December 12, 2025 • 38 mins
A megaplant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material used in everything from stockings to toothbrushes to electronics. When a reactor vessel fails, the engineers improvise a quick-fix workaround, so the plant can keep up with demand. Before long, the temporary patch - a small, bent pipe - becomes a permanent part of the factory, and the people of Flixborough unknowingly drift towards disaster.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. 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. Business History
is hosted by two podcasting legends, Robert Smith and Jacob Goldstein.
Robert and Jacob tell the stories behind famous companies and
(00:35):
iconic products, and chart financial booms and bursting bubbles and
as they say in Hollywood. This new show comes from
the producers of Cautionary Tales. Listen to Business History wherever
you get your podcasts, or search Business History podcast on
YouTube to see it in video form. Lincolnshire, on the
(00:58):
east coast of England, sparsely populated and largely rural. Few
great moments of history have been made here. Large towns
are also 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.
(01:23):
The county is famed for something though, being flat, and
that flatness has given Lincolnshire a geopolitical significance. It's perfect
for air bases. In the early summer of nineteen seventy four,
(01:52):
Lincolnshire is home to v Force of the RAF. The
giant Vulcan bombers screaming up this long runway a part
of Britain's nuclear deterrented. If a Soviet Union launches a
surprise atomic strike, these Royal Air Force crews have just
a few minutes warning to get into the air and
(02:13):
hit back, devastating karl Markstadt, Minsk or Moscow in retaliation.
The Vulcan pilots would doubtless have much on their minds
given the mission ahead, but few wasted time in thinking
of their return home. The quite reasonable assumption is that
(02:34):
the Russians would pulverize Lincolnshire and its runways while they
were away. It's late on a Saturday afternoon and farmer
Gordon Atkinson is working in a sugar beet field near
the hamlet of brandy Wharf, but a distant noise prompts
(02:55):
him to look up from his labors. I heard this
rumble and thought it's going to be a thunderstorm, he said,
But that rolling boom was no act of God. Its
origins were man made. An enormous explosion has just ripped
(03:15):
across northern Lincolnshire, and if that wasn't obvious to Gordon Atkinson.
It was all too clear to his elderly mother. She's
been spending a quiet afternoon at home twenty miles near
at the epicenter of the detonation. Her house was now
(03:35):
as shambles. The blast ripped the front door off its
hinges and sent it rocketing up the staircase to the
floor above. If she could see, Missus Atkinson might have
despaired at the state of her lounge, littered as it
(03:56):
was with shards of glass and tatters of curtaincloth. 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. People ten, twenty, even thirty miles from
the explosion stopped in their tracks to look in the
(04:19):
direction of Missus Atkinson's village. Flicksborough, teenager Leduena 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. But then we
saw the mushroom cloud, dark and ominous in the sky,
(04:44):
said Ladrena. All laughter in the Beckers household stopped had
World War IREE really begun. I'm Tim Harford and you're
listening to another cautionary tale. You've probably never heard of polycaprolactum,
(05:29):
even by its snappier monica nylon six. But I'll bet
there's some nylon six within arms reach of you right now.
It's used in all manner of items. It makes the
bristles of toothbrushes and the strings of tennis rackets. You
can find it inside almost every electrical gadget, and since
(05:49):
nylon six is used to fashion medical implants, you might
even have some inside you. Nylon six is strong, hard
and tough. It won't conduct electricity and doesn't taint foods
it comes into contact with. It's useful stuff, and it
would be hard to imagine our world without it. Flying
(06:11):
a plane, driving a car, or even getting dressed in
the morning would be a very different proposition without nylon six.
Nylon six was an invention of Nazi Germany. The polymer
was used to make parachute canopies, tires for warplanes, and
the toe ropes of gliders. But nylon six production really
(06:34):
boomed in the post war years, with factories around the
world pumping out the stuff. Depending on where you lived,
it might be marketed as Perlon, Nilotron, ultramid, or Jurathan.
I won't bore you with the details of its manufacture,
but this story centers around the production of caprolactum, from
(06:55):
which nylon six is made. By the nineteen seventies, nylon
six was in huge demand. The fibers were so ubiquitous
that there was even a fashion for people to carpet
their entire homes wall to wall with the stuff. To
meet this clamor, a joint venture was launched by the
Dutch State Mines and the British National Coal Board. There
(07:18):
had been a modest factory at Flicksborough making fertilizer from
the mucky waste from local steel foundries, but now under
the name Nypro, Flicksburg was getting into the glamorous world
of polymers. The plant would be transformed at the cost
of many millions of pounds, and the workforce would swell
(07:41):
into the hundreds. Local newspapers soon filled up with recruitment
ads for chemists, engineers, shorthand typists and canteen staff. It
was expected the complex would use as much power as
a city of half a million people, all to produce
seventy thousand tons of cap prolactum per year. It would
(08:02):
be Britain's biggest, indeed its only caprolactum plant. Nypro was
essentially putting all its eggs in one basket, and to
many this reasoning seemed sound. Building a single mega factory
offered considerable economies of scale. It would simplify transport and logistics,
(08:25):
and allow Nipro to strike bulk buying deals for energy
and raw materials. So in sleepy rural Lincolnshire, on a
curve of the Broad River trend, the Nypro works quickly
took shape. Gargantuan cranes hoisted gleaming steel processing tanks into place.
(08:45):
Chimneys and cooling towers went up, as did tall spindleaf flarestacks.
