Port Talbot
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hiraethified
Some good news for Port Talbot:
www.constructionenquirer.com
McAlpine clinches £1.25bn Port Talbot low carbon steelworks job
Deal to build one of the largest electric arc furnaces in the world
www.constructionenquirer.com
Tankus
Bemused OAP
seen this before ....
Hmm my father was a steel man , started in Llanelli in the stamping mills 1955 , then moved to Port Talbot in 1970 , then Currans in Butetown cardiff for enamels 1975 , died in 1977 (cancer) , probably due toxic shit in the environment he was working .
Took me on a visit at Port Talbot ( I've been to LLanwern too ) as a young un, and we walked the top galleries along the whole mill, from the loading end after the furnaces , to the final roll (about a mile) . every surface was caked in soot ,like black snow , two inches thick if undisturbed , few had masks if not on the mill floor , The noise , the smell the almost subsonic thump of the shaping hammers on the bright glowing ingot, before it gets pulled into the rollers , then the speed of the plate near the end as it cools and gets rolled up , fucking absolute hell. Dante was here......
When the steel works (mills and stamping ) closed in llanelli the place was an absolute bombsite , with a lot of scrap everywhere , when staying with my Grandad in Strady Park as a nipper, we used to cut through the site to get to the beach . The scrap piles would be way above or heads in height . Stradys off to the bottom left of this photo.
Duport expanded their then state of the art electric arc furnaces fed by scrap, mid '70s i think , lauded like a new dawn , the furnace hall was massive.
Thatcher closed them down 1978 and they were thought to be uneconomically unviable , the furnaces were sold to South Africa for a song (no Welsh male voice choirs involved} . and shipped out piece by piece by piece . By an amazing coincidence it was alleged that dear old Dennis had a shit ton of shares related to the receiving company in Africa .
The new plant only ran for a few years . until 1978 ish . Shipping the furnaces out meant the the decision to shut was non reversable (no mothballs if sheet prices went up !)
The whole bombsite got landscaped and clay capped over the years after the 1980's, eventually ending in the millennium park and continuation of the Welsh coastal path . It looks so natural, yet carcinogenic shit lies in wait of someone in the future, to dig a foundation into it.
I suspect this will be Port Talbots ultimate final true future (you cannot really build houses on top of it due to century's of shit from the furnaces and dumping all manner of nasties into pits , which will leech eventually, love canal anyone? ) As that steel will ultimately be non competitive. Probably yet another bloody park cometh, former Welsh pits too , how green were my factories .
A Welsh steel worker gets paid around £40k per year .
How many indians (Tata) or Chinese workers would that cover .???....
Weirdly the beaches from Port Talbot to Merthyr Mawr are pretty good , The sand dunes are spectacular including the the biggest one in Wales (big dipper}
My uncle used to fly radio controlled gliders of the top of that, back in the day.
Photos are not mine , random net stuff
Lol been in this thread 19 years, it may have been one of my first posts here.
45 years later and the story is almost the same, maybe not the nine o'clock news should be put on repeats again , it'll need more verses though.!!
Hmm my father was a steel man , started in Llanelli in the stamping mills 1955 , then moved to Port Talbot in 1970 , then Currans in Butetown cardiff for enamels 1975 , died in 1977 (cancer) , probably due toxic shit in the environment he was working .
Took me on a visit at Port Talbot ( I've been to LLanwern too ) as a young un, and we walked the top galleries along the whole mill, from the loading end after the furnaces , to the final roll (about a mile) . every surface was caked in soot ,like black snow , two inches thick if undisturbed , few had masks if not on the mill floor , The noise , the smell the almost subsonic thump of the shaping hammers on the bright glowing ingot, before it gets pulled into the rollers , then the speed of the plate near the end as it cools and gets rolled up , fucking absolute hell. Dante was here......
When the steel works (mills and stamping ) closed in llanelli the place was an absolute bombsite , with a lot of scrap everywhere , when staying with my Grandad in Strady Park as a nipper, we used to cut through the site to get to the beach . The scrap piles would be way above or heads in height . Stradys off to the bottom left of this photo.
Duport expanded their then state of the art electric arc furnaces fed by scrap, mid '70s i think , lauded like a new dawn , the furnace hall was massive.
Thatcher closed them down 1978 and they were thought to be uneconomically unviable , the furnaces were sold to South Africa for a song (no Welsh male voice choirs involved} . and shipped out piece by piece by piece . By an amazing coincidence it was alleged that dear old Dennis had a shit ton of shares related to the receiving company in Africa .
The new plant only ran for a few years . until 1978 ish . Shipping the furnaces out meant the the decision to shut was non reversable (no mothballs if sheet prices went up !)
The whole bombsite got landscaped and clay capped over the years after the 1980's, eventually ending in the millennium park and continuation of the Welsh coastal path . It looks so natural, yet carcinogenic shit lies in wait of someone in the future, to dig a foundation into it.
I suspect this will be Port Talbots ultimate final true future (you cannot really build houses on top of it due to century's of shit from the furnaces and dumping all manner of nasties into pits , which will leech eventually, love canal anyone? ) As that steel will ultimately be non competitive. Probably yet another bloody park cometh, former Welsh pits too , how green were my factories .
A Welsh steel worker gets paid around £40k per year .
How many indians (Tata) or Chinese workers would that cover .???....
