The Oversight

The steel plant's worst accident
came on a cold winter's nightshift,
while an overhead craneman emptied a ladle 
as big as a house
brimming with two hundred tons
of molten iron.

He was seated above,
wearing blast furnace goggles,
aiming a blinding stream of metal
into a railroad car,
when bubbles the size of dinner plates
began bursting through the pool
and venting jets of steam.

His silver-gloved hand slammed
the big red button --
a klaxon wailed, 
he and his crane sped full bore
down the factory ceiling.

His mistake was in forgetting 
to right the ladle.

Two hundred tons of iron
poured from a vessel
moving at ten miles per hour
toward fifty family men 
wearing hard hats
scattering like ants
catching fire
beneath the molten splash and splatter.

That's when the railroad car
he had left behind,
that solid steel monster
shaped like a submarine,
that twelve-wheeled terror
of a fucking steam bomb,
exploded.

"It had rained for days,"
Dad explained,
sitting scorched and smudged 
at the dinner table,
hard hat perched white atop his head.
"Someone left the hatch open,
and a foot of water pooled 
inside the railroad car.
An oversight..."

His words paled beside the front-page photo
on the Daily News.
It looked like an Apollo shot from the Moon --
two tiny men in silvery suits
perched on the rim of a crater.

Scott Speck
09/01/01