After dark, their flames, along with countless strings of lights,
picked out the silhouette of the plant against the night sky.
(09:05):
Dennis Lawrence was one of Nipro's employees. He loved the job.
He told his family the plant was just so modern,
so clean, but all was not well at nightprob The
target was to produce seventy thousand tonnes of caprolactum per year,
(09:26):
but by nineteen seventy four. Two years into the expansion,
only forty seven thousand tons were likely to leave the
factory gate. For Nipro to turn a profit, they needed
to make more of the stuff, and quickly. The heart
of the factory was a series of six identical steel
reactor vessels. These cylindrical tanks were installed in a line
(09:49):
and connected by pipework. The first, sixteen foot tall vessel
was the highest in this chain. The second vessel was
placed fourteen inches lower, and so on. Thus gravity would
aid the flow of chemicals from one down to the next,
and the chemical inside was liquid cyclo hexaane, which was pressurized, heated,
(10:14):
and then blasted with compressed air as it traveled through
the vessels. The boss is at Nipro had high hopes
for this part of the plant, but so far its
operation was proving troublesome. Nypro worker Dennis Lawrence confided to
his wife that there had been leaks. She didn't like
(10:34):
the sound of that and worried for his safety. Cyclohexaye is,
after all, an incredibly flammable liquid, and when it escape
since the open air, it tends to vaporize, forming a
deadly combustible cloud. Dennis, a part time firefighter, had told
his wife that if the cyclohexane tanks ever went up,
(10:58):
there'd be no hope for anyone on the site. The
management was alive to these risks. Arriving workers were frisked
for cigarettes and lighters, and the technicians who worked closest
to the chemicals wore special shoes to reduce the risk
of creating a spark. That said, it was feared that
(11:20):
even someone shifting too quickly in a fashionable nylon shirt
could produce enough static charge to ignite an explosion. Naturally,
when a six foot long crack was discovered in the
fifth of the six steel reactor vessels in March nineteen
seventy four, the whole array was immediately closed down and
(11:43):
allowed to cool off. It was swiftly decided that vessel
five 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 five should
have been. This pipe would simply have to be designed
(12:03):
and built on site. No one in authority thought this
close or hazardous decision. They were said to regard it
as no more than a routine plumbing job, but unfortunately
we don't always know what we don't know. A mechanical
engineer might have told them that fabricating such a pipe
(12:26):
was fraught with difficulties. But amongst all the newspaper ads
for cooks and clerks and draftsmen to join the workforce
at Flicksborough, there was also a situation's vacant notice for
a mechanical engineer, and that position had yet to be filled.
(12:48):
Cautionary tales were returned shortly. 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,
(13:11):
you haven't heard the half of it. The existing pipes
carrying pressurized and scalding hot liquid cyclohexane from vessel to
vessel measured twenty eight inches across, but no spare piping
of that size could be found laying around the niproplant.
(13:33):
Instead of delaying the repair to order some a handy
length of twenty inch pipe was substituted, roughly half the
capacity of the original. Pushing the cyclohexane from a broad
pipe into a thinner one creates issues, but some rough
calculations reassured the nprobosses that the smaller pipe could take
(13:56):
the strain. But the original twenty eight inch pipes ran straight,
and by removing React of five, the NPRO workers now
needed its smaller replace to accommodate the considerable drop in
height from vessel four to vessel six, So they gave
(14:18):
the new pipe a dog leg by welding two joints
along its length, So now the pipe ran straight, drop down,
ran straight, a bit more, drop down again, and then
joined React to vessel six. If they'd consulted the relevant
safety standards, the men putting these kinks in the pipe
(14:39):
would have known that their welds weren't up to the task.
For when you force a moving liquid to change direction,
it puts extra strain on the points where your pipe bends.
This is all bad, but we're still not finished. The
forces acting on the pipe's two bends would also cause
(15:02):
a so called turning moment, causing the metalwork to shift
and twist in worrying ways. To counteract these forces, they
need to secure the whole structure firmly. But as they
hoisted their replacement pipe into place, the NYPRO workers merely
perched it on some flimsy scaffolding poles. Each original pipe
(15:26):
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. 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. If the replacement pipe began to
(15:48):
buck and squirm, would these bellows joints just split apart.
A mechanical engineer would immediately have spotted all these dangers,
but there wasn't one on site. A chemical engineer around
the npro operation. He was no doubt highly trained in
his own field, but such was narrow back then and
(16:11):
wouldn't have included even the most basic mechanical concepts. 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 lots more, they were working at breakneck speed
(16:31):
to complete the job. The crack in Vessel five had
been spotted on March the twenty seventh nineteen seventy four.
Once it had been lifted clear, the design, building and
installation of the replacement pipe had taken just thirty hours.
There followed a rather half hearted attempt to test the
(16:54):
dog legged assembly. Gas rather than liquid, was pushed into
the pipe that pressures approximating the normal operation of the system.
The normal operation mine no thought was given to an
abnormal spike in pressure. The system, of course had a
safety valve to release pressure if such a spike became
(17:14):
too much and threatened to burst the vessels and original pipes,
but the replacement pipe was never tested to see if
it would fail before this safety valve kicked in. So
on April fools Day nineteen seventy four, just five days
(17:37):
after the vessel cracked, Flicksburgh was back at work oxidizing
highly flammable cyclohexaane. The management and board of Nipro were
no doubt delighted by this performance. The outward flow of
capro lactum could resume, and so too could the inward
flow of money. Whenever you centralize production, when you put
(18:04):
all your eggs in one basket, as Nipro had, you
can really considerable gains. But this always comes with Risk.
