10 Smoke Signals
The short taste of life on the factory floor drew me into a more appropriate job at an even bigger factory, this time making aluminium. My new job was at Alcan in Rogerstone, on a site with origins in iron and also with old and new production environments. Alcan employed around 2000 people when I went there in 1965 and it was even bigger than Lysaght’s steelworks. The factory ran for a couple of miles along the River Ebbw, with its twelve-foot wide hot mill rolling aluminium for ocean liners and aircraft and acclaimed as the best in Europe. An extrusion press, with 7,500 tonnes of force, squeezed heated aluminium into long sections for yacht masts and helicopter rotor blades. And for me, there was the most striking, most un-natural, most ugly but most beautiful machine: the Davy-Loewy stretcher, whose purpose was to pull the life out of massive strong-alloy plates, to flatten them and relieve their stresses ready for machining or fabricating. Above the subterranean world housing the enormous body of the beast, two huge jaws stood above the ground, like the mouths of giant bulldogs ready to bite the vast plates of world-beating proportions. If a plate snapped when being stretched, the shockwaves released generated a minor earthquake that could be felt in distant offices. The production processes at Alcan were supported by quality control facilities which themselves amounted to a good-sized industrial enterprise. Separate departments tested the aluminium for its mechanical properties, its chemical composition and its microscopic metallurgical characteristics.Alcan’s distinctive lorries were kings of the road in their blue and silver livery, always the height of fashion and gleaming. There were dozens of Alcan plants and offices throughout the world and with the company’s international aura, its technological prowess and futuristic ambitions I found myself in a stimulating environment. Having binned my accountancy course I quickly settled into a new job that was closer to the heart of the action and during seventeen years in aluminium I eagerly absorbed the commercial, the practical and the scientific aspects of industry.
As much as I enjoyed my work it didn’t allow much time for two young children and by 1982 I’d decided it was time for a change. With a teacher-training college in Caerleon on my doorstep I joined a course to teach science and mathematics and as the pace of life after industry slowed down I was able to take in more of what was going on around me. When rising early for a long day ahead at work, my routine had been to walk straight past my bedroom window after getting up. Now with time to stand and stare out of the window, when a long period of fine weather arrived early in the May of 1984, on one glorious morning I could hardly believe my eyes. Stretching for miles down the valley and even covering outlying areas of Newport in the South, there was a dark foundation for the clear blue sky above. The layer extended from ground level to its flat ceiling a few hundred metres high. The visual impact was striking and very different from that of normal mist or haze. My first thought was that there had been some large fire overnight, but whatever the source of the dark layer, I knew that I was viewing a two-tone illustration of atmospheric temperature inversion, where a cap of clear, warmer air prevented the rise of the smoke trapped in the cool air below.People enveloped in that opaque layer in the valley would have been unaware of the contrast that was visible to me from afar. In Pill during the 1950’s a similar dark shroud would have been a common occurrence. I remembered being inside the smog from coal burning fires, but I’d never before been outside the smog looking in on it and this time it wasn’t coming from domestic fires.The spectacular sight was repeated on still summer mornings and not many days passed before, at the northern end of the dark layer, I noticed a thick black plume rising and churning in the sky. A nearby hill tantalisingly blocked my view to the source of the plume, so before going to college I drove through local lanes to a point where I could see the smoke’s birthplace. What a sight! The incinerator stack of ReChem at full throttle. The volume, density, speed and turbulence of the smoke coming out of the top was shocking, without even considering what those emissions might contain, and so I soon set about making enquiries. My first calls were to the local authority, to the Air Pollution Inspectorate and to the company itself. I was alarmed with my findings.
Having always been on the look-out for interesting things to study, when I was in industry and when the Open University was in its infancy I was attracted to its course entitled “Science and Religious Belief, from Copernicus to Darwin”. The pleasure I found studying with the OU lured me into a degree which included chemistry and thermodynamics. Those studies helped sow my seeds of doubt over the proficiency of the Pontypool process. Prior to the Open University, my education had benefited from Alcan’s generosity and the company’s faith in me. At first my training included business education by day-release from work but I also pursued Economics and Pure Maths at night school, where I fell in love with Mathematics and was hooked for life.
