Redcar Blast Furnace demolition

The mighty Blast Furnace at Redcar is to be demolished using explosives.

BBC Breakfast will be showing it live at 09.00, no doubt many other sources as well.

I have many memories of sitting on the beach as a child with roar of that plus the bitingly cold wind when visiting relatives in the North East.

Edited By V8Eng on 23/11/2022 08:42:31

I remember going to Skinningrove rolling mill with about forty other nine year olds in the mid forties.We were staying at Staithes on school holiday

Imagine today a group of youngsters on the rolling mill floor watching them making railway rails, no hard hats or safety boots

Happy days (and they were)

Roy

Oh bother !! [or words to that effect] … I missed it.

But ‘the Independent’ has video here: **LINK**

https://apple.news/AFqWcDm0ATbesXG-TODeAKw

MichaelG.

Another bit of UK history gone

They've pretty much erased every splinter of our past and yet tourism is the industry of the future

Industrial sites that built the modern world, battleships old and new, railway stuff etc etc etc, all vanished

They were going to scrap HMY Britannia when a small group of people in Scotland said "we'll have it!"

Anybody watching this should keep an eye on what happens to the tall chimney fairly close to the demolition!

Edited By V8Eng on 23/11/2022 13:03:03

Hi V8Eng, yes, I noticed it moved a little bit from being vertical but seeing how far a London double-decker bus will tilt before it topples and putting things into proportion, I guess it won't topple anytime soon, well unless there are really high winds in the wrong direction.

Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 23/11/2022 13:57:30

When the local school children came to Bilston Steel Works spotting the yellow hard hats the rolling mill crew would always put on a display for them the 40" mill being the best as the ingot approached the rolls the ingot skin was termed 'wet' so the crew would squeeze the rolls tighter than normal so as the ingot entered the rolls there was a spectacular display as the outer skin of the ingot exploded up into the roof.

H

Michael thanks for the link and though I wasn't aa fan of Redcar it's always sad to see a blast furnace fall

H

It's only been there since the seventies - it's not old, just out of date. Hardly heritage material.

There's hardly a sign that they ever made steel in Ravenscraig either, nothing to nothing in my lifetime.

After my one visit to Redcar all I can say is they could do with more of the same!

At least it did fall over unlike the chimney at Milford Haven a couple of years ago. They blew the whole bottom out of the stack so all it did was drop a few metres and stayed mostly upright. Ended up using half a million quids worth of remote controlled demolition robot to knock the base out with the operator over a quarter of a mile away using binoculars, until it eventually went over

dragon-lng-cogen-stack-finally-demolished/.

I was an apprentice Instrument Artificer back in 1970 in my tech college class there were students from three main companies. ICI Billingham. ICI Wilton and British Steel. God knows how many people were employed in there three massive sites. It must have been over 40,000 + Where have all these jobs gone ?

What a shame, in the sense of lost industry. I was at Redcar as a site engineer while they were building the site. I installed the first plant monitoring computer for the furnace - 13 6-ft high cabs which were hoisted in by crane because there was no lift!

There were once over a thousand men on site but when I visited again several years later there were just 16.

I wonder if the second furnace is still there. It was on the same train as the Redcar furnace but was destined for Llanwern. The contract was cancelled before it got there so they rolled it into a ditch. I did find an old site engineer who admitted his brother was trying to sell it to Mexico.

Chris

Edited By Chris Gill on 23/11/2022 21:14:24

ICI Wilton and Billingham are still there, as are most of the jobs...

It's now "Wilton International" and whilst Billingham has merged into the wider "Seal Sands Complex" (The big obvious bit is now CF fertilisers) with the plants split between 20+ owners, which is it's own kind of stupid, coming from where it was but the North East is still going strong when it comes to chemicals...

How else do you think the North East manages to have the highest exports of any region of the UK, there's only so much demand for Nissan's and Black (or Red) and White Striped football shirts!

ICI Wilton and Billingham are still there, as are most of the jobs? How many people are employed over the two sites ? 2000 or 20000. Look at area view of both sites, Most of the plants have been raised to the ground. My last plant. Ammonia 4 is possible still there nothing else remains. ICI Nitram now CF fertilisers is hanging by a thread because of it's biproduct CO2

Yeah ... like you I mourn the passing of The Tower of London, Edinburgh Castle,
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (my wife can actually say it) etc.

At least hyperbole has survived

The BBC in the 50's- 60's had film of a tall chimney being (expertly) demolished with explosives. They put it on quite frequently and ran it forward, backward and slo-mo. It was very popular in its day.

Edited By Peter Greene 🇨🇦 on 23/11/2022 22:15:32

Ady 1 , well said mate !.

Shant comment on this destruction because it will definitely involve bad swear words.....

Going to the beach sounds like a whole different experience from mine in Australia!

From what I have seen you are correct in that assumption!
I was a 50% London 50% Northern heritage lad sitting on the wind blown beach in my trunks then striding down into the bitterly cold sea, mostly so the northern granddad would not classify me as one of his “southern softies”
I shiver at the thought even now!

Several decades ago I took my then new (southerner) wife on holiday in the tees area and met a few of the relatives, we drove past the steelworks one evening when a very long glowing chunk of metal was moving along a few feet above ground.

To this day she still remembers the sight and speaks of it if steelworks are mentioned.

Edited By V8Eng on 23/11/2022 23:43:55

According to NEPIC, the chemicals sector in the north East (from Morpeth to Middlesborough) employs 190,000 people directly, and there are 1,400 additional companies in the region (mostly engineering and engineering services) supported as part of the wider supply chain.

Regardless of whether Wilton itself has grown or shrunk (or is growing again), that's a lot of skilled jobs retained in an area which has otherwise haemorrhage opportunity for a good while.

FWIW I know of more than £100M of investment in scaling up of chemicals production on teesside which has happened in the last 12 months alone spread across 4 organisations, so the industry has a future there.