Flixborough: The Factory that was Wiped off the Map

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Speaker 4 In the episode you're about to hear, I mentioned the new podcast, Business History. And I thought you might want to hear a bit more about it.

Speaker 4 Business History is hosted by two podcasting legends, Robert Smith and Jacob Goldstein.

Speaker 4 Robert and Jacob tell the stories behind famous companies and iconic products and chart financial booms and bursting bubbles.

Speaker 4 And, as they say in Hollywood, this new show comes from the producers of Cautionary Tales.

Speaker 4 Listen to Business History wherever you get your podcasts, or search Business History Podcast on YouTube to see it in video form.

Speaker 2 Lincolnshire, on the east coast of of England. Sparsely populated and largely rural, few great moments of history have been made here.
Large towns are also few.

Speaker 2 The people tend to live in small villages, engaged in such bucolic activities as potato farming and pig husbandry. It seems hard to believe that Lincolnshire is on anyone's radar.

Speaker 2 The county is famed for something, though: being flat. And that flatness has given Lincolnshire a geopolitical significance.

Speaker 2 It's perfect for air bases.

Speaker 2 In the early summer of 1974, Lincolnshire is home to V-Force of the RAF. The giant Vulcan bombers screaming up this long runway are part of Britain's nuclear deterrent.

Speaker 2 If the Soviet Union launches a surprise atomic strike, these Royal Air Force crews have just a few minutes' warning to get into the air and hit back, devastating Karl Markstadt, Minsk or Moscow in retaliation.

Speaker 2 The Vulcan pilots would doubtless have much on their minds given the mission ahead, but few wasted time time in thinking of their return home.

Speaker 2 The quite reasonable assumption is that the Russians would pulverise Lincolnshire and its runways while they were away.

Speaker 2 It's late on a Saturday afternoon and farmer Gordon Atkinson is working in a sugar beet field near the hamlet of Brandy Wharf.

Speaker 2 But a distant noise prompts him to look up from his labours.

Speaker 2 I heard this rumble and thought, it's going to be a thunderstorm, he said.

Speaker 2 But that rolling boom was no act of God.

Speaker 2 Its origins were man-made.

Speaker 2 An enormous explosion has just ripped across northern Lincolnshire. And if that wasn't obvious to Gordon Atkinson, it was all too clear to his elderly mother.

Speaker 2 She's been spending a quiet afternoon at home, 20 20 miles nearer the epicenter of the detonation.

Speaker 2 Her house was now a shambles.

Speaker 2 The blast ripped the front door off its hinges and sent it rocketing up the staircase to the floor above. If she could see, Mrs.

Speaker 2 Atkinson might have despaired at the state of her lounge, littered as it was with shards of glass and tatters of curtain cloth.

Speaker 2 But she couldn't see. The blast wave had come whooshing down the chimney stack, filling the house with a blinding, choking veil of soot.

Speaker 2 People 10, 20, even 30 miles from the explosion stopped in their tracks to look in the direction of Mrs. Atkinson's village, Flixborough.

Speaker 2 Teenager Ludwina Beckers was watching the football on TV with her four brothers. Rushing to look out the window.
The family joked about what the source of the noise might be.

Speaker 2 But then we saw the mushroom cloud, dark and ominous in the sky, said Ludwina.

Speaker 2 All laughter in the Beckers household stopped.

Speaker 2 Had World War III really begun?

Speaker 2 I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to another Cautionary Tale.

Speaker 2 You've probably never heard of Polycaprolactam, even by its snappier moniker, nylon-6, but I'll bet there's some nylon-6 within arm's reach of you right now. It's used in all manner of items.

Speaker 2 It makes the bristles of toothbrushes and the strings of tennis rackets. You can find it inside almost every electrical gadget.

Speaker 2 And since nylon-6 is used to fashion medical implants, you might even have some inside you.

Speaker 2 Nylon-6 is strong, hard and tough. It won't conduct electricity and doesn't taint foods it comes into contact with.