In a recent episode of the new podcast Business History,
host Jacob Goldstein looked at the success of the American
airline Southwest. Southwest began as a budget regional carrier out
(18:27):
of Texas, but it's no Frill's approach soon made it
a major national airline, able to turn a profit each
and every year for forty seven years. That's an unrivaled
feat in the aviation world. One of the secrets to
this success was standardization. While other airlines might have mixed
(18:50):
fleets of Boeing seven for seven jumbo jets or Airbus
A three eighties or smaller short haul aircraft, Southwest has
only really ever operated the Boeing seven three seven. This
made life much easier and cheaper for Southwest. Pilot's, flight
attendants and ground crew only had to learn the foibles
(19:12):
of a single aircraft type. Thus training time was reduced.
When staff went circle planes broke down, substitutions were easier
and flights could continue. But in twenty eighteen came the
first of two deadly crashes involving a Boeing seven three
seven Max. Neither flight was operated by Southwest, but the
(19:36):
authorities grounded all aircraft of that Type seven three seven
maxes made up a third of Southwest's fleet, a crippling
blow to its operation that lost it nearly a billion
dollars in revenue. So what you gain in savings can
be lost in resilience. At Flicksborough, night Pro had discovered
(20:03):
the risks of building one mega factory to make caprolactum.
A single crack to react to vessel had halted production,
disappointing important customers and further delaying the day when the
troubled plant would turn a profit. It's little wander then
that a solution was hurriedly decided upon and a temporary fix,
(20:25):
the bodge together dog leg pipe installed. In fact, Nipro
was so desperate to get back to work that the
cause of the crack in Vessel five wasn't investigated, nor
were the other vessels checked for the signs of any
impending failure. So throughout April and May of nineteen seventy four,
(20:48):
cyclohexane was driven through the oxidizing system without mishap. 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
(21:10):
or workplace. You might well see a fixture or appliance
somewhere that broke and was quickly repaired in a less
an ideal way, Perhaps afraid electrical cable was wrapped up
with adhesive tape, or an important office IT system that
fell over and was brought back online with a temporary
(21:31):
workaround for every complex problem, wrote the essayist h L.
Mencan there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
Mencan had a point. So called band aid solutions are tempting,
but in the long run can prove to be more
(21:52):
damaging than the problems they were meant to solve. Take
the example of patching up an IT system. 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,
and a cheap fix often proves expensive in the longer term.
(22:14):
Bodgies and band aids make it harder to maintain an
IT network, 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 her freyed electric cable
with some tape. Don't here's the advice of the London
(22:37):
Fire Brigade. Always replace faulty leads. Is it worth risking
your loved ones and your home for the sake of
a few pounds. That's exactly the kind of advice Lodwena
Becker's father, who might have endorsed teenage Lduena and her
(22:57):
four brothers remember, were settling down at home on June
the first, nineteen seventy four to watch football on TV.
Their dad, Hohob, was setting off for work at the
night Prop pile, but paused because he noticed something amiss.
Loduena doesn't recall what it was, a rattley door handle perhaps,
(23:18):
or a loose paving stone, but she does remember her
dad stopping immediately to put it right. He was always
meticulous with keeping things in good working order, she said.
The fix completed, who began his slightly delayed drive to
Flicksborough and his plant for Who Becker's was Nightpro's general
(23:42):
manager and the man who had green licked that dog
legged pipe. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
(24:07):
Dennis Lawrence was also on the afternoon shift at Nypro
that sunny June Saturday. It was his term to supply refreshments,
so he'd stopped to pick up some tea and sugar.
Dennis enjoyed the camaraderie of working in the plant's control room.
At forty eight, he was older than the other lads,
who called him Granddad, but he was a popular member
(24:30):
of the team. 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.
He'd weathered some financial difficulties, but had just made the
final repayment on his bankruptcy debts. He was in the
clear at last. The control room was the brains of
(24:54):
the plant, and it never stopped making Capra. Lactam was
a twenty four to seven business, but on a Saturday
there was no need for Nipro's draftsmen, clerks and cooks.
Instead of three hundred workers year, around seventy people were
working across the site. There were men in workshops, storehouses
and laboratories dotted all over the estate. Thomas Crooks, the
(25:19):
security guard, was on duty. A tanker truck driver had
parked up at the factory too. 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. No
inspection was made since the special spark proved tools needed
(25:43):
to work so close to the flammable cyclohexane had been
locked away and couldn't be accessed. 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
(26:04):
to convert cyclohexane into caprolactum. 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
three five PM was fast approaching, so he thought he'd
start on his packed lunch of sandwiches before anyone could
(26:26):
call to report a faulty gauge. It made scant progress
when a noise boomed across the plant, followed by a
whoosh like the approach of an express train. Through the
workshop window, John could see men running into the control
room while others left it with equal urgency. The technician
(26:49):
put down his sandwich and made for the door to
join those fleeing. The first boom John had heard was
the temporary pipe between reactive vessels four and six breaking open.
The woosh that was hots cyclohexane escape into the air
(27:10):
and forming a vast flammable cloud drifting across the chemical works.
