• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Explosion at IMI, Witton late 1960;s

bear & ragged staff

Brummie babby
My dad, Jack Keirl, worked at Kyoch, ICI and IMI at Witton all of his working life retiring in 1979. He started in 'Lightning Fastener' and moved on to IMI working on the titanium furnaces. These furnaces were housed in an odd shaped purposely built building. A problem occurred one day in the mid to late sixties when the coolant to one of the furnaces ceased to flow, resulting in a serious explosion. My recollection is that the explosion found a weak point in the building and split it in half, the blast escaped through the split and removed roof tiles and blew windows in on houses hundreds of yards away. My dad and his colleague, Wilf Winter, were lucky not to be seriously injured if not worse. The building was repaired by rejoining the two halves of the building with a metal band.
I no longer live in Birmingham and try to relate this story to others and I think they believe I am pulling their leg. Can anybody point me in the right direction to find details or better still a picture of the above. Many Thanks.
 
A very informative thread exists:
 
The official history of IMI seems to contain no mention of this incident as far as I can tell (the book lacks a detailed index which makes finding anything rather a pain). But possibly not surprising if it didn't involve loss of life or serious injury, unlike the 1973 explosion in the ammunition area which is well documented. I have a note of a new vacuum furnace being commissioned in 1968 but whether this was the result of an earlier disaster, whether it was this new equipment which was the problem or whether it was all something separate, I don't know.

I would have thought that a major incident like this would have merited a report in the local press. Do please let us know if you learn anything more.

Chris
 
We lived not far from IMI Witton, and I do remember that titanium-plant explosion as well as the later ammunition one. My late father was employed as an installation and maintenance electrician for Birlec Furnaces Ltd, and I know he did some work on furnaces in the IMI titanium plant. He liked working at IMI as he could walk home for lunch! Whether he was actually involved in the original installation of the furnaces, or sent in to assist in the post-explosion repair, I can't remember. I have a vague memory of the whole thing being kept a bit quiet at the time. Much later, and not long before the titanium plant closed, I worked for a company that supplied production material for the plant. My contact there was called Alan Bratt, if I recall.

G
 
An online search of Birmingham papers for the period using search term s IMI, Witton and explosion gave no relevant results
 
Hi there, I created this account because I was talking to my mom (Susan Lusher) about this blast that happened in 1973 and well, she was in it, thankfully as one of the survivors. My mom had only been working at IMI since the start of 73 and she worked in Sporting loading. Her office was the 2nd office from the machine shop based in the packing department, literally next door to the hopper that went off.

She described when the blast went off (the clock above the opening that went into the machine shop stopped at 11:27), she felt a blast of warm air and can remember bricks, plaster, concrete and dust on her desk when she looked up. She didn't hear the blast at all. She remembers looking up where the roof should be only to see sky, not to mention the pallets, boxes, debris and anything else falling from the sky in slow motion. She also remembers trying a work colleague was sitting at her desk still on the phone (probably in shock) and had told her to get out. She couldn't open the door because another colleague (Queenie, possibly a nickname?) was on the floor in front of the door blocking it. She'd just left the office as the blast went off. Eventually my mom managed to get out with minor cuts and bruises. She was one of the lucky ones.

From what I can gather, the contractor who was working on the machine wasn't working upstairs (I've read elsewhere this was probably the case) but was working on the ground floor same as my mom, just in the machine shop. Where he was working, there would have been residue of gunpowder which he should have cleared but didn't. She mentioned there were two machines that had pipes that led up to the hopper on the floor above. The sparks from the drill would have set off a chain reaction igniting the gunpowder around the first machine that went up the pipe to the hopper and the blast went down the second tube to the second machine which sent that through the floor to the basement. Unfortunately the operator on that second machine was Patricia Harris. She was killed instantly.

I've attached an still from a video that shows the office my mom was working in at the time.
 

Attachments

  • IMI.png
    IMI.png
    836.5 KB · Views: 52
Found an old satellite image from 1999, a few years before the whole place got flattened to make way for new units. You can clearly see the whole machine shop was demolished and never built upon.
 

Attachments

  • IMI2.png
    IMI2.png
    1.1 MB · Views: 35
Lusher - have a look at the 1961 site images I posted here: https://birminghamhistory.co.uk/forum/index.php?threads/kynoch-works-witton-1961-images.41872/

Are the buildings you are talking about visible on these?

Chris
Image 4. Far right middle, just above the bunch of foliage and trees. Long row of buildings. That's the only picture that faces that general direction from where the photos were taken from.

After much deliberation, I'm convinced it was Sporting loading. There are no other buildings in that area behind trees and bushes that face that direction and it lines up with the roads behind that are on the other side of the tracks.
 

