I have no idea what it's like to work in a foundry, but I learned one thing from the video below: if the metal you dump in the furnace is wet from rain or whatever, that water will expand explosively the moment it hits the furnace. The guy driving the forklift is lucky to be alive. If you watch this video directly on YouTube, you can see a bunch of insightful comments regarding what happened. One foundry worker commented that, at his place of work, this sort of thing happened more than once. I hope these workers get hazard pay. More important, I hope they learn some foundry-related common sense.
I briefly worked in a foundry (Teledyne Cast Products) after high school. I'd pretty much forgotten that experience until reading your post this morning. Our plant made aluminum parts for jet engines, so it wasn't really like the one in the video. My job was monitoring the temperature of vats of molten aluminum (the parts had to be cast at a specified heat level). Working around those giant pots of liquid metal was hot work, and I always imagined what would happen if it were to spill or splash while I was doing my thing. I didn't cry too much when I was let go...
ReplyDelete