the loading and burning of such objects, but I’d been completely unaware of the primitive preparation process Martin described. He also had concerns about the unreliability of chemical sludge burning and the variability of furnace temperature. He felt that the support fuel used was not always of the quality needed to quickly reverse any sudden fall in furnace temperature. In an emergency, when temperature dipped too far, the supply of any pipe-fed liquid PCB waste could be shut-off, but PCB-containing solid objects remained on the hearth. To reinforce his concerns about combustion efficiency, Martin described capacitors that were still intact being removed from the incinerator for transport to the local landfill. He also spoke of being engulfed in flames when on a fork-truck facing furnace blow-backs. He told me of an employee who, through an accident with acid, lost an eye. Martin himself went to hospital with a maintenance fitter who had been burned when trying to correct a support fuel burner. Martin told me: “He was doing something with T3 burner. There was a blast which blew him off the burner platform. He suffered burns to his hands, arm and face.” Among other incidents described in our discussions was one when an operative was hospitalised after being overcome by fumes from a substance known as RM17 Fish Toxic. He added that a sealed Ciba Geigy drum exploded in the incinerator, a PCB capacitor exploded when the furnace door was open and showered the area with hot metal and on one occasion the burning of chemical slurry sent flames out of the top of the 180 foot stack. Martin’s other recollections included:
You wouldn’t always know the contents of a drum. A consignment of gas cylinders, in a drum, had somehow been covered with other waste. As I tipped the drum into the incinerator I noticed the bottles coming out. I got away fast . . . A job which was supposed to have been paint waste appeared rubbery when poked with a stick to test it. The stick test was a common test, as was slapping the sides of the drum. We had loaded about four of the drums, using the extended forks, after testing each one. The next drum was tested and appeared to be the same. However, when tipped into the incinerator it reacted violently with black smoke first pouring out of the door, then out of the stack. I seem to remember the job number was 7701, from Sakab in Sweden. After chemical analysis of the remaining drums it turned out to be different from what we had expected and contained a high concentration of chlorine. . . . We burned five-gallon drums with the radioactive warning symbol . . . . TDI (Toluene di-isocyanate) had proved problematic through the special liquids system, since it was prone to reacting and clogging up the pipes, burner and pumps. We would drain about half the liquid into a steel tray which we called a coffin. The draining was done by laying each end against the coffin and holing each end with a pick. The liquid which came out would be loaded into the incinerator, with a truck, still in the coffin, on the extended forks. We would then cut the top of the half-full drum with an air chisel and load the drum into the incinerator with the grabs (a drum with the top off was not easy to handle with the grabs as it was a bit flexible). Drums sometimes dropped onto the floor, outside the incinerator, spilling their contents. . . T.D.I. drums weren’t the only drums which caused fires by dropping from the grabs. The liquid in the coffin would frequently slop over the sides of the coffin, because of the uneven road up to the incinerator (Cell one) with spectacular results . . . the liquid in the coffin sometimes ignited before it was fully in the incinerator. As for the drums they were prone to igniting while being positioned in cell one . . . Some parts of the capacitors and transformers were valuable as scrap metal, as long as contamination was ignored . . . we did a number of deals with a local scrap merchant . . . we had ReChem’s own van full of burnt-out drums packed with copper cores from transformers. . . Another time, in getting the copper out of a transformer, so much PCB fluid leaked out that we were wading through it . . . When the inspectors came around for test burns we would use plenty of support fuel, but once they had gone we used less, again. The same type of thing happened when we had a visit from the University of Loughborough for the filming of the burning of PCB capacitors. These types of people did not see typical burning . . . the dampers at the base of the stack -these had been bolted, so they would not close. When the computer shows they should be closed, they remained open. I believe the reason was to avoid blowbacks, by allowing pressurisations to go up the stack . . . sometimes the support fuel contained water and this caused a sudden drop in temperature . . . The number of occasions I observed black smoke coming from the stack is certainly more than a hundred, just to put a figure on it. It happened almost every shift, for many reasons. Sometimes it would persist for a long time, particularly at night. On numerous occasions I saw pink smoke and occasionally other colours.