Attachments

  • Image 4.jpg
    Image 4.jpg
    141.8 KB · Views: 17
Last edited:
My dad, Jack Keirl, worked at Kyoch, ICI and IMI at Witton all of his working life retiring in 1979. He started in 'Lightning Fastener' and moved on to IMI working on the titanium furnaces. These furnaces were housed in an odd shaped purposely built building. A problem occurred one day in the mid to late sixties when the coolant to one of the furnaces ceased to flow, resulting in a serious explosion. My recollection is that the explosion found a weak point in the building and split it in half, the blast escaped through the split and removed roof tiles and blew windows in on houses hundreds of yards away. My dad and his colleague, Wilf Winter, were lucky not to be seriously injured if not worse. The building was repaired by rejoining the two halves of the building with a metal band.
I no longer live in Birmingham and try to relate this story to others and I think they believe I am pulling their leg. Can anybody point me in the right direction to find details or better still a picture of the above. Many Thanks.

Between 1963 to 1969 I worked as an IMI member of staff in the New Metals Research which included work on Melting and Casting Titanium Alloys by either Vacuum Arc Melting or Vacuum Electron Beam Melting in a purpose built building at Kynoch in Witton. The casting was done under a 'high vacuum' to stop the air embrittling the metal at high temperatures around 1500 degree Centigrade into Water Cooled Copper Crucible. Because of the rare danger of a stray arc piercing the copper crucible which might cause at worst an explosion from water ingress the building was designed with a thin weak back panel which would cause any explosion to be safely directed outwards through the thin panel which sounds as though what happened. After that the Furnace Supplier changed the furnace design for a safer cooling system other than water
 
Hi Genmac,

my father Eddie Bryant worked for Birlec in those days, and did a good deal of furnace installation and serving at IMI. Much later I was sales manager for a small company supplying high-temperature materials, and we did some business at IMI, my contact being Alan Bratt. Do these names ring any bells with you?

G
 
Sorry I don't know the 2 names you mentioned. The titanium vacuum melting furnaces were made by Heraeus not Birlec. In the research I was responsible for the Reactive and Refractory Metals which we then made electrodes for vacuum melting
 
My old man never said a lot about his work, but I do recall him saying he was spending time doing some kind of maintenance in the Titanium Division. I know he spent a lot of time at IMI on a general basis, and he liked it as he could walk there and back home for lunch!

G
 
Hi,
Old thread i know but i was talking about industrial accidents and i decided to do a search on IMI Titanium and this popped up.
Im surprised nobody has been before me to tell the tale of the explosion.
I did my apprenticeship there in the early 90's and i was always told the tale of one of the furnaces exploding and smashing all the windows out in houses in Erdington. I was told there were compensation payments so perhaps a part of that was a non disclosure agreement.
At the back of the building where the water cooled furnaces were, there was a gap where the one that blew up was located.
Out on the road directly behind there used to be a huge I shaped girder lying up against the building that was buckled in the middle which was apparently ripped out the ground where the explosion happened.
I remember the place well, i saw a few horrors there but thankfully no fatalities although there were a few other stories of some. These other incidents are what led me to your thread so now im registered, ill keep on searching.

I really enjoyed my time there, i have some great memories and there were some real characters around.

Mark
 
Welcome to the Forum, MarkMano. Have a good search to find the references to Kynoch. There are a number of threads.

Various members will look forward to your further posts and thanks for your first!

Chris
 
MarkMano, thanks for your reminder to us of the IMI Titanium/New Metals explosion. I have just re-checked my potted online history of Kynoch (link below) and have reminded myself that I made no reference to it at all. The reason for this is almost certainly because the main detailed history of IMI, "A World of Engineering", officially sanctioned, seems not to mention it either. (The book doesn't benefit from an index). That latter history is a very detailed examination of the Company's fortunes from 1862 to 2001 and deals with trends and strategies within a very complicated company over a long period of time. It does it very well but, on the other hand, It can hardly be described as "a popular history"!

Disasters ARE of course covered but possibly these are ones that tended to involve significant loss of life and public/political scrutiny which impinged on the broader fortunes of the Company. Perhaps, serious as it was, the Titanium explosion didn't fall into that category. It would be good to know more about it, to set the record straight. As I've said before, I wonder if any of our members can find newspaper cuttings discussing the incident – in view of damage to surrounding property, it is bound to have been reported upon.

I myself have only the vaguest personal recollection of the incident. I was an IMI employee at the time but not on the Witton site. It was different for the Ammunition Division disaster which came later and which made a big impact.

Chris
 
In 1973 the boundary between Witton (B6) and Erdington (B23) was at Roddis and Norse and Moor Lane, on Brookvale Road. We were about 200 yards into Erdington, but no windows were broken.
 
Back
Top