Twenty-five years ago today, an explosion at No 5 blast furnace at Port Talbot steelworks killed three men and seriously injured 12 more.
Andrew Hutin was 20 and Stephen Galsworthy was 25, both from Port Talbot. Len Radford, 53, was from Maesteg.
This week Stephen Kinnock, the Labour MP for Aberafan Maesteg and Secretary of State for Wales, laid a wreath at the memorial site at the works.
He called the explosion “one of the darkest days in our community’s history”.
Mr Kinnock said he was also thinking of the 12 workers who suffered serious injuries, and of the “families, friends and colleagues whose lives were changed forever by the events of that day”.
Of the three men who died, he added: “They will always be in our thoughts.”
What happened inside No 5 blast furnace on 8 November 2001
The furnace, then run by Corus, exploded on the afternoon of 8 November 2001. Water had got in and met molten material in its lower section, causing a sudden build-up of pressure, according to a summary by the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
The blast lifted the top of the furnace, around 5,000 tonnes, about 0.75 metres before it fell back out of line. Around 200 tonnes of hot material was thrown onto the cast house floor.
Two of the furnace’s three safety-critical cooling water pumps had failed about 20 hours earlier, the summary says, and water leaking through cooling elements was spotted and dealt with late.
Corus fined £1.3m at Swansea Crown Court over the three deaths
Corus pleaded guilty to two health and safety offences. In December 2006 it was fined £1.3m at Swansea Crown Court and ordered to pay £1.74m in costs.
Terry Rose, then head of the Health and Safety Executive in Wales, blamed “systematic corporate management failure at the Port Talbot works”.
The company maintained the explosion was neither foreseen nor foreseeable, which the prosecution accepted, it was reported at the time.
Kinnock calls for the highest standards of safety in every workplace
Mr Kinnock said the anniversary was a time to “reaffirm the importance of ensuring the highest possible standards of safety for workers in every workplace”.
Safety at the works is back before the courts. Last month a jury found Tata Steel guilty after two steelworkers breathed in gas during a blast furnace emergency in 2022, and sentencing is due on 8 December.
Port Talbot shut down its last blast furnace in September 2024.
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