It was only a matter of time before this cloud
encountered a spark or flame. You see the explosion before
you hear it, said John, A tsunami of flame coming
(27:31):
towards me at great speed. That's when I screamed, and
then there was a tremendous gust of wind, and I
remember being lifted off the ground and then something hitting
me on the head. When John regained consciousness, the workshop
(27:52):
had collapsed on him. The ceiling was down, the walls
punched in, windows shattered, and the contents of the room
flung around. Fortunately, some sturdy workbenches had withstood the blade
and sheltered the young technician from being crushed. They also
(28:13):
offered him an escape route, a tunnel to exit the building.
Thus began a hellish journey. Every one of John's fingers
had been broken, but on hands and lacerated knees, he
crossed the glass and sharp rubble. I crawled, and I
(28:36):
was screaming, but I couldn't even hear my own screams.
The blast had deafened John. 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. He knew
(29:00):
the layout of the plant, but now stumbled sightless to
an unfamiliar landscape, repeatedly crashing into unexpected obstacles. Disoriented John
most feared plunging into an acid storage pit he knew
was somewhere along his route. Miraculously, he negotiated the catwalk
(29:21):
over the acid pool without tottering in. At that point,
I got hopelessly lost, said John. I stood up a
few times and waved my hands around and shouted for help.
No one answered his card. Blinded and surrounded by raging fires,
(29:43):
a badly wounded technician slumped down in the rubble, defeated.
I just thought I was going to die. John then
felt a hand on his shoulder. On seeing the explosion,
(30:05):
two off duty night pro workers had rushed the plant,
using a broken down door as a stretcher. He carried
John to safety. A volunteer ambulance crew had also hurried
to the disaster, and without anesthetic, began to stitch up
the worst of the many wounds across John's face. They
(30:27):
managed to clean me up as best they could, said John,
who assumed it was just the blood from these cuts
that was obscuring his vision. His injuries would, however, prove
to be life changing. Twenty two year old John Irvin
would never see again. Five miles away, the family of
(30:54):
Dennis Lawrence gazed dumbfounded towards the explosion. Had nypro really
gone up? People were phoning up to say, that's exactly
what had happened. Dennis's daughter, I was sure he'd be fine,
but missus Lawrence had no illusions. Your dad isn't coming back,
(31:19):
she said, calmly, as silence descended on the family home.
She was right, and Dennis wasn't the only fatality. Thomas Crooks,
the security guard, was dead. The visiting tanker driver dead too.
(31:39):
Across the plant, twenty eight people had perished. The toll
was heaviest in the control room, where Dennis had worked.
There were eighteen people in there, none of them survived
and lost with them were all the records of what
happened leading up to the blast. It was estimated that
(32:04):
the cyclo hexayne ignited with the force of around their
tons of TNT, easily the biggest peacetime explosion in British history.
It's a miracle, then, that no one beyond the factory
gates was killed. When farmer Gordon Atkinson arrived home close
(32:26):
to the plant, he found his mother shaken, but thankfully alive.
It was like a ghost village, he said. There were
curtains blowing out of broken windows, roofs lifted and set
back wrong, fire raged on at night, pro for ten
(32:46):
full days, and specialist coal mine rescue teams were drafted
in to recover the buried dead. The 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 counseling in those days, said one micro employee.
(33:09):
You just had to grin and bear it and get on,
and that's what we did. Questions immediately arose about the
wisdom of Nypro building a cap prolactum megaplant, stockpiling such
vast quantities of chemicals on a single site undoubtedly resulted
(33:31):
in the huge scale of the explosion. The shockwaves of
the disaster spread far beyond rural Lincolnshire. With its sole
caprolactum maker reduced to rubble, the already shaky UK economy
tottered too. Vast sums were wiped off the stock market
(33:52):
as chemical companies, textile weavers and carpet makers faced a
draft of raw materials. There was even a run on
nylon stockings in the shops as consumers panic boart ahead
of looming shortages and expected price rises. Hoobe Becker's, the
general manager at Nipro, had missed the explosion by a
(34:15):
few minutes thanks to a decision to stop for a
little bit of DIY before leaving home. He now set
about defending the safety culture at his plant, likening it
to the stringent procedures observed at say, a nuclear power plant.
When a court of inquiry was convened, Hoobe gave detailed
(34:38):
evidence and supplied copious notes about the decision to replace
reactor Vessel five with a temporary pipe. He argued that
all necessary protocols had been followed. The inquiry, though hampered
by the total destruction of data from the control room
(34:59):
concluded that there had been a litany of errors in
the design, construction and installation of that pipe. The integrity
of a well designed and constructed plant was thereby destroyed.
Redit's report. In other words, a cheap band aid solution
(35:20):
had devastated a multi million pound operation, claiming many lives
in the process. 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
(35:41):
new laws. Henceforth, no one could install such a flimsy
pipe and still claim they'd followed the rules. The Flicksburgh
plant was rebuilt, this time with greater attention to safety
and survivability. The control room, for example, would be placed
(36:03):
further from danger and built to withstand any future explosion.
The new boss, same as the old boss, Hooper Becker's,
stayed on as the general manager, and his family remained
in the area. His teenage daughter, Luduena, enrolled in the
local college. Walking into the common room, she noticed another
(36:27):
student in a T shirt. One of his arms was
extremely scarred. She remembers from his hand right up to
the sleeve. Ludweena asked the boy what had happened. His
reply was simple and direct. Your dad's factory did that.
(36:57):
For a full list of our sources, see the show
notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.
It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound
(37:18):
design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise
bend A. Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey,
and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
(37:42):
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review. It really does make a difference to us,
and if you want to hear it, add free and
receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only
newsletter every month. Why not showIn the Cautionary Club. To
sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club.
