The Factory That Was Wiped Off The Map (From Cautionary Tales)

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1:37Pushkin. Too quick? No, it was perfect. Pushkin. Stop. You got it. Hey, it's Jacob. Business history is on a break this week, so we're going to play you an episode of another Pushkin show called Cautionary Tales. The show is hosted by the great Tim Harford, and this episode is the story of a factory. In particular, the story of what seemed like a small thing leading eventually to a terrible disaster.

2:09Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. Sparsely populated and largely rural, few great moments of history have been made here. Large towns are also few. 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. The county is famed for something, though. Being flat. And that flatness has given Lincolnshire a geopolitical significance. It's perfect for air bases. Attention! Attention! Attention! This is an operation alert. Scramble! Scramble! Scramble! In the early summer of 1974, Lincolnshire is home to V-Force, the RAF.

3:09The giant Vulcan bombers screaming up this long runway are part of Britain's nuclear deterrent. 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-Marx-Stadt, Minsk or Moscow in retaliation.

3:34The Vulcan pilots would doubtless have much on their minds given the mission ahead, but few wasted time in thinking of their return home. A quite reasonable assumption is that the Russians would pulverise 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 him to look up from his lavers 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 across northern Lincolnshire.

4:29And 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, 20 miles nearer the epicentre of the detonation. Her house was now a shambles.

4:53The blast ripped the front door off its hinges and sent it rocketing up the staircase to the floor above. If she could see, Mrs Atkinson might have despaired at the state of her lounge, littered as it was with shards of glass and tatters of curtain cloth. 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 10, 20, even 30 miles from the explosion stopped in their tracks to look in the direction of Mrs Atkinson's village, Flicksborough. Teenager Ludwina Beckers was watching the football on TV with her four brothers.

5:44Rushing 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, said Ludwina. All laughter in the Becker's household stopped. Had World War III really begun? I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to another Cautionary Tale.

6:37You'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. It makes the bristles of toothbrushes and the strings of tennis rackets. You can find it inside almost every electrical gadget. And since Nylon 6 is used to fashion medical implants, you might even have some inside you. Nylon 6 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.

7:23Flying a plane, driving a car, or even getting dressed in the morning would be a very different proposition without Nylon 6. 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. But nylon 6 production really 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, Nylatron, Ultramid, or Durathan. 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.

8:09By the 1970s, 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. To meet this clamour, a joint venture was launched by the Dutch State Mines and the British National Coal Board. There had been a modest factory at Flixborough making fertiliser from the mucky waste from local steel foundries. But now, under the name NYPRO, Flixborough 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 into the hundreds.

8:55Local 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 70 ,000 tonnes of caprolactam per year. It would be Britain's biggest, indeed its only, caprolactam plant. Nipro was essentially putting all its eggs in one basket and to many this reasoning seems sound building a single megafactory offered considerable economies of scale it would simplify transport and logistics 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 Trent the Nipro works quickly took shape.

9:52Gargantuan cranes hoisted gleaming steel processing tanks into place. 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.

10:17Dennis 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 Nipro. The target was to produce 70 ,000 tonnes of caprolactam per year, but by 1974, two years into the expansion, only 47 ,000 tonnes 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 and connected by pipework. The first 16-foot-tall vessel was the highest in this chain.

11:08The second vessel was placed 14 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 cyclohexane, which was pressurised, heated, and then blasted with compressed air as it travelled through the vessel. The bosses 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 the sound of that and worried for his safety. Cyclohexane is, after all, an incredibly flammable liquid and when it escapes into the open air it tends to vaporise, forming a deadly combustible cloud.

12:02Dennis, 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 The management was alive to these risks Arriving workers were frisked for cigarettes, matches 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 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 1974, the whole array was immediately closed down and allowed to cool off.

12:56It 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 5 should have been. This pipe would simply have to be designed and built on site. 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. 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. 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.

14:00Cautionary tales will return shortly.

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17:22The 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. The existing pipes, carrying pressurised and scalding hot liquid cyclohexane from vessel to vessel, measured 28 inches across. But no spare piping of that size could be found laying around the Nipro plant. Instead of delaying the repair to order some, a handy length of 20-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 NYPRO bosses that the smaller pipe could take the strain.

18:20But the original 28-inch pipes ran straight, and by removing Reactor 5, the NYPRO workers now needed its smaller replacement to accommodate the considerable drop in height from Vessel 4 to Vessel 6. So they gave the new pipe a dogleg 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. 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. For when you force a moving liquid to change direction, it puts extra strain on the points where your pipe bends.

19:13This is all bad. But we're still not finished. 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. 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 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.

20:08If the replacement pipe began to 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 ran the Nipro operation, 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. 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. What's more, they were working at breakneck speed to complete the job.

20:55The crack in Vessel 5 had been spotted on March 27, 1974. Once it had been lifted clear, the design, building and installation of the replacement pipe had taken just 30 hours. There followed a rather half-hearted attempt to test the dog-legged assembly. 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. 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. But the replacement pipe was never tested to see if it would fail before this safety valve kicked in.

21:52So, on April Fool's Day 1974, just five days after the vessel cracked, Flixborough was back at work oxidising highly flammable cyclohexane. 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.

22:23Whenever you centralise production, when you put all your eggs in one basket as Nipro had, you can realise 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 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. That's an unrivaled feat in the aviation world. One of the secrets to this success was standardisation. 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.

23:25This 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. When staff went sick or planes broke down, substitutions were easier and flights could continue. But in 2018 came the first of two deadly crashes involving a Boeing 737 MAX. Neither flight was operated by Southwest, but the authorities grounded all aircraft of that type. 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. So, what you gain in savings can be lost in resilience.

24:22At Flixborough, Nipro had discovered the risks of building one mega-factory to make caprolactam. A single cracked reactor vessel had halted production, disappointing important customers and further delaying the day when the troubled plant would turn a profit. It's little wonder, then, that a solution was hurriedly decided upon and a temporary fix the bodged-together dog-leg pipe installed. 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. So, throughout April and May of 1974, cyclohexane was driven through the oxidising system without mishap.

25:16The 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. 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 or an important office IT system that fell over and was brought back online with a temporary workaround. For every complex problem, wrote the essayist H.L. Mencken, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Mencken had a point.

26:08So-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. 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. Bodges 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 a frayed electric cable with some tape, don't.

26:58Here's the advice of the London Fire Brigade. Always replace faulty leads. Is it worth risking your loved ones and your home for the sake of a few pounds?

27:12That's exactly the kind of advice Ludwina Becker's father, Hoob, might have endorsed. Teenage Ludwina and her four brothers, remember, were settling down at home on June 1st, 1974, to watch football on TV. Their dad, Hoob, was setting off for work at the Nipro plant, but paused because he noticed something amiss. Ludwina doesn't recall what it was, a rattly door handle, perhaps, 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 Flixborough and his plan.

28:01For who Beckers was Nipro's general manager and the man who'd green-lit that dog-legged pipe? Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.

28:26Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.