Explore #212: HFX Blast Furnaces and Steel works, Hayange / Florange, France – August 2017

Explore #4 of the ‘Greased Otters Tour’

Day Two was the centrepiece explore of our long weekend – the other sites we had lined up were all great in their own ways, but this one was an absolute beast – a huge decomissioned steel works which once boasted no fewer than six blast furnaces…

History (translated and rewritten from here and here)
The presence of iron ore in the region was exploited back to Roman times, if not earlier.

The six blast furnaces (numbered P1 to P6) were constructed between 1907 and 1913. A period of modernisation led to three of the furnaces (P3, P4 and P6) being remodelled on an American design between 1952 and 1960, and then being extensively rebuilt with higher capacities between 1973 and 1978.

The site during operation…

Work on a seventh blast furnace was abandoned in 1962, and furnaces P1, P2 and P5 were subsequently decommisioned and demolished.

In 1993 furnace P4 was ‘cocooned’, but never restarted, and production on site stopped completely in 2012 with the ‘mothballing’ of the remaining two furnaces P3 and P6. However, the decision to permanently close the site came on 30 November 2012, and despite a petition calling for nationalisation of the site gathering some 30,000 signatures in only a few weeks in December 2012 the site still sits disused and decaying more than five years later. It seems that demolition of the remaining furnaces is now inevitable, it is just a matter of when…

Our Explore
I don’t mind admitting that I was very nervous before this explore – I had proposed it and spent several hours (along with Jeremy) researching the best likely access route, but had also heard that security was very tight, with constant patrols and security cameras plus numerous fences, razor wire, etc etc. Some friends had attempted the site a few weeks earlier and had ended up in the back of a police van before they had even got their cameras out. We were undecided whether the potential reward was worth the high risk until the night before, but eventually decided to go for it.

Up after only 5 hours sleep, following none the night before, we all felt pretty grumpy as we made our move shortly before dawn. Access ended up being one of the longer and harder of the sites I’ve explored to date, and after nearly an hour of slow and circumspect work we had finally made it to the first building, only to nearly be caught by a security patrol driving around the inner perimeter! Luckily we heard them before they came around the bend, giving us the precious few seconds needed to sprint into the nearest dark corner and hide until the coast was clear. We then made our way to the steel works, where pig iron from the blast furnaces would have been processed, burning off its high carbon content to produce steel which would then have been rolled/milled into the shapes required for sale.

Backing up a second – first a quick overview of how a blast furnace works…

Or to simplify it even further with the Adam X summary: crumby crumbly, heaty heaty, melty melty, movy movy, heaty heaty, rolly rolly, cooly cooly, selly selly ™. Got it? 🙂

So, those steel works… we were immediately in industrial heaven…

Looking down from a gantry onto an electromagnetic lifting gear…

We’d definitely come too far to let a little sign stop us 😉

A large lorry/loader, with the early morning light streaming in…

A view of the huge ladles used for pouring the molten iron…

That electromagnetic lifting gear from earlier, this time at ground level…

More huge ladles…

We probably hung around in the steel works section of the site longer than we should have, but eventually we made our way out and started picking our way towards the nearest blast furnace, which turned out to be P6…

After yet more climbing, clambering, and a makeshift ladder to overcome more locked and blocked access we made our way inside the main P6 building, where we were greeted by this rather natty spiral staircase…

…which as you can see led up to a small control pod…

…which looked like this inside.

View of the base of P6 blast furnace…

…and part way up…

X marks the spot…

…a close up of the blast furnace base.

I absolutely loved this view looking towards the other blast furnaces, with railing carriages steadily rusting and becoming overgrown in their sidings…

We then aimed for the building which we thought would house the main blast furnaces control room…we were correct, but all the doors and windows were locked. Access was looking impossible until I spotted a slightly open window – the only problem was it was on the second floor, with a drop of about 20+ feet beneath it. Up stepped ninja Mark… 🙂

…a few moments later he let us less agile team mates in through a now opened door…

We all had a bit of a start when some sort of alarm suddenly went off in the control room. Then I realised that it was simply notifying that it was midday – it felt like we had already been on site for days!

We then moved on to the other blast furnaces, involving a fair amount of dodging security patrols…

Looking up one of the blast furnaces…

We ended the explore in the turbo blowers house and warehouse…

Remnants of the old P4 control panels, probably long since stripped out during the modernisation of the 1970s…

Two turbo blowers – these would be used to blow hot air into the bases of the blast furnaces (see that diagram above)…

Control room for the turbo blowers…

Various spare parts stored in the warehouse…

Eventually we knew that we had to leave. We had still only covered maybe 75% of the site, but by the time we finally collapsed back at the car we had been on our feet for 10.5 hours straight and all I’d consumed during that time was 500ml of water! I was faint from exhaustion, low blood sugar, and thirst – but oh man, the McDonalds feast we had that afternoon was right up there in the pantheon of best Maccers *ever*! 🙂

Thanks so much for making it all the way through the report, I hope you had a blast!
Adam X