Detroit blast furnace rupture (1925-era)

They do this same type of wall cooling on the huge steel blast furnaces — not on the modern ones, but I had one in Detroit that was built in 1925. The walls were starting to buckle — it was an old riveted structure — but it was producing $100,000 of product per hour. They knew it was falling apart, but no one wanted to call the shot to shut it down. They would send welders up there while the thing was still hot, welding the shell back together. The shell was buckled, thinned down to one tenth of its original thickness. They were flooding the outside with water to keep the whole thing cool. At $100,000 an hour, who's going to shut it down? Not the outside consultants, not the internal staff — no one was going to take that responsibility. So they kept pushing it until it blew up one night and caused a half-a-billion-dollar loss. Hey, the insurance company paid for it.