Whilst with Martin, I took the opportunity to check-out some bizarre rumours I’d heard about the incineration plant. He fleshed them out with descriptions like this:
In the summer of 1983 a lorry dumped zoological waste, according to the slip, at the door of the incinerator. There were countless guinea pigs or rats. The stink was appalling and there were huge maggots everywhere - and there was what seemed like dogs legs covered in horrid yellowy-green slime . . . I have seen blood and guts and what looked like amputations from hospitals. Also bags of hypodermic needles . . . On one occasion a van driver dumped some bags containing clothes which had come from the Royal Gwent Hospital. Apparently a man with an extremely rare disease had come into the country and his clothes had to be burned. It could have been Green Monkey disease . . . we incinerated dead zoo animals. It was a joke amongst incinerator operators that you could find a camels head or a crocodile in the incinerator. . .
Despite his concerns, Martin was keen to say that things were improving when he left in 1983 and he spoke highly of the safety consciousness of one particular shift supervisor, Brian Hancock. Having already studied it with binoculars from outside the fence, I wasn’t surprised by Martin’s accounts of working on the incinerator. Before that I had already concluded that there were too many uncontrollable variables in the plant's processes, that there was frequent reliance on manual intervention and an over-reliance on personal judgement. Specifically, I felt there were inherent difficulties in the identification of the composition of certain wastes; in coping with the vast repertoire of chemicals burned; in the different physical forms of the materials; in the limitations of the control systems and in the exposure of the surrounding environment to failures in the process. Martin wasn’t afraid to meet the media but even at that time, before the fear of ReChem at its height, most of his tales were too hot to handle and they remained unpublicised. I could do no more than become the custodian of his accounts, believing that their only value lay in the insight they gave me for my probing. Through the years I kept in touch with Martin, not realising that there would come a time when I would be ask him to turn his stories into an affidavit for use in my defence against Rechem’s writ.
Campaigning against Rechem originated as a reaction to the planning application in 1972 and there were protests when the burning of the cocktails of hazardous chemicals began in Pontypool in 1974. To the old Monmouth District Council, Rechem gave all the required assurances, dispelling fears of danger and dismissing concerns over forms of nuisance such as smell or smoke. When the operation of the incinerator exposed the flaws in those promises, neighbours living in the lower part of New Inn, including John Williams and a Sergeant Rossiter, formed an action group. They were joined by local mini-market owner Derek Craxford when he moved into his new home in Jerusalem Lane less than a mile downwind from ReChem. On Wednesday 29th October 1975 Derek was elected Chairman of a formally constituted Panteg Environmental Protection Association, or PEPA, and on November 26th PEPA staged the first in a long line of public meetings. When I appeared on the scene, 10 years after ReChem’s beginnings, Derek helped bring me up to speed by handing me his early records. Other prominent PEPA members including Maldwyn Osborne, Edna Pugh, and Gordon Bates were also important sources of information and advice for me. The records I acquired from Derek told of his home being invaded by black smoke and of his complaining in vain to councillors, to the local authority and to the Welsh Office. From the old records, I could see that after going through the normal channels, the group lost confidence in the capability of the regulators and embarked on an independent course of action. All hopes were then placed on pursuing ReChem through the court, by means of a private civil action.
In that action, the onus was on P.E.P.A. to prove that the ReChem plant was doing something wrong. The PEPA committee undertook monitoring of the emissions, set up a complaints register and did a survey of public perceptions in the lower half of village. They were advised of the difficulty in proving a causal link between the incinerator and health problems, but were told they might be able to pin ReChem down on a charge of causing a public nuisance.Thus the group then applied to the Attorney General for consent to take ReChem International Limited to the High Court, following which action was served against the company on 31st October 1978. A lot of money was needed to fund the action and enormous efforts went into raising it. Fund raising activities included coffee mornings, lottery, bingo, whist drives and fetes. Paradoxically, as fundraising efforts spread through the community, people weren’t complaining about ReChem enough. It’s possible that most were confident that PEPA would solve the problems and indeed, in the year the legal action was launched, the group did thwart plans for Kepone imports from the United States, setting a precedent for successfully protesting against imported waste.
The legal route the campaign took had been determined at a public meeting on 20th April 1978 and it was based on the advice of a leading London barrister. In his view there was a prima facie case that ReChem’s emissions constituted both a private and a public nuisance actionable by the Attorney General. PEPA were advised to apply for an injunction to restrain the nuisance. In justifying his opinion on private nuisance the barrister leaned heavily on the standard for interference and annoyance set in the 1851 case of Walter v Selfe and described as:
An inconvenience materially interfering with the ordinary comfort physically of human existence not merely according to elegant and dainty modes and habits of living but according to plain and sober and simple notions among the English people.
