Friday, 23 November 2018

Your Worst Nightmare Writ Large

There are some stories that are so horrific that you can't actually imagine them, except perhaps in the worst of your nightmares or the horror movies.

The Furnace - Too Much For Me To Watch ....

One of my perennial nightmare fears as a boy, was being threatened with immersion in hot lava or liquid metal, or trapped in an oven or furnace.

I couldn't watch documentary films at school (yes, we had those back in the day), of steel workers pouring hot molten steel into moulds, without a horrified shudder, as the 'what would happen if they drop it ...?' thought, passed my over-active imagination, as it, like Elvis, left the building!

Recently I saw the latest Conan the Barbarian version from 2011, in which the young Conan has to try (unsuccessfully) to stop a bucket of molten metal pouring over his father .... I felt uncomfortable even watching that reasonably non-graphic scene i.e. you didn't really see it happening in the film, even though there was plenty of graphic violence in the rest of the movie.

So imagine my shudder when I saw that this had really happened to someone. A night-worker at a refinery in Northfleet, Kent, England, was doused from head to toe with molten metal (Either Lead or Silver), in a refinery which uses a high temperature furnace, in a terrible accident. His work colleagues rushed him under a shower to cool the metal before the ambulance arrived, but he was in a critical life threatening condition with multiple deep burns.

Once I started to research this story, all my worst fears from childhood were realised. Being killed in a furnace, or having molten metals poured over you, are in fact a fairly common form of death .... just proving that my childhood fears were very well grounded.

I won't go into the gory details, but here's a few links for those of you who think that Saw 1 to the Eighth Saw movie were entertaining films.
 
One steelworker died and nine were in hospital after a blast furnace fire at the Corus steel plant in Port Talbot, South Wales, in November 2001. Witnesses reported hearing explosions at the No 5 furnace shortly after 6pm. Corus confirmed that there had been a serious escape of molten iron with some of the injured having severe burns.

Furnace Deaths - Akron

Jose Webster, took his wife, Karla Ramos, and their two children to his place of work, in Akron, and authorities suspect he forced his wife into an industrial furnace before getting in it himself, killing both in a murder-suicide. There apparently was a struggle, before Karla Ramos was put into the furnace and killed, the county medical examiner's office said. The children were not hurt. Police and medical examiners said no additional details were available which is probably good!

Patrycjusz Handzel, was working a night-shift as a melter at Transition International's factory in Sheffield in March 2007 when he suffered 80% burns in a furnace explosion. He died in hospital three days later from multiple organ failure.

A contract steel worker was repairing and reassembling a massive steel furnace when he got trapped at the Gerdau Ameristeel plant at the corner of Lakeview Road and Old Statesville Road in north Charlotte. The contractor died and a co-worker who was trying to help him was injured shortly after 5:30 a.m. in December 2008. Fire-fighters said responding to such incidents was challenging and disturbing for them.

Mr Catterall a factory worker died from severe burns when he became trapped in an industrial oven, at Pyranha Mouldings Ltd in Runcorn, England in December 2010. Another worker, who was due to marry the dead man's daughter, turned the oven on, not realising Mr Catterall had gone inside.

In Dubai, police investigated the cause behind the death of two workers who burnt to death inside a large furnace at an aluminium factory in Jebel Ali in August 2018.

2 comments:

  1. A chip shop owner has been charged with killing his wife with boiling fat from the fryer in their chip shop in Hermon, Carmarthenshire, Wales. It happens all the time mate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll take your word for this ... I don't want to dwell on this subject. Thanks for the comment.

      Delete

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