Remembering Flixborough: 50 years on from one of the chemical industry’s deadliest disasters

Fifty years ago, at 4.53pm on Saturday 1 June a devastating explosion levelled a chemical plant near the small village of Flixborough, not far from Scunthorpe. The explosion killed 28 people working at the Nypro plant and seriously injured 36 more. Two hundred houses were destroyed and another 1000 damaged, with the blast heard 30 miles away in Doncaster and Grimsby.

The explosion was the result of an improperly constructed bypass on a reactor. The Nypro plant was using cyclohexane to produce caprolactam – a commodity chemical mostly turned into nylon. When the bypass pipeline broke, tonnes of cyclohexane leaked out and ignited, resulting in a fireball that rose hundreds of feet into the air.

Details of the disaster that came from one employee of the Nypro plant that Chemistry World spoke to still make for harrowing reading all these years later. For some the memories are still too raw and they declined to talk to us.