Lost

Lost! 12 Tons of Steel

In the 1950s, Sandy Water Park was a hive of activity with steel works, sheet mills and foundries belching out fumes, heat, steam and smoke. As the swans swim serenely on the lake it is hard to imagine men in dark clothes sweltering in the heat as they produced steel for the metal industries.

Cliff Rees had worked his way up in the foundry to chargehand and Gerald Grant loved to relate the tale about the night the men were waiting for the steel to reach the correct temperature in the open hearth furnace. As they did not get paid to stand around doing nothing, they decided to take their meal break and retired to their hut to eat their sandwiches and refresh themselves with the tea from their billy cans.

When they returned to the open hearth furnace, to their dismay they found the furnace had cracked and the molten steel was missing. Where had their night’s work gone? Sandy, as its name suggests, is near the water and the land on which the foundry was built was marshy. The red hot molten steel simply seeped into the boggy ground forming a 12 ton slab of steel somewhere below the surface.

If anyone in the Sandy Water Park has cause to use a compass, or sensitive electronic equipment, it will not be surprising if their readings are somewhat adrift!

Another question begs to be answered ‘How did the manager explain to his superiors that the shift had “lost” the 12 tons of red hot molten steel, which had vanished without trace?’