Speaker 2 It's useful stuff, and it would be hard to imagine our world without it. Flying a plane, driving a car, or even getting dressed in the morning would be a very different proposition without nylon 6.

Speaker 2 Nylon 6 was an invention of Nazi Germany. The polymer was used to make parachute canopies, tyres for warplanes, and the tow ropes of gliders.

Speaker 2 But nylon-6 production really boomed in the post-war years, with factories around the world pumping out the stuff.

Speaker 2 Depending on where you lived, it might be marketed as Perlon, nylotron, ultramid, or durathan.

Speaker 2 I won't bore you with the details of its manufacture, but this story centres around the production of caprolactam, from which nylon-6 is made.

Speaker 2 By the 1970s, nylon-6 nylon-6 was in huge demand. The fibres were so ubiquitous that there was even a fashion for people to carpet their entire homes wall to wall with the stuff.

Speaker 2 To meet this clamour, a joint venture was launched by the Dutch State Mines and the British National Coal Board.

Speaker 2 There had been a modest factory at Flixborough making fertilizer from the mucky waste from local steel foundries.

Speaker 2 But now, under the name Nipro, Flixborough was getting into the glamorous world of polymers.

Speaker 2 The plant would be transformed at the cost of many millions of pounds, and the workforce would swell into the hundreds.

Speaker 2 Local newspapers soon filled up with recruitment ads for chemists, engineers, shorthand typists and canteen staff.

Speaker 2 It was expected the complex would use as much power as a city of half a million people, all to produce 70,000 tons of caprolactam per year.

Speaker 2 It would be Britain's biggest, indeed its only caprolactam plant.

Speaker 2 Nipro was essentially putting all its eggs in one basket. And to many this reasoning seems sound.
Building a single mega factory offered considerable economies of scale.

Speaker 2 It would simplify transport and logistics and allow Nipro to strike bulk buying deals for energy and raw materials.

Speaker 2 So in sleepy rural Lincolnshire, on a curve of the broad River Trent, the Nipro works quickly took shape. Gargantuan cranes hoisted gleaming steel processing tanks into place.

Speaker 2 Chimneys and cooling towers went up, as did tall, spindly flare stacks. After dark, their flames, along with countless strings of lights, picked out the silhouette of the plant against the night sky.

Speaker 2 Dennis Lawrence was one of Nipro's employees. He loved the job, he told his family.
The plant was just so modern, so clean.

Speaker 2 But all was not well at Nipro.

Speaker 2 The target was to produce 70,000 tons of caprolactam per year, but by 1974, two years into the expansion, only 47,000 tons were likely to leave the factory gate.

Speaker 2 For Nipro to turn a profit, they needed to make more of the stuff, and quickly.

Speaker 2 The heart of the factory was a series of six identical steel reactor vessels. These cylindrical tanks were installed in a line and connected by pipework.

Speaker 2 The first 16-foot tall vessel was the highest in this chain. The second vessel was placed 14 inches lower, and so on.
Thus gravity would aid the flow of chemicals from one down to the next.

Speaker 2 And the chemical inside was liquid cyclohexane which was pressurized, heated and then blasted with compressed air as it traveled through the vessel.

Speaker 2 The bosses at Nipro had high hopes for this part of the plant, but so far its operation was proving troublesome. Nipro worker Dennis Lawrence confided to his wife that there had been leaks.

Speaker 2 She didn't like the sound of that and worried for his safety.

Speaker 2 Cyclohexane is, after all, an incredibly flammable liquid. And when it escapes into the open air, it tends to vaporize, forming a deadly combustible cloud.

Speaker 2 Dennis, a part-time firefighter, had told his wife that if the cyclohexane tanks ever went up, there'd be no hope for anyone on the site.

Speaker 2 The management was alive to these risks. Arriving workers were frisked for cigarettes, matches and lighters.

Speaker 2 And the technicians who worked closest to the chemicals wore special shoes to reduce the risk of creating a spark.

Speaker 2 That said, it was feared that even someone shifting too quickly in a fashionable nylon shirt could produce enough static charge to ignite an explosion.

