‘Fire and devastation’: 50 years on from the Flixborough disaster what’s changed?

‘You’ve never seen so much devastation in your life unless you’ve been to a war zone,’ recalls Dave Roberts. He was just 21 years old when the 1974 Flixborough disaster occurred and eight months into his training to be a plant operator at the Nypro plant at the centre of the tragedy. ‘If it had happened on a weekday, I’m guessing there would have been nearly 200 [fatalities],’ he says. ‘That time of day, just before five o’clock, all the engineers would be leaving the workshops and walking through the plant.’

Fifty years have now passed since the devastating explosion close to the sleepy village of Flixborough in North Lincolnshire that killed 28 employees and injured a further 36. Deemed the UK’s worst mainland process plant disaster, the event left a lasting legacy on the chemical industry and drove forward improvements in process safety.

‘It is still one of the prime examples we use in our teaching because as far as the UK is concerned – in terms of loss of life – it is probably Britain’s worst on-shore industrial accident, other than mining disasters, going back a couple of centuries,’ explains Robert Skelton, a chemical engineering undergraduate supervisor at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge.

Following an extensive investigation, it was concluded that the Flixborough disaster was the result of a modification to a reactor that was carried out with little thought as to the potential consequences.