(38:06):
That's Patreon, p A t r e N dot com
slash cautionary club
Pushkin. 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. Business History
is hosted by two podcasting legends, Robert Smith and Jacob Goldstein.
Robert and Jacob tell the stories behind famous companies and
(00:35):
iconic products, and chart financial booms and bursting bubbles and
as they say in Hollywood. This new show comes from
the producers of Cautionary Tales. Listen to Business History wherever
you get your podcasts, or search Business History podcast on
YouTube to see it in video form. Lincolnshire, on the
(00:58):
east coast of England, sparsely populated and largely rural. Few
great moments of history have been made here. Large towns
are also 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.
(01:23):
The county is famed for something though, being flat, and
that flatness has given Lincolnshire a geopolitical significance. It's perfect
for air bases. In the early summer of nineteen seventy four,
(01:52):
Lincolnshire is home to v Force of the RAF. The
giant Vulcan bombers screaming up this long runway a part
of Britain's nuclear deterrented. If a Soviet Union launches a
surprise atomic strike, these Royal Air Force crews have just
a few minutes warning to get into the air and
(02:13):
hit back, devastating karl Markstadt, Minsk or Moscow in retaliation.
The Vulcan pilots would doubtless have much on their minds
given the mission ahead, but few wasted time in thinking
of their return home. The quite reasonable assumption is that
(02:34):
the Russians would pulverize Lincolnshire and its runways while they
were away. It's late on a Saturday afternoon and farmer
Gordon Atkinson is working in a sugar beet field near
the hamlet of brandy Wharf, but a distant noise prompts
(02:55):
him to look up from his labors. I heard this
rumble and thought it's going to be a thunderstorm, he said,
But that rolling boom was no act of God. Its
origins were man made. An enormous explosion has just ripped
(03:15):
across northern Lincolnshire, and if that wasn't obvious to Gordon Atkinson.
It was all too clear to his elderly mother. She's
been spending a quiet afternoon at home twenty miles near
at the epicenter of the detonation. Her house was now
(03:35):
as shambles. The blast ripped the front door off its
hinges and sent it rocketing up the staircase to the
floor above. If she could see, Missus Atkinson might have
despaired at the state of her lounge, littered as it
(03:56):
was with shards of glass and tatters of curtaincloth. 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. People ten, twenty, even thirty miles from
the explosion stopped in their tracks to look in the
(04:19):
direction of Missus Atkinson's village. Flicksborough, teenager Leduena 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. But then we
saw the mushroom cloud, dark and ominous in the sky,
(04:44):
said Ladrena. All laughter in the Beckers household stopped had
World War IREE really begun. I'm Tim Harford and you're
listening to another cautionary tale. You've probably never heard of polycaprolactum,
(05:29):
even by its snappier monica nylon six. But I'll bet
there's some nylon six within arms reach of you right now.
It's used in all manner of items. It makes the
bristles of toothbrushes and the strings of tennis rackets. You
can find it inside almost every electrical gadget, and since
(05:49):
nylon six is used to fashion medical implants, you might
even have some inside you. Nylon six is strong, hard
and tough. It won't conduct electricity and doesn't taint foods
it comes into contact with. It's useful stuff, and it
would be hard to imagine our world without it. Flying
(06:11):
a plane, driving a car, or even getting dressed in
the morning would be a very different proposition without nylon six.
Nylon six was an invention of Nazi Germany. The polymer
was used to make parachute canopies, tires for warplanes, and
the toe ropes of gliders. But nylon six production really
(06:34):
boomed in the post war years, with factories around the
world pumping out the stuff. Depending on where you lived,
it might be marketed as Perlon, Nilotron, ultramid, or Jurathan.
I won't bore you with the details of its manufacture,
but this story centers around the production of caprolactum, from
(06:55):
which nylon six is made. By the nineteen seventies, nylon
six was in huge demand. The fibers were so ubiquitous
that there was even a fashion for people to carpet
their entire homes wall to wall with the stuff. To
meet this clamor, a joint venture was launched by the
Dutch State Mines and the British National Coal Board. There
(07:18):
had been a modest factory at Flicksborough making fertilizer from
the mucky waste from local steel foundries, but now under
the name Nypro, Flicksburg was getting into the glamorous world
of polymers. The plant would be transformed at the cost
of many millions of pounds, and the workforce would swell
(07:41):
into the hundreds. Local newspapers soon filled up with recruitment
ads for chemists, engineers, shorthand typists and canteen staff. It
was expected the complex would use as much power as
a city of half a million people, all to produce
seventy thousand tons of cap prolactum per year. It would
(08:02):
be Britain's biggest, indeed its only caprolactum plant. Nypro was
essentially putting all its eggs in one basket, and to
many this reasoning seemed sound. Building a single mega factory
offered considerable economies of scale. It would simplify transport and logistics,
(08:25):
and allow Nipro to strike bulk buying deals for energy
and raw materials. So in sleepy rural Lincolnshire, on a
curve of the Broad River trend, the Nypro works quickly
took shape. Gargantuan cranes hoisted gleaming steel processing tanks into place.
(08:45):
Chimneys and cooling towers went up, as did tall spindleaf flarestacks.
After dark, their flames, along with countless strings of lights,
picked out the silhouette of the plant against the night sky.
(09:05):
Dennis Lawrence was one of Nipro's employees. He loved the job.