Notably, in this concept of nuisance showed it was not necessary to prove injury to health. The barrister’s analysis also quoted the case of Rapier v London Tramways in 1893 over the smell from the stables of tram horses, where it was said that it was no defence to claim that all reasonable care had been taken to prevent the smell. There was also reference to a 1913 action over the smell from a fried fish shop and there were several other fascinating cases, but all far removed from a commercial chemical waste incineration plant.For formal evidence of the alleged nuisance caused by the plant, PEPA conducted a survey in the autumn of 1978, in which 384 households in the affected area were visited. Some 78% of witnesses claimed to have been affected by emissions from ReChem, with 44% suffering physical symptoms. The files passed on to me contained a good selection of miscellaneous written records from individuals together with P.E.P.A.’s own register of complaints. One description of fumes and deposits on land came from Troestra farm, Glascoed, miles away from the incinerator. Closer to the plant, New Inn residents told of the need to keep windows closed, of being unable to sit in the garden, of children having to stay indoors, of fumes causing sore throats and painful eyes and of feeling ill or even vomiting from the smell. The recurring descriptions of thick clouds of black smoke were punctuated with observations of other colours in the incinerators emissions. The testimonies appeared to support the barrister’s view that: “A public nuisance at common law is an act or omission which materially affects the reasonable comfort and convenience of life of a class of her Majesty’s subjects”. He argued that the neighbourhood contained enough affected people to be regarded as “a class” of her Majesty’s subjects who suffered collectively.He even suggested alternatives to a private action, suggesting that the 1936 Public Health Act gave powers to the Local Authority to serve an abatement notice authorized by the court, for statutory nuisance. He said that another theoretical possibility was a summons consequent to the Clean Air Act 1956 and the Public Health Act 1936, which could be heard before a magistrate’s court and where success could mean complete closure of the plant rather than the lesser severe penalties applicable for nuisance under the 1936 Public Health Act. Ultimately, the direction taken was somewhat different and meant that detailed witness statements would be combined to form what was termed a Relator Action, to be taken out in the name of P.E.P.A.’s chairman.The aim of this action would be to secure an injunction preventing emissions from the incinerator and the associated writ was served on 31st October 1978 in Derek Craxford’s name.
Further fund raising followed, with more bingo, Pontnewydd Male Choir, Barn Dancing, Sports and Fetes, dancing to Olga and Roy, a Spanish night, a Disco, a mystery rail trip, a custom Car Rally and a Christmas Bazaar for which housebound Vi Baker knitted 20 pairs of socks. Following the raising of £3,000 in two months of the summer of 1978, and after Maldwyn Osborne became secretary, the kitty grew to £12,000 over the following two years. In addition to the cash income, some individuals gave pledges of money for the fighting fund, in case it should be needed in the future.
Rechem’s defence, issued on 20th Jan 1979 against Writ 1978 H No 334 brought by “Her Majesty’s Attorney General at and by the Relation of Derek John Craxford”, emphasised the plant’s lawful operation under the 1974 Control of Pollution Act. The company acknowledged the emission of smoke and steam from time to time but denied that the emissions were noxious, unhealthy or offensive and said the emissions did not constitute a nuisance. The company claimed that it was not their emissions that caused windows to be closed, or created deposits on property. ReChem denied that any fears or anxieties need be related to occurrences at the plant, viewed the alleged complaints as unjustified and added that other local industries should be blamed for atmospheric pollution. In the uncompromising head-to-head contest, P.E.P.A. quickly came to recognise ReChem’s high level of immunity. Eventually, disheartening legal advice reflected diminishing prospects of success for P.E.P.A. and what had appeared to be a reasonable initiative by the group ran into the buffers. A disheartened but still determined P.E.P.A. continued campaigning against Rechem after the legal action was halted in 1980.
When I first entered the controversy in 1984 I was unaware of the former protests and I only became interested through seeing ReChem’s chimney stack at work. After I had grown out of trainspotting, for a many years I had no reason to travel north up the Eastern Valley but I eventually broke my schooldays boycott of rugby and sometimes I would pass-by the plant to play for Caerleon against teams in Pontypool and beyond. The stack, especially when smoking, was unmissable on the road north but I remained ignorant of its purpose and unaware of any controversy around it. This all changed when I left my job in industry to train for teaching.
