Thorne, Althorpe and Flixborough
One of the places the train stopped was Thorne.
I can remember driving through it on a dark and wet night sometime in about 1970, when it was one of the poorest areas in the UK. C, myself and our eldest son, who was just a baby at the time had been to visit C’s friend from Liverpool University, Sandra Briton and her husband Keith at Gliberdyke.
It still looked pretty bleak from the train, as the wind blew across the flat lands of North Lincolnshire.
It’s not a place I should have ever wanted to live.
Althorpe was another place passed by the train and we used to have friends who lived near there under the shadow of the River Trent. C could remember being woken up by a boat on the river virtually passing by the room where she was sleeping.
Our friends used to tell a story how tourists used to turn up looking for the last resting place of Princess Diana. But of course they had got the spelling wrong. I hope it’s improved with Sat-Navs or do they send those Dianaphiles to the wilds of North Lincolnshire?
But I couldn’t go to this part of the country, without thinking about the Flixborough disaster. I’ve worked on lots of chemical plants and know how dangerous they can be. And the disaster at Flixborough, proved my fears, when 28 people died and many were injured in June 1974.
According to Wikipedia, the cause of the explosion my well have been a badly-designed bypass pipe that wasn’t properly tested. I also heard a contributing factor from an engineer at ICI, was that the design of the plant had been metric as it was a Dutch design and it had been converted to Imperial when it was built in the UK. This had meant that the pipe that broke was the wrong size to withstand the pressure. Wikipedia says this.
The official inquiry into the accident determined that the bypass pipe had failed because of unforeseen lateral stresses in the pipe during a pressure surge. The bypass had been designed by engineers who were not experienced in high-pressure pipework, no plans or calculations had been produced, the pipe was not pressure-tested, and was mounted on temporary scaffolding poles that allowed the pipe to twist under pressure. The by-pass pipe was a smaller diameter (20″) than the reactor flanges (24″) and in order to align the flanges, short sections of steel bellows were added at each end of the by-pass – under pressure such bellows tend to squirm or twist.
I don’t know what the truth was and probably we’ll never find out, but in my view to mix measurement systems in anything as dangerous as a chemical plant is asking for trouble. It should be noted that ICI went fully metric in chemical plant design sometime in the 1950s. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that safety was one of the reasons.
The fact that we still commonly use Imperial measures is an absolute disgrace.
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