He told his family the plant was just so modern,
so clean, but all was not well at nightprob The
target was to produce seventy thousand tonnes of caprolactum per year,
(09:26):
but by nineteen seventy four. Two years into the expansion,
only forty seven thousand tons were likely to leave the
factory gate. For Nipro to turn a profit, they needed
to make more of the stuff, and quickly. The heart
of the factory was a series of six identical steel
reactor vessels. These cylindrical tanks were installed in a line
(09:49):
and connected by pipework. The first, sixteen foot tall vessel
was the highest in this chain. The second vessel was
placed fourteen inches lower, and so on. Thus gravity would
aid the flow of chemicals from one down to the next,
and the chemical inside was liquid cyclo hexaane, which was pressurized, heated,
(10:14):
and then blasted with compressed air as it traveled through
the vessels. The boss is at Nipro had high hopes
for this part of the plant, but so far its
operation was proving troublesome. Nypro worker Dennis Lawrence confided to
his wife that there had been leaks. She didn't like
(10:34):
the sound of that and worried for his safety. Cyclohexaye is,
after all, an incredibly flammable liquid, and when it escape
since the open air, it tends to vaporize, forming a
deadly combustible cloud. Dennis, a part time firefighter, had told
his wife that if the cyclohexane tanks ever went up,
(10:58):
there'd be no hope for anyone on the site. The
management was alive to these risks. Arriving workers were frisked
for cigarettes and lighters, and the technicians who worked closest
to the chemicals wore special shoes to reduce the risk
of creating a spark. That said, it was feared that
(11:20):
even someone shifting too quickly in a fashionable nylon shirt
could produce enough static charge to ignite an explosion. Naturally,
when a six foot long crack was discovered in the
fifth of the six steel reactor vessels in March nineteen
seventy four, the whole array was immediately closed down and
(11:43):
allowed to cool off. It was swiftly decided that vessel
five 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 five should
have been. This pipe would simply have to be designed
(12:03):
and built on site. No one in authority thought this
close or hazardous decision. They were said to regard it
as no more than a routine plumbing job, but unfortunately
we don't always know what we don't know. A mechanical
engineer might have told them that fabricating such a pipe
(12:26):
was fraught with difficulties. But amongst all the newspaper ads
for cooks and clerks and draftsmen to join the workforce
at Flicksborough, there was also a situation's vacant notice for
a mechanical engineer, and that position had yet to be filled.
(12:48):
Cautionary tales were returned shortly. 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,
(13:11):
you haven't heard the half of it. The existing pipes
carrying pressurized and scalding hot liquid cyclohexane from vessel to
vessel measured twenty eight inches across, but no spare piping
of that size could be found laying around the niproplant.
(13:33):
Instead of delaying the repair to order some a handy
length of twenty inch pipe was substituted, roughly half the
capacity of the original. Pushing the cyclohexane from a broad
pipe into a thinner one creates issues, but some rough
calculations reassured the nprobosses that the smaller pipe could take
(13:56):
the strain. But the original twenty eight inch pipes ran straight,
and by removing React of five, the NPRO workers now
needed its smaller replace to accommodate the considerable drop in
height from vessel four to vessel six, So they gave
(14:18):
the new pipe a dog leg by welding two joints
along its length, So now the pipe ran straight, drop down,
ran straight, a bit more, drop down again, and then
joined React to vessel six. If they'd consulted the relevant
safety standards, the men putting these kinks in the pipe
(14:39):
would have known that their welds weren't up to the task.
For when you force a moving liquid to change direction,
it puts extra strain on the points where your pipe bends.
This is all bad, but we're still not finished. The
forces acting on the pipe's two bends would also cause
(15:02):
a so called turning moment, causing the metalwork to shift
and twist in worrying ways. To counteract these forces, they
need to secure the whole structure firmly. But as they
hoisted their replacement pipe into place, the NYPRO workers merely
perched it on some flimsy scaffolding poles. Each original pipe
(15:26):
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. 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. If the replacement pipe began to
(15:48):
buck and squirm, would these bellows joints just split apart.
A mechanical engineer would immediately have spotted all these dangers,
but there wasn't one on site. A chemical engineer around
the npro operation. He was no doubt highly trained in
his own field, but such was narrow back then and
(16:11):
wouldn't have included even the most basic mechanical concepts. 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 lots more, they were working at breakneck speed
(16:31):
to complete the job. The crack in Vessel five had
been spotted on March the twenty seventh nineteen seventy four.
Once it had been lifted clear, the design, building and
installation of the replacement pipe had taken just thirty hours.
There followed a rather half hearted attempt to test the
(16:54):
dog legged assembly. Gas rather than liquid, was pushed into
the pipe that pressures approximating the normal operation of the system.
The normal operation mine no thought was given to an
abnormal spike in pressure. The system, of course had a
safety valve to release pressure if such a spike became
(17:14):
too much and threatened to burst the vessels and original pipes,
but the replacement pipe was never tested to see if
it would fail before this safety valve kicked in. So
on April fools Day nineteen seventy four, just five days
(17:37):
after the vessel cracked, Flicksburgh was back at work oxidizing
highly flammable cyclohexaane. The management and board of Nipro were
no doubt delighted by this performance. The outward flow of
capro lactum could resume, and so too could the inward
flow of money. Whenever you centralize production, when you put
(18:04):
all your eggs in one basket, as Nipro had, you
can really considerable gains. But this always comes with Risk.
