30.05.2025

Fatal steam blast

Details have emerged of an incident in 2023 in which two men died in a boom lift at a Stelco steelworks in Ontario.

The incident came to light earlier this week after Canadian sheet metal specialist John Kenyon was fined $225,000 for failings in the incident in which two men using a boom lift at the Stelco Lake Erie Works in Nanticoke, Ontario – due south of Hamilton - died from injuries inflicted by steam, after they failed to move their platform away from a quench tower during operation.

The incident occurred on April 25th 2023, while they were carrying out repairs on the 36 metre tower’s steel cladding, including plugging any holes etc... The tower acts as a chimney to direct steam produced when water is poured onto hot coke in the trolley car that transport it from the blast furnaces after each process is complete.

While this work was carried out the coke oven remained in operation, with the automatic trolley cars continuing to arrive at the tower which hot coke.
In addition to the two men in the platform - Gabriel Cabral, 32, and Sean MacPherson, 56 - were working at a height of around 12 metres at the time, while another two employees were based on the ground, purely as spotters and signallers to warn when it was time to stop work and move the platform to safety.

The routine was for the boom lift to be moved away from the tower – to a safe distance any time a trolley approached, with the ground crew responsible for letting their colleagues know that they needed to move the lift away from the tower. The two acknowledged the signal but did not move the lift and seemed to ignore a second signal even after they used a horn when the trolley arrived.
Shortly thereafter 125,000 litres of water was dumped onto the hot coke, with the resulting steam surging up the quench tower and escaping through a gap in the external wall which the two men had been working on. The blast of steam caused major burns and internal injuries to them both. Cabral died in hospital in mid-May, while MacPherson passed away there in November 2023.

An investigation by the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development determined that Kenyon failed to ensure that its employees followed Stelco’s safety procedures correctly and that it “failed to take the reasonable precaution to ensure the workers were not performing work on a quench tower while the quenching process took place.”

Kenyon pleaded guilty to the charge at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cayuga, and was fined C$225,000, plus a 25 percent victim surcharge. Stelco was also charged in relation to the incident, with the failure to have an emergency stop switch on the quenching process, this was later withdrawn.