Speaker 2 Naturally, when a six-foot-long crack was discovered in the fifth of the six steel reactor vessels in March 1974, the whole array was immediately closed down and allowed to cool off.

Speaker 2 It was swiftly decided that vessel 5 should be removed, but that a costly shutdown could be avoided if the remaining vessels were pressed back into service, connected with a temporary pipe where Reactor Reactor 5 should have been.

Speaker 2 This pipe would simply have to be designed and built on site.

Speaker 2 No one in authority thought this a reckless or hazardous decision. They were said to regard it as no more than a routine plumbing job.

Speaker 2 But unfortunately, we don't always know what we don't know. A mechanical engineer might have told them that fabricating such a pipe was fraught with difficulties.

Speaker 2 But amongst all the newspaper ads for cooks and clerks and draftsmen to join the workforce at Flixborough, there was also a situations vacant notice for a mechanical engineer.

Speaker 2 And that position had yet to be filled.

Speaker 2 Cautionary tales will return shortly.

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Speaker 2 The plans for the temporary pipe were supposedly sketched out in chalk on the floor of the factory's workshop. And if that sounds worryingly cavalier, you haven't heard the half of it.

Speaker 2 The existing pipes, carrying pressurized and scalding hot liquid cyclohexane from vessel to vessel, measured 28 inches across.

Speaker 2 But no spare piping of that size could be found laying around the Nitro plant.

Speaker 2 Instead of delaying the repair to order some, a handy length of 20 inch pipe was substituted, roughly half the capacity of the original.

Speaker 2 Pushing the cyclohexane from a broad pipe into a thinner one creates issues. But some rough calculations reassured the Nitro bosses that the smaller pipe could take the strain.

Speaker 2 But the original 28-inch pipes ran straight. And by removing Reactor 5, the Nipro workers now needed its smaller replacement to accommodate the considerable drop in height from vessel 4 to vessel 6.

Speaker 2 So, they gave the new pipe a dog leg. by welding two joints along its length.
So now the pipe ran straight, dropped down, ran straight a bit more, dropped down again, and then joined reactor vessel 6.

Speaker 2 If they'd consulted the relevant safety standards, the men putting these kinks in the pipe would have known that their welds weren't up to the task.

Speaker 2 For when you force a moving liquid to change direction, it puts extra strain on the points where your pipe bends.

Speaker 2 This is all bad, but we're still not finished.

Speaker 2 The forces acting on the pipe's two bends would also cause a so-called turning moment, causing the metalwork to shift and twist in worrying ways.

Speaker 2 To counteract these forces, they need to secure the whole structure firmly. But as they hoisted their replacement pipe into place, the Nipro workers merely perched it on some flimsy scaffolding poles.

Speaker 2 Each original pipe was fitted with a bellows joint, essentially a rubber section that could expand and move to help absorb some of the forces acting on the rigid metalwork.

Speaker 2 No one thought to ask the manufacturer of these rubber joints if they were strong enough to absorb the forces at play in this jerry-rigged pipework.

Speaker 2 If the replacement pipe began to buck and squirm, Would these bellows joints just split apart?

Speaker 2 A mechanical engineer would immediately have spotted all these dangers, but there wasn't one on sight. A chemical engineer ran the Nipro operation.

Speaker 2 He was no doubt highly trained in his own field, but such training was narrow back then and wouldn't have included even the most basic mechanical concepts.

Speaker 2 It was an electrical engineer who oversaw the repair crew, and he wasn't educated to degree level, and the workmen themselves can hardly have been expected to spot the flaws in the design.

Speaker 2 What's more, they were working at breakneck speed to complete the job. The crack in vessel 5 had been spotted on March the 27th, 1974.

Speaker 2 Once it had been lifted clear, the design, building and installation of the replacement pipe had taken just 30 hours.

Speaker 2 There followed a rather half-hearted attempt to test the dog-legged assembly.

Speaker 2 Gas rather than liquid was pushed into the pipe at pressures approximating the normal operation of the system, the normal operation mine. No thought was given to an abnormal spike in pressure.