In a recent episode of the new podcast Business History,
host Jacob Goldstein looked at the success of the American
airline Southwest. Southwest began as a budget regional carrier out
(18:27):
of Texas, but it's no Frill's approach soon made it
a major national airline, able to turn a profit each
and every year for forty seven years. That's an unrivaled
feat in the aviation world. One of the secrets to
this success was standardization. While other airlines might have mixed
(18:50):
fleets of Boeing seven for seven jumbo jets or Airbus
A three eighties or smaller short haul aircraft, Southwest has
only really ever operated the Boeing seven three seven. This
made life much easier and cheaper for Southwest. Pilot's, flight
attendants and ground crew only had to learn the foibles
(19:12):
of a single aircraft type. Thus training time was reduced.
When staff went circle planes broke down, substitutions were easier
and flights could continue. But in twenty eighteen came the
first of two deadly crashes involving a Boeing seven three
seven Max. Neither flight was operated by Southwest, but the
(19:36):
authorities grounded all aircraft of that Type seven three seven
maxes made up a third of Southwest's fleet, a crippling
blow to its operation that lost it nearly a billion
dollars in revenue. So what you gain in savings can
be lost in resilience. At Flicksborough, night Pro had discovered
(20:03):
the risks of building one mega factory to make caprolactum.
A single crack to react to vessel had halted production,
disappointing important customers and further delaying the day when the
troubled plant would turn a profit. It's little wander then
that a solution was hurriedly decided upon and a temporary fix,
(20:25):
the bodge together dog leg pipe installed. In fact, Nipro
was so desperate to get back to work that the
cause of the crack in Vessel five wasn't investigated, nor
were the other vessels checked for the signs of any
impending failure. So throughout April and May of nineteen seventy four,
(20:48):
cyclohexane was driven through the oxidizing system without mishap. 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
(21:10):
or workplace. You might well see a fixture or appliance
somewhere that broke and was quickly repaired in a less
an ideal way, Perhaps afraid electrical cable was wrapped up
with adhesive tape, or an important office IT system that
fell over and was brought back online with a temporary
(21:31):
workaround for every complex problem, wrote the essayist h L.
Mencan there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
Mencan had a point. So called band aid solutions are tempting,
but in the long run can prove to be more
(21:52):
damaging than the problems they were meant to solve. Take
the example of patching up an IT system. 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,
and a cheap fix often proves expensive in the longer term.
(22:14):
Bodgies and band aids make it harder to maintain an
IT network, 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 her freyed electric cable
with some tape. Don't here's the advice of the London
(22:37):
Fire Brigade. Always replace faulty leads. Is it worth risking
your loved ones and your home for the sake of
a few pounds. That's exactly the kind of advice Lodwena
Becker's father, who might have endorsed teenage Lduena and her
(22:57):
four brothers remember, were settling down at home on June
the first, nineteen seventy four to watch football on TV.
Their dad, Hohob, was setting off for work at the
night Prop pile, but paused because he noticed something amiss.
Loduena doesn't recall what it was, a rattley door handle perhaps,
(23:18):
or a loose paving stone, but she does remember her
dad stopping immediately to put it right. He was always
meticulous with keeping things in good working order, she said.
The fix completed, who began his slightly delayed drive to
Flicksborough and his plant for Who Becker's was Nightpro's general
(23:42):
manager and the man who had green licked that dog
legged pipe. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
(24:07):
Dennis Lawrence was also on the afternoon shift at Nypro
that sunny June Saturday. It was his term to supply refreshments,
so he'd stopped to pick up some tea and sugar.
Dennis enjoyed the camaraderie of working in the plant's control room.
At forty eight, he was older than the other lads,
who called him Granddad, but he was a popular member
(24:30):
of the team. 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.
He'd weathered some financial difficulties, but had just made the
final repayment on his bankruptcy debts. He was in the
clear at last. The control room was the brains of
(24:54):
the plant, and it never stopped making Capra. Lactam was
a twenty four to seven business, but on a Saturday
there was no need for Nipro's draftsmen, clerks and cooks.
Instead of three hundred workers year, around seventy people were
working across the site. There were men in workshops, storehouses
and laboratories dotted all over the estate. Thomas Crooks, the
(25:19):
security guard, was on duty. A tanker truck driver had
parked up at the factory too. 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. No
inspection was made since the special spark proved tools needed
(25:43):
to work so close to the flammable cyclohexane had been
locked away and couldn't be accessed. 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
(26:04):
to convert cyclohexane into caprolactum. 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
three five PM was fast approaching, so he thought he'd
start on his packed lunch of sandwiches before anyone could
(26:26):
call to report a faulty gauge. It made scant progress
when a noise boomed across the plant, followed by a
whoosh like the approach of an express train. Through the
workshop window, John could see men running into the control
room while others left it with equal urgency. The technician
(26:49):
put down his sandwich and made for the door to
join those fleeing. The first boom John had heard was
the temporary pipe between reactive vessels four and six breaking open.
The woosh that was hots cyclohexane escape into the air
(27:10):
and forming a vast flammable cloud drifting across the chemical works.
It was only a matter of time before this cloud
encountered a spark or flame. You see the explosion before
you hear it, said John, A tsunami of flame coming
(27:31):
towards me at great speed. That's when I screamed, and
then there was a tremendous gust of wind, and I
remember being lifted off the ground and then something hitting
me on the head. When John regained consciousness, the workshop
(27:52):
had collapsed on him. The ceiling was down, the walls
punched in, windows shattered, and the contents of the room
flung around. Fortunately, some sturdy workbenches had withstood the blade
and sheltered the young technician from being crushed. They also
(28:13):
offered him an escape route, a tunnel to exit the building.
