Back when the blast furnaces were still burning: A smelter worker remembers

Gaston Simon was a smelter for 45 years. Like so many other young men from southern Luxembourg, the now 87-year-old worked for Arbed (Aciéries Réunies de Burbach, Eich, Dudelange, today ArcelorMittal), which took over the Esch-Belval production facilities in 1937, originally commissioned in 1911. Until 1997, the blast furnaces operated on the former grounds of the Clair-Chêne communal forest. The plant, known as the Adolf-Emil-Hütte, was considered one of the most modern in Europe, producing high-quality pig iron, or "Goss" in Luxembourgish.

Simon spent his entire career at the Belval ironworks, where there were six blast furnaces as well as a steelworks and several rolling mills. In 1953, the Esch native started his apprenticeship at Arbed's "Léierbud" and was trained as a welder, specialising in electric welding and repair work. "We were lucky and were able to learn everything, so I later did forging work, hammered copper and carried out repairs, " explains Simon. Why did he become a smelter? "What else was there? I was actually interested in medicine, but my father died young and there weren't many options, so I joined Arbed."

Sparks, asbestos and pig iron

There was no time for downtime in the Luxembourg smelters – broken pieces had to be replaced or repaired quickly and "the more you could do and the faster you worked, the quicker you got on with the job, " says the 87-year-old. He has always enjoyed working, he lifted weights four times a week on the side and was active for several years in "Protection civile", i.e. as a volunteer in rescue and civil defence. Simon describes his many years in the trade as varied, but not easy, because you often paid for good work with your own health: "There was an incredible amount of dust and I saw what sometimes flowed out of the furnaces with the slag. The pieces shone in all kinds of colours and were beautiful, but whether they were also good for your health is questionable."

The work site itself also harboured many health risks, because if the welder repair team didn't have to lug spare parts weighing several dozen kilos somewhere, the repairers sometimes had to work inside the blast furnaces. "Everything there was full of asbestos and we were right in the middle of it, " recalls Simon. He knew the exact structure of the blast furnaces only too well: their outer metal shell, the inner layer of refractory bricks that protected it from the high temperatures, the fuel and raw materials that were poured in from above, layer by layer, to produce molten pig iron from the Minette iron ore.