Speaker 2 The system, of course, had a safety valve to release pressure if such a spike became too much and threatened to burst the vessels and original pipes.

Speaker 2 But the replacement pipe was never tested to see if it would fail before this safety valve kicked in.

Speaker 2 So, on April Fools Day 1974, just five days after the vessel cracked, Flixborough was back at work oxidizing highly flammable cyclohexane.

Speaker 2 The management and board of Nipro were no doubt delighted by this performance. The outward flow of caprolactam could resume, and so too could the inward flow of money.

Speaker 2 Whenever you centralize production, when you put all your eggs in one basket as Nipro had, you can realize considerable gains, but this always comes with risk.

Speaker 2 In a recent episode of the new podcast, Business History, Host Jacob Goldstein looked at the success of the American airline Southwest.

Speaker 2 Southwest began as a budget regional carrier out of Texas, but its no-frills approach soon made it a major national airline, able to turn a profit each and every year for 47 years.

Speaker 2 That's an unrivaled feat in the aviation world.

Speaker 2 One of the secrets to this success was standardization.

Speaker 2 While other airlines might have mixed fleets of Boeing 747 jumbo jets or Airbus A380s or smaller short-haul aircraft, Southwest has only really ever operated the Boeing 737.

Speaker 2 This made life much easier and cheaper for Southwest. Pilots, flight attendants and ground crew only had to learn the foibles of a single aircraft type.
Thus, training time was reduced.

Speaker 2 When staff went sick or planes broke down, substitutions were easier and flights could continue.

Speaker 2 But in 2018 came the first of two deadly crashes involving a Boeing 737 MAX.

Speaker 2 Neither flight was operated by Southwest, but the authorities grounded all aircraft of that type.

Speaker 2 737 MAXs made up a third of Southwest's fleet, a crippling blow to its operation that lost it nearly a billion dollars in revenue.

Speaker 2 So, what you gain in savings can be lost in resilience.

Speaker 2 At Flixborough, Nitro had discovered the risks of building one mega factory to make caprolactam.

Speaker 2 A single cracked reactor vessel had halted production, disappointing important customers and further delaying the day when the troubled plant would turn a profit.

Speaker 2 It's little wonder then that a solution was hurriedly decided upon, and a temporary fix, the bodged together dogleg pipe, installed.

Speaker 2 In fact, Nipro was so desperate to get back to work that the cause of the crack in Vessel 5 wasn't investigated, nor were the other vessels checked for the signs of any impending failure.

Speaker 2 So, throughout April and May of 1974, cyclohexane was driven through the oxidizing system without mishap.

Speaker 2 The temporary fix, the bent pipe knocked up on site, became permanent. The temporary fix was folly, but not seeking to upgrade it compounded that error.
Look around your home or car or workplace.

Speaker 2 You might well see a fixture or appliance somewhere that broke and was quickly repaired in a less than ideal way. Perhaps a frayed electrical cable was wrapped up with adhesive tape.

Speaker 2 Or an important office IT system that fell over and was brought back online with a temporary workaround.

Speaker 2 For every complex problem, wrote the essayist H. L.
Mencken, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.

Speaker 2 Mencken had a point. So-called band-aid solutions are tempting.
but in the long run can prove to be more damaging than the problems they were meant to solve.

Speaker 2 Take the example of of patching up an IT system.

Speaker 2 You may get everyone in the office back up on their computers, but a rushed line of code, like a rotten brick in a wall, can make the whole edifice less sturdy.

Speaker 2 And a cheap fix often proves expensive in the longer term. Bodges and band-aids make it harder to maintain an IT network.

Speaker 2 Then, weeks or months down the line, a catastrophic outage destroys your business. It's the same at home.
If you're ever tempted to wrap a frayed electric cable with some tape, don't.

Speaker 2 Here's the advice of the London Fire Brigade.

Speaker 2 Always replace faulty leads. Is it worth risking your loved ones and your home for the sake of a few pounds?

Speaker 2 That's exactly the kind of advice Ladwina Becker's father, Hube, might have endorsed.