When at Alcan, amongst the activities that came under my wing were the furnaces and chemical processes that ended up being so influential in my judgement of ReChem and its toxic waste. However, it was the array of old mechanical power presses that provided the strongest conceptual background for my campaigning about the Pontypool incineration process.The presses stamped aluminium discs, ready for the manufacture of cooking utensils, at up to 180 per minute and in the millions per month. I compared the regulation of ReChem with the standards of control set in the 1965 Power Press Regulations, which were introduced to save thousands of amputations every year.
The 1965 regulations required every working press to be inspected during the first four hours of a shift and then to be certified by a registered “competent person” as being in compliance with all aspects of the regulations. The system wasn’t watertight, but it seemed sensible and the number of amputations plummeted. My shift foremen would normally inspect and certify the presses, but I would step in if a foreman was absent. One Tuesday afternoon I needed to do just that, but forgot, when in a rush to get home for Caerleon Rugby Club’s training session. I arrived home after six and was preparing my kit when there was a call from work. Six o’ clock was four hours into the 2-10 shift, the period of grace had run out and the presses were at a standstill. I had no alternative but to drive back to Rogerstone and inspect the presses before returning, late, to rugby training. There was no wriggle-room in the process of inspection and certification.
After I had made my initial enquiries about the Pontypool incineration plant, the rigour of the Power Press Regulations and my strong upbringing in Health and Safety contrasted with what I imagined might be happening in toxic waste incineration. When first asking questions about ReChem’s process I’d been away from Alcan for nearly two years but I recalled my last, untypical, visit from a Factory Inspector shortly after Margaret Thatcher came to power. The 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act had been a revolution, but it had not been well-received by Britain’s entire industrial establishment, from which there were cries about state interference and over-regulation.Under the new rules, I feared that one particular machine would one day be my nemesis. That bane of my life was a big, fast, aluminium strip slitting machine that used rotating discs to slice swiftly-unwinding 5-tonne coils of strip into narrower strands.The well guarded discs, called knives, weren’t a problem, but the spinning mandrel for re-coiling the speeding, sharp-edged aluminium strip was too exposed for my liking. It was a potential killer and I’d failed to find a way to make the machine work productively whilst preventing human access to the danger-area. I’d visited other factories, including the Panteg Steelworks near ReChem’s incinerator, to investigate coil rewinding safeguards, but nothing was suitable for our process. Simply relying on the vigilance of skilled and sensible operators, like Gordon Anthony and Tommy Lewis, was unsatisfactory and was a constant concern for me. As a reality check, the word “prison” had been mentioned to me by one of Her Majesty’s Factory Inspectors and in the dying days of the Labour Government I’d been sternly warned about the need to improve the slitter’s safety. I believe Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory saved my bacon, for soon after that I noticed a difference in inspections.
The last factory inspector I saw in my life walked with me along the gangway in the production bay where the big slitter was slashing away to our right. As we approached the machine the inspector purposefully looked left and continued to do so until the slitter was gone. He didn’t notice my relief.That incident alone wouldn’t have been convincing but I’d also been working on a project, with engineer Bob Marsh, to improve the stability of narrow aluminium coils standing five feet high, with no support, in their storage areas. They were susceptible to a knock from an overhead crane or from a fork truck accessing the coils. A toppling coil of a tonne or so had already crushed one man’s leg. We’d made a lot of progress and were continuing to invest in improvements to the storage facilities, but we hadn't yet done enough. Still walking beside the factory inspector, I sighed with relief again when he serenely moved past the coil storage area. If my memory serves me correctly, the main item of interest for Her Majesty’s unusually congenial visitor on that day was the tie worn by George Crabb who operated a small packing-paper cutting machine. The inspector feared that George’s tie could get caught up in the mechanism. The problem was easily solved, though the newly open-necked George, who was a dignified man, wasn’t happy with dressing-down he’d received about his over-dressing. That single, simple problem stood out in an otherwise uneventful visit that ended amicably with coffee in my office. There was no return to the threatening talk of previous factory inspectors and in the passing of time I wasn’t alone in forming the opinion that the government’s new attitude towards regulation had resulted in a slackening of controls. The relaxation helped me to get decades of highly dangerous deposits removed from sumps under chemical treatment tanks, although fearing for the poorly kitted out sub-contractors who came in on the tide of deregulation and worked in ignorance. This new political position on regulation came to be a factor in my assessment of controls on our local incinerator and certainly influenced my decision to act in 1984.
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