Legacies & memories from an industrial age
Two local councillors are launching a new bid to rid Wrexham village Rhos of an acid tar lagoon containing more than 1,100 chemical drums, dumped since the 1960s.
According to , Paul Pemberton and Wrexham Council leader Aled Roberts have put together a dossier to present to the assembly government and European Parliament to try to secure funding to clean up the old Llwyneinion brickworks site. Experts reckon it will cost £100m.
Meanwhile, comments have come in from contributors recalling how different working life used to be. Trevor, who worked at a textiles mill in Greenfield, near Holywell, in the late '60s, remembers: "The most boring job in the whole universe used to be the spotter. There was a climbing, rotating wall of hundreds of sharp nails embeded in a conveyor belt and a mechanical comb. How I never ended up shredded, packed and baled whilst working the night shift as a spotter I don't know."
And there has been no shortage of people recalling the characters who worked at Brymbo Steelworks and Shotton Steelworks.
Ron, who worked in the medical department at Brymbo Steelworks, says: "I remember one night a man limping in having had a splash of molten metal from the blast furnace. He was in his sixties and the white hot metal had burned through his protective trousers and had exposed the bone in his calf. 'Put a plaster on this lad', he said and was most put out when I insisted he needed urgent hospital treatment! The steelworks was a hard and dangerous place but the workforce were hard and tough to meet these dangers head on."