Speaker 2 Teenage Ludwina and her four brothers, remember, were settling down at home on June the 1st, 1974, to watch football on TV.

Speaker 2 Their dad, Hube, was setting off for work at the night probe plant, but paused because he noticed something amiss. Ludwina doesn't recall what it was.

Speaker 2 A rattly door handle, perhaps, or a loose paving stone. But she does remember her dad stopping immediately to put it right.

Speaker 2 He was always meticulous with keeping things in good working order, she said.

Speaker 2 The fix completed, Hoop began his slightly delayed drive to Flixborough and his plan.

Speaker 2 For Hoop Beckers was Night Pro's general manager and

Speaker 2 the man who'd green lit that dog-legged pipe.

Speaker 2 Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.

Speaker 4 The Chase Inc. Business Premier card is made for business owners who make things happen.
Designed for high spend and limitless cash back, Inc.

Speaker 4 Business Premier is a pay-in-full card with built-in flexibility. Get the buying power you need to make large purchases, cover unexpected expenses, and help your business grow.

Speaker 4 Earn a total of 2.5% cash back on every purchase of $5,000 or more, plus earn unlimited 2% cash back on every other purchase, giving you unlimited earned potential to invest cash back into your business, from innovation and technology to everyday expenses.

Speaker 4 Inc.

Speaker 4 Business Premier is the only business credit card with 2.5% cash back on every purchase of $5,000 or more and is part of a suite of credit cards from Chase for Business designed to meet your needs every step along the way.

Speaker 4 Learn more at chase.com forward slash business card. Chase for Business.
Make more of what's yours. Accounts subject to credit approval, restrictions, and limitations apply.

Speaker 4 Cards are issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA, member FDIC.

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Speaker 3 With Super Mobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 3 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 3 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 3 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Speaker 3 Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features. Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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That's odoo.com.

Speaker 6 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 6 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 6 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 6 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 6 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 2 Dennis Lawrence was also on the afternoon shift at Nightpro that sunny June Saturday. It was his turn to supply refreshments, so he'd stop to pick up some tea and sugar.

Speaker 2 Dennis enjoyed the camaraderie of working in the plant's control room. At 48, he was older than the other lads, who called him Grandad, but he was a popular member of the team.

Speaker 2 Indeed, he was so avuncular that he'd played Santa Claus at the staff party the previous Christmas. Dennis was in a particularly good mood that summer's day.

Speaker 2 He'd weathered some financial difficulties, but had just made the final repayment on his bankruptcy debts. He was in the clear at last.

Speaker 2 The control room was the brains of the plant, and it never stopped. Making capra lactam was a 24-7 business, but on a Saturday there was no need for Nipro's draftsmen, clerks and cooks.

Speaker 2 Instead of 300 workers, only around 70 people were working across the site. There were men in workshops, storehouses and laboratories dotted all over the estate.

Speaker 2 Thomas Crookes, the security guard, was on duty. A tanker truck driver had parked up at the factory too.

Speaker 2 A day or so earlier, several leaks had been detected in the five remaining reactor vessels. These leaks came and went, seeming to fix themselves.

Speaker 2 No inspection was made, since the special spark-proof tools needed to work so close to the flammable cyclohexane had been locked away. and couldn't be accessed.

Speaker 2 In the control room, Dennis Lawrence was making the tea while his colleagues were diligently monitoring their dials and meters, keeping up the constant balancing act to maintain the right pressure and right temperature to convert cyclohexane into caprolactam.

Speaker 2 But things were much more relaxed in a workshop to the north. Instrument technician John Irvin hadn't had much to do since clocking on at 3.

Speaker 2 5 p.m. was fast approaching, so he thought he'd start on his packed lunch of sandwiches before anyone could call to report a faulty gauge.

Speaker 2 He'd made scant progress when a noise boomed across the plant,

Speaker 2 followed by a whoosh, like the approach of an express train.

Speaker 2 Through the workshop window, John could see men running into the control room, while others left it with equal urgency.

Speaker 2 The technician put down his sandwich and made for the door to join those fleeing.