Weirdly the beaches from Port Talbot to Merthyr Mawr are pretty good , The sand dunes are spectacular including the the biggest one in Wales (big dipper}
My uncle used to fly radio controlled gliders of the top of that, back in the day.
Photos are not mine , random net stuff
Lol been in this thread 19 years, it may have been one of my first posts here.
45 years later and the story is almost the same, maybe not the nine o'clock news should be put on repeats again , it'll need more verses though.!!
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farmerbarleymow
I'm Petee's spirit animal
My dad spent years in the chemical industry and died young (cardiac rather than cancer) - no doubt for similar reasons as yours.
Tankus
Bemused OAP
More than a few died before their time, A couple of his work colleagues including his ex boss went in the early 80's ,them being in their early , mid 50's ... ( my father was 44 when he died) ......with wives and family left on shitty shrinking pensions and possibly bad advice given to reduce pension cost to cover the pension black hole enlarging after every fucking buyout and asset strip .
I would not be surprised if that fund got dipped into .
www.fca.org.uk
My mother struggled hard raising us 3 young kids alone as we had not long moved to the valleys away from her friends /support , and she didn't drive . End of the 70,s nursing my father in his final 6 months of life broke her heart and her spirit .
I would not be surprised if that fund got dipped into .
FCA publishes response to British Steel Pension Scheme complaints
We've been investigating a number of complaints, under our complaints scheme, about our actions or inactions in relation to the British Steel Pension Scheme (BSPS).
My mother struggled hard raising us 3 young kids alone as we had not long moved to the valleys away from her friends /support , and she didn't drive . End of the 70,s nursing my father in his final 6 months of life broke her heart and her spirit .
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farmerbarleymow
I'm Petee's spirit animal
My dad always said he wouldn't make old bones. Yeah, I think you're probably right that the mortality rate of those working in heavy industries must have been higher than the population average. Some residential areas in Teesside where I grew up had quite shocking life expectancy figures back in the day - but I don't know if that's improved since.
Glad I moved away as soon as I could - can't be good for you breathing in all that shit in the air from these sort of sites.
Tankus
Bemused OAP
Yep , I suppose I'm a case in point . I had asthma when I was young , had a few weeks in neath hospital with pneumonia , must haven been around 9 yrs , (scary as a nipper) our local GP advised my parents to move away for us childrens health (2 younger sisters ), so my father changed jobs to the ' diff (Curran enamel and stamping ) and we moved up to the valleys and fresh air . Might be the reason why covid hit me so hard last year and stuck with me .
Ironically as I reached my mid teens, my local watering hole was a miners pub .Some of the old boys . they would struggle to get to the bar ,breathing hard with pneumoconiosis -miners black lung . (the colliery and some of the houses were up the hill in Bedwas, bit of a stretch ) while my breathing improved. .
Thatcher followed us there too , 1984/5 the mine was closed , about 9 months into the strike (from what I remember )
It was a combination of thatcher and the unions . It was originally agreed at the start of the strike (a majority vote to remain in ) that the mine would remain crewed during the strike in order to keep the pumps running and prevent full flooding ( If the mine flooded it would be game over as the deep mine would get irreparable damage and collapses ) A bus load of unioners came down from yorkshire and the taff (not too sure) , and blocked access to the pit (cries of Scabs ) so the line wouldn't be crossed , mainitence stopped , flooding and mine collapse followed as predicted .It never reopened after the strike , the damage was uneconomically beyond recovery , and the attached coking plant , losing its supply, closed not long after . jobs gone from there too .
The them and us in the village was something else , It was never very heavily unionised .
There's still around an estimated half a century's worth of reserves still down there . It was one of the navigation collieries with very high purity anthracite .
Another life now .
lol ...Im reminiscing like an old fart tonight ,another sleepless night ...ah well
Ironically as I reached my mid teens, my local watering hole was a miners pub .Some of the old boys . they would struggle to get to the bar ,breathing hard with pneumoconiosis -miners black lung . (the colliery and some of the houses were up the hill in Bedwas, bit of a stretch ) while my breathing improved. .
Thatcher followed us there too , 1984/5 the mine was closed , about 9 months into the strike (from what I remember )
It was a combination of thatcher and the unions . It was originally agreed at the start of the strike (a majority vote to remain in ) that the mine would remain crewed during the strike in order to keep the pumps running and prevent full flooding ( If the mine flooded it would be game over as the deep mine would get irreparable damage and collapses ) A bus load of unioners came down from yorkshire and the taff (not too sure) , and blocked access to the pit (cries of Scabs ) so the line wouldn't be crossed , mainitence stopped , flooding and mine collapse followed as predicted .It never reopened after the strike , the damage was uneconomically beyond recovery , and the attached coking plant , losing its supply, closed not long after . jobs gone from there too .
The them and us in the village was something else , It was never very heavily unionised .
There's still around an estimated half a century's worth of reserves still down there . It was one of the navigation collieries with very high purity anthracite .
Another life now .
lol ...Im reminiscing like an old fart tonight ,another sleepless night ...ah well
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davesgcr
Reading books
An excellent thread - one I can relate to as being from industrial South Wales , - well done and great photos.
nogojones
spelling is overrated
When I was having chemo, there was only 12 of us tubed up at a time in the room where they delivered chemo for hematology, but of those 12, three of us used to work in the same steel mill.
Anecdotal, but still a pretty eye opening observation