Thus began a hellish journey. Every one of John's fingers
had been broken, but on hands and lacerated knees, he
crossed the glass and sharp rubble. I crawled, and I
(28:36):
was screaming, but I couldn't even hear my own screams.
The blast had deafened John. 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. He knew
(29:00):
the layout of the plant, but now stumbled sightless to
an unfamiliar landscape, repeatedly crashing into unexpected obstacles. Disoriented John
most feared plunging into an acid storage pit he knew
was somewhere along his route. Miraculously, he negotiated the catwalk
(29:21):
over the acid pool without tottering in. At that point,
I got hopelessly lost, said John. I stood up a
few times and waved my hands around and shouted for help.
No one answered his card. Blinded and surrounded by raging fires,
(29:43):
a badly wounded technician slumped down in the rubble, defeated.
I just thought I was going to die. John then
felt a hand on his shoulder. On seeing the explosion,
(30:05):
two off duty night pro workers had rushed the plant,
using a broken down door as a stretcher. He carried
John to safety. A volunteer ambulance crew had also hurried
to the disaster, and without anesthetic, began to stitch up
the worst of the many wounds across John's face. They
(30:27):
managed to clean me up as best they could, said John,
who assumed it was just the blood from these cuts
that was obscuring his vision. His injuries would, however, prove
to be life changing. Twenty two year old John Irvin
would never see again. Five miles away, the family of
(30:54):
Dennis Lawrence gazed dumbfounded towards the explosion. Had nypro really
gone up? People were phoning up to say, that's exactly
what had happened. Dennis's daughter, I was sure he'd be fine,
but missus Lawrence had no illusions. Your dad isn't coming back,
(31:19):
she said, calmly, as silence descended on the family home.
She was right, and Dennis wasn't the only fatality. Thomas Crooks,
the security guard, was dead. The visiting tanker driver dead too.
(31:39):
Across the plant, twenty eight people had perished. The toll
was heaviest in the control room, where Dennis had worked.
There were eighteen people in there, none of them survived
and lost with them were all the records of what
happened leading up to the blast. It was estimated that
(32:04):
the cyclo hexayne ignited with the force of around their
tons of TNT, easily the biggest peacetime explosion in British history.
It's a miracle, then, that no one beyond the factory
gates was killed. When farmer Gordon Atkinson arrived home close
(32:26):
to the plant, he found his mother shaken, but thankfully alive.
It was like a ghost village, he said. There were
curtains blowing out of broken windows, roofs lifted and set
back wrong, fire raged on at night, pro for ten
(32:46):
full days, and specialist coal mine rescue teams were drafted
in to recover the buried dead. The 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 counseling in those days, said one micro employee.
(33:09):
You just had to grin and bear it and get on,
and that's what we did. Questions immediately arose about the
wisdom of Nypro building a cap prolactum megaplant, stockpiling such
vast quantities of chemicals on a single site undoubtedly resulted
(33:31):
in the huge scale of the explosion. The shockwaves of
the disaster spread far beyond rural Lincolnshire. With its sole
caprolactum maker reduced to rubble, the already shaky UK economy
tottered too. Vast sums were wiped off the stock market
(33:52):
as chemical companies, textile weavers and carpet makers faced a
draft of raw materials. There was even a run on
nylon stockings in the shops as consumers panic boart ahead
of looming shortages and expected price rises. Hoobe Becker's, the
general manager at Nipro, had missed the explosion by a
(34:15):
few minutes thanks to a decision to stop for a
little bit of DIY before leaving home. He now set
about defending the safety culture at his plant, likening it
to the stringent procedures observed at say, a nuclear power plant.
When a court of inquiry was convened, Hoobe gave detailed
(34:38):
evidence and supplied copious notes about the decision to replace
reactor Vessel five with a temporary pipe. He argued that
all necessary protocols had been followed. The inquiry, though hampered
by the total destruction of data from the control room
(34:59):
concluded that there had been a litany of errors in
the design, construction and installation of that pipe. The integrity
of a well designed and constructed plant was thereby destroyed.
Redit's report. In other words, a cheap band aid solution
(35:20):
had devastated a multi million pound operation, claiming many lives
in the process. 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
(35:41):
new laws. Henceforth, no one could install such a flimsy
pipe and still claim they'd followed the rules. The Flicksburgh
plant was rebuilt, this time with greater attention to safety
and survivability. The control room, for example, would be placed
(36:03):
further from danger and built to withstand any future explosion.
The new boss, same as the old boss, Hooper Becker's,
stayed on as the general manager, and his family remained
in the area. His teenage daughter, Luduena, enrolled in the
local college. Walking into the common room, she noticed another
(36:27):
student in a T shirt. One of his arms was
extremely scarred. She remembers from his hand right up to
the sleeve. Ludweena asked the boy what had happened. His
reply was simple and direct. Your dad's factory did that.
(36:57):
For a full list of our sources, see the show
notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.
It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound
(37:18):
design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise
bend A. Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey,
and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
(37:42):
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review. It really does make a difference to us,
and if you want to hear it, add free and
receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only
newsletter every month. Why not showIn the Cautionary Club. To
sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club.
(38:06):
That's Patreon, p A t r e N dot com
slash cautionary club
Host
Tim Harford
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