Speaker 2 The first boom John had heard was the temporary pipe between reactor vessels 4 and 6.

Speaker 2 Breaking open. The whoosh was hot cyclohexane escaping into the air and forming a vast, flammable cloud.

Speaker 2 Drifting across the chemical works, It was only a matter of time before this cloud encountered a spark or flame.

Speaker 2 You see the explosion before you hear it, said John. A tsunami of flame coming towards me at great speed.

Speaker 2 That's when I screamed.

Speaker 2 Then there was a tremendous gust of wind and I remember being lifted off the ground and then something hitting me on the head.

Speaker 2 When John regained consciousness, the workshop had collapsed on him.

Speaker 2 The ceiling was down, the walls punched in, windows shattered, and the contents of the room flung around.

Speaker 2 Fortunately, some sturdy workbenches had withstood the blast and sheltered the young technician from being crushed. They also offered him an escape route, a tunnel to exit the building.

Speaker 2 Thus began a hellish journey. Every one of of John's fingers had been broken.
But on hands and lacerated knees, he crossed the glass and sharp rubble.

Speaker 2 I crawled, and I was screaming.

Speaker 2 But I couldn't even hear my own screams.

Speaker 2 The blast had deafened John.

Speaker 2 That wasn't his most urgent problem though, because the explosion also left him blinded. He scrabbled madly from room to room, eventually finding himself outside.

Speaker 2 He knew the layout of the plant, but now stumbled sightless through an unfamiliar landscape, repeatedly crashing into unexpected obstacles.

Speaker 2 Disoriented, John most feared plunging into an acid storage pit he knew was somewhere along his route. Miraculously, he negotiated the catwalk over the acid pool without tottering in.

Speaker 2 At that point, I got hopelessly lost, said John. I stood up a few times and waved my hands around and shouted for help.

Speaker 4 No one answered his calls.

Speaker 2 Blinded

Speaker 2 and surrounded by raging fires, a badly wounded technician slumped down in the rubble, defeated.

Speaker 2 I just thought I was going to die.

Speaker 2 John then felt a hand on his shoulder.

Speaker 2 On seeing the explosion, two off-duty Nipro workers had rushed to the plant.

Speaker 2 Using a broken-down door as a stretcher, they carried John to safety.

Speaker 2 A volunteer ambulance crew had also hurried to the disaster and without anesthetic began to stitch up up the worst of the many wounds across John's face.

Speaker 2 They managed to clean me up as best they could, said John,

Speaker 2 who assumed it was just the blood from these cuts that was obscuring his vision.

Speaker 2 His injuries would, however, prove to be life-changing.

Speaker 2 22-year-old John Irvin

Speaker 2 would never see again.

Speaker 2 Five miles away, the family of Dennis Lawrence gazed dumbfounded towards the explosion.

Speaker 2 Had Nipro really gone up?

Speaker 2 People were phoning up to say that's exactly what had happened.

Speaker 2 Dennis's daughter was sure he'd be fine, but Mrs. Lawrence had no illusions.

Speaker 2 Your dad isn't coming back,

Speaker 2 she said calmly

Speaker 2 as silence descended on the family home.

Speaker 2 She was right.

Speaker 2 And Dennis wasn't the only fatality.

Speaker 2 Thomas Crookes, the security guard, was dead. The visiting tanker driver, dead too.

Speaker 2 Across the plant, 28 people had perished.

Speaker 2 The toll was heaviest in the control room where Dennis had worked.

Speaker 2 There were 18 people in there. None of them survived.

Speaker 2 And lost with them were all the records of what happened leading up to the blast.

Speaker 2 It was estimated that the cyclohexane ignited with the force of around 30 tons of TNT, easily the biggest peacetime explosion in British history.

Speaker 2 It's a miracle then that no one beyond the factory gates was killed.

Speaker 2 When farmer Gordon Atkinson arrived home close to the plant, he found his mother shaken but thankfully alive.

Speaker 2 It was like a ghost village, he said.