Since the region had been associated old dirty industries, the placing of a furnace in Pontypool was somehow in keeping with tradition. Pontypool’s history of fire goes back to the early fifteenth century. Through the name of Hanbury, which is embedded in the locality, the region once pioneered the rolling of sheet iron for which furnaces were a prerequisite. Clinging on to that heritage, to the south-west of ReChem and with origins 100 years before the incinerator, the medium-sized Panteg steelworks retained the valley’s fiery heritage. In 1789 the term “state of the art” would have truly applied to the technology at the same valley’s world-famous ironworks furnaces in Blaenavon and Centuries later ReChem boasted about the “state of the art” incineration that actually incorporated the old open-hearth principle of bygone days.
Down the road, iron and steel had also been prominent in the town of Newport and the industry still flourished, not least when the giant Spencer Steelworks came to the Llanwern site in 1962. Therefore, when I left school, there was a good chance that a local boy would end up working with metal - and I did.I first made a vocational misjudgement, which meant a brief spell as a trainee accountant in a steelworks not far from Llanwern. I went to Lysaghts Orb Works out in the main industrial area of Newport and, complete with its own shipping wharf, it stretched about a mile along the eastern Bank of the river Usk. When I worked there I knew about the end use of much of the electrical steel made there, but I didn’t know about its link with PCBs.Also in Newport’s industrial area, and just down the road from the steelworks, lay the smelly factory of Monsanto Chemicals. At the time I had no idea about that chemical plant’s role in PCB production and I didn’t know how the products of two quite different adjacent factories would eventually be united in my adventure in toxic waste.
Lysaght’s Orb steelworks had two halves, the old and the new. The more modern section of the factory had high speed reversing mills for rolling thin, wide steel strip in large coils weighing many tonnes each. There were continuous annealing lines, some machinery for slicing the steel to width and other machinery for cutting it to length. The degree of automation meant that people were thinly scattered in this section of the steelworks in which there was a tangible sense of organisation and everything seemed to flow smoothly. In contrast, the older, original part of Lysaghts steelworks was separated by a short walk that seemed to go into a different century. Dickensian darkness was interrupted by the flaring from open furnaces. Chaotic banging and clattering came from rows of small rolling mills that were fed manually with pieces of red hot steel held in tongs. Instead of automation, manual strength was manifest and people were plentiful.Fumes rose from acid pits in the floor and everywhere men were moving metal at close quarters.“Heaver-over” and “Catcher” were amongst the literal job titles of the men on the mills and the hot bars of steel were repeatedly rolled down to make sandwiches of thin sheets called packs.A pack would end up as one large layered chunk and then individual sheets would need to be separated in the most arduous job of all. The separating job was done in a spacious area where the door-sized sandwiches of steel, held strenuously in tongs, were flailed through the air and thrashed onto the floor, in violent attempts to tear the pack apart. It was hard, hot work that produced a great demand for fluids, sometimes from the site’s “wet” canteen. This split personality steelworks formed a snapshot of high-tech versus low-tech and when I first looked at the workings of ReChem’s Pontypool plant I was reminded more of the ancient than of the modern aspects of my first images of industry.
In school I’d scraped through enough ‘O-levels’ to become a trainee accountant. It was a random choice as I really didn’t know what I wanted to do apart from the fading dreams of professional football or motorcycle road-racing. During my six months at Lysaghts I studied accountancy through a correspondence course and I found it deadly. However, many of the daily duties at work had little to do with accountancy because most of my work was in the production control office, with about 20 or 30 others. We sat very formally at our desks in rows facing the boss and speaking only when work demanded it.The daily grind in the office was almost as bad as the accountancy course I tackled every evening, but at least I considered myself lucky that my work in the day wasn’t concerned with balancing books. I mostly dealt with the raw steel supplies for the works and with the finished steel leaving the works. The final product was steel for use in electrical applications, including laminations in PCB containing transformers. Little did I know that I was dealing with the steel destined to become a companion to Monsanto’s PCBs and that the transformers would become entwined in my legal defence and crucial to my confidence.