Phosphate Rocks Chapter 29: The Blinding

On the day of the accident, a hard frost had set in. 

Willy was writing his log in the control room when an alarm sounded from the panel. He checked the readings and traced the problem back to a low flow of concentrated acid to the dilution plant. 

Willy put on his donkey jacket, stepped outside and shivered. The pump was running, the motor whirring, the inlet and outlet valves wide open and yet the pressure gauge was reading zero, so it was not unnatural to assume, given the peculiar freezing point curve of oleum, that there might be a blockage in the pipe. 

Willy did what any self-respecting process operator at the time would have done: he found a steam hose and a hammer. When the pipe split and the concentrated sulphuric acid encountered Willy’s eyes, the first burn was a chemical burn. The proteins and lipids in his living tissue were destroyed by amide and ester hydrolysis. The second burn was a thermal burn. The strong acid absorbed the moisture from his eyes, liberating heat. Willy couldn’t distinguish the chemical burn from the thermal burn. All he could do was scream. 

John heard the commotion from inside the shift manager’s office. At first it was a howl of shock rather than pain: those cries would come later. John put down his mug of tea, dropped his half-eaten Tunnock’s caramel wafer and ran towards the noise. He was second on the scene. Roger was already there; he had pulled Willy to the safety shower and was holding him down. John took in the situation with one glance and walked swiftly past them to the sulphuric acid plant office. He calmly phoned Alec, the gateman, and told him to call an ambulance and declare an emergency in that order. He put on the rubber gloves that Willy kept in his donkey jacket and armed himself with the eyewash bottle from the lab. He shouted at Roger to hold on to Willy as he embraced them in the outdoor shower. Willy wouldn’t open his eyes, so Roger had to pin him to the wall while John forced his eyelids apart to irrigate them.  

It was too late. The acid had attacked the cornea, and where his eyes had once been clear blue with dark pupils, they were now completely white and opaque. 

They saved his life, however. Willy cursed them for that during months of pain in one hospital after another. His complete blindness spared him the awful sight of his scarred face and body. He could only feel the ridges of the scar tissue and the edges of the skin grafts with the pinkie of his left hand. His other fingertips, burned as he tried to remove his acid-soaked clothes, would never recover any feeling. 

The investigation into what had happened focused on Willy’s failure to follow procedure. He should not have hit the frozen oleum pipe with a hammer. Furthermore, if he was intent on clearing a blockage, he should have worn personal protective equipment; he definitely should not have approached the problem without goggles, a face shield, an acid suit, rubber boots and gloves. His unprotected eyes and flesh should not have been anywhere near when the pipe tore and the spray from a tsunami of concentrated sulphuric acid engulfed him. 

Tall Willy was still supervising carpenters in Aberdeen at the time of the accident. Otherwise he might have inspected the torn pipe more closely and noticed a clean tear along the bottom, nowhere near where Willy had thwacked it, almost as if someone had taken a knife to butter. He would have measured the thickness of the mild steel pipe and seen that it was thick at the top and paper thin at the bottom. 

He would have scratched his head, looked up and noticed the long red rubber hose that ran from the tank farm, up over the oleum piping to the phosphoric acid reactor. He might not have realised its critical contribution to optimising gypsum crystal growth, but he would have moved away because of the steady stream of water leaking from the hose where a sulphur lorry once ran over it. He would have marvelled at the bad luck that allowed the leak to be positioned so the water ran into the vent from the oleum pump pressure relief valve. He would have followed the slope of the vent pipe and realised that the water could have pooled in a section of pipe, reacted with the oleum to form dilute sulphuric acid and chomped through the mild steel in a matter of minutes. 

He would have confirmed his thesis that there never was a blockage by stripping the pump and discovering that the impeller had completely corroded away. The pressure gauge showed zero not because it was U/S, but because there was no pressure. 

The contract pipe fitter who replaced the section of piping between pump and absorber did report the shocking state of the horizontal sections of piping. He was told by his boss to shut up and get on with it. The boss wasn’t all bad: he did help the crew move the bloody hose that was spraying water all over them as they worked. 

The shift fitter who overhauled the oleum pump before the acid plant could restart was bemused as to where the impeller had gone. But no one read the shift fitter’s report that he’d had to replace it, and no one thought to connect this fact to the accident. 

Blind Willy took all the blame. 

One year after the last of the skin grafts and two years after the accident, Blind Willy was back at work. His wife drove him in. Every morning she tidied his hair, prematurely white from the shock, and straightened his shirt collar. Every morning he stroked her face with the pinkie of his left hand, and she kissed his scarred face in return. She handed him his white stick as he got out of the car and waited patiently while he shuffled past the barrier, tapping to find the door to the gatehouse. She would not leave until she saw him seated at his chair in a spot that would catch the early morning sun. Alec would wave to her as he set down a cup of tea in front of Blind Willy, and then she would leave for the bakery where she worked. 

Blind Willy was grateful that the bosses kept him on. He sat at the window of the gatehouse, answered the phone and operated a switchboard specially modified for him. The men saw his scars as they came in: the best safety campaign a factory ever had.