Speaker 2 There were curtains blowing out of broken windows, roofs lifted and set back wrong.

Speaker 2 Fire raged on at Nightpro for 10 full days. and specialist coal mine rescue teams were drafted in to recover the buried dead.

Speaker 2 Factory workers helped in this grim task, but were sent away for a cup of tea whenever the corpse of a colleague was uncovered. Nobody got counselling in those days, said one Nipro employee.

Speaker 2 You just had to grin and bear it and get on, and that's what we did.

Speaker 2 Questions immediately arose about the wisdom of Nipro building a cat caprolactam mega plant.

Speaker 2 Stockpiling such vast quantities of chemicals on a single site undoubtedly resulted in the huge scale of the explosion.

Speaker 2 But the shock waves of the disaster spread far beyond rural Lincolnshire.

Speaker 2 With its sole caprolactam maker reduced to rubble, the already shaky UK economy tottered too.

Speaker 2 Vast sums were wiped off the stock market as chemical companies, textile weavers, and carpet makers faced a drought of raw materials.

Speaker 2 There was even a run on nylon stockings in the shops, as consumers panic bought ahead of looming shortages and expected price rises.

Speaker 2 Hube Beckers, the general manager at Night Pro, had missed the explosion by a few minutes, thanks to a decision to stop for a little bit of DIY before leaving home.

Speaker 2 He now set about defending the safety culture at his plant, likening it to the stringent procedures observed at, say, a nuclear power plant.

Speaker 2 When a court of inquiry was convened, Hoobe gave detailed evidence and supplied copious notes about the decision to replace reactor vessel 5 with a temporary pipe.

Speaker 2 He argued that all necessary protocols had been followed.

Speaker 2 The inquiry, though hampered by the total destruction of data from the control room, concluded that there had been a litany of errors in the design, construction, and installation

Speaker 2 of that pipe.

Speaker 2 The integrity of a well-designed and constructed plant was thereby destroyed, read its report.

Speaker 2 In other words, A cheap band-aid solution had devastated a multi-million pound operation, claiming many lives in the process.

Speaker 2 No one faced prosecution for the blast. Health and safety legislation was still being debated in Britain's Parliament.
But the Night Pro Blast informed the formulation of these new laws.

Speaker 2 Henceforth, no one could install such a flimsy pipe. and still claim they'd followed the rules.

Speaker 2 The Flixborough plant was rebuilt, this time with greater attention to safety and survivability.

Speaker 2 The control room, for example, would be placed further from danger and built to withstand any future explosion.

Speaker 2 And the new boss?

Speaker 2 Same as the old boss. Hubert Beckers stayed on as the general manager.
and his family remained in the area. His teenage daughter, Ludwina, enrolled in a local college.

Speaker 2 Walking into the common room, she noticed another student in a t-shirt. One of his arms was extremely scarred, she remembers, from his hand right up to the sleeve.

Speaker 2 Ludwina asked the boy what had happened.

Speaker 2 His reply was simple and direct:

Speaker 2 Your dad's factory did that

Speaker 2 For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com.

Speaker 2 Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

Speaker 2 The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Speaker 2 Ben Nadaf Hafri edited the scripts.

Speaker 2 The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Speaker 2 Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It really does make a difference to us.

Speaker 2 And if you want to hear it, ad-free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club?

Speaker 2 To sign up, head to patreon.com/slash cautionary club. That's patreon, p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com slash cautionary club.

Speaker 5 And now, superhuman shack.

Speaker 2 I keep telling them not to say that. I'm no superhuman.
Believe it or not, I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA.

Speaker 2 In adults with obesity, moderate to severe OSA is a condition where breathing is interrupted during sleep with loud snoring, choking, gasping for air, and even daytime fatigue.

Speaker 2 Let's just say it can sound a lot like this.

Speaker 2 Sound familiar? Learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com.

Speaker 5 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

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Speaker 1 only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line.

Speaker 2 But first,

Speaker 2 there,

Speaker 2 the last one.

Speaker 2 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 1 refreshes.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.

Speaker 2 Guaranteed human.