Last updated 11:38, Thursday, 08 May 2008

When the phone rang, Tom Tuohy was at home, nursing his wife and two children who were sick with flu. It was the evening of October 10 1957, and 39-year-old Tom was deputy general manager at the Windscale and Calder works, which in later years became known worldwide as Sellafield.

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Fire: Pile chimney number 1

The caller anxiously told Tom: “Come at once. Pile number one is on fire.”

For Tom – known among his staff as a stern but fair disciplinarian – those nine words marked the beginning of a crisis that was to go down in nuclear history.

Despite official criticism of the workers involved, which later proved to have been politically motivated, most people now believe that it was Tom Tuohy’s brave leadership that saved Cumbria from a nuclear catastrophe.

At the time of the fire, Pile 1 was the name given to an anonymous looking building which housed a primitive nuclear reactor.

Its purpose was as simple as it was deadly: to produce weapons-grade plutonium for Britain’s own atomic and hydrogen bombs.

When Tom took that call, he had no illusions about the dangers he – and the people of Cumbria – faced. He told his wife and children to stay indoors and keep the windows closed and went to work.

In a gesture typical of the man’s courage, he discarded his radiation badge so that nobody could order him off the site because he had exceeded the permitted dose.

He then put on his protective suit and scaled a ladder to the top of the 80ft high pile building so he could peer down the inspection holes into the reactor’s graphite core.

Deep inside, he could see the fire’s telltale bright glow, confirmation that the core was indeed alight.

In the hours that followed, he repeated his inspections, and saw the fire intensify, the glowing interior changing from red to white.

He estimated that around 120 uranium fuel rods – each slowly being converted into plutonium – were now ablaze.

Meanwhile, Tom’s staff worked in appalling heat, using steel rods in a desperate attempt to remove the burning rods from the core.

Late into the night, the heat in the core had risen to the point where it was hot enough to melt steel.

At dawn, Tom directed his staff to pump all the available carbon dioxide into the core in the hope of quelling the blaze but to no effect.

It was then that Tom was confronted by a terrifying new danger: the fear that the concrete shield protecting him and his staff from the core’s intense radiation might crumble in the heat.

He had already agreed with his colleagues that if all else failed water – which could have triggered an explosion by releasing dangerous gasses – must be used on the fire.

Time was running out.

So Tuohy ordered everybody out of the building except himself and his fire chief. He then told him where to position the hoses, just two feet above the reactor fire.

Tom stayed in the pile building as the water was turned on, gently at first.

It must have been a terrifying moment: the seconds when the core could have exploded to create a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.

At first nothing happened, so Tom switched off the blowers which were blasting gale-force cooling air through the pile, keeping the temperature tolerable for the firemen but also fanning the flames.

Five hours later, it was clear that the gamble had paid off. Tom called his boss – also at home with flu – to confirm that the fire had finally been extinguished, though they kept water flowing over the reactor core for another 30 hours.

Recalling the accident for a TV documentary last year, Tuohy spoke of how during the 30-hour crisis he and his men found themselves in new and dangerous territory.

He said: “We were pioneers. I never thought about my own safety. I just knew that there were things I could do and got on and did them.”

It later emerged that Tom’s radiation dose during the incident reached the equivalent of four times that allowed for workers in a single year.

In a 20-mile zone outside the plant, the fear of contamination led to a ban on the consumption of milk produced by local dairy herds.

Tests later showed that radioactive iodine and caesium were released into the atmosphere, as well as deadly plutonium.

An estimated 200 cancers resulted, half of them fatal.

A government report later blamed the nuclear staff who had actually prevented the fire running out of control.

The men say they were made scapegoats, their reputations sacrificed to hide how safety margins were squeezed in the race for nuclear weapons and to protect the UK’s special relationship with the US.

The truth of the situation was neatly summed up in a recent ITV Border documentary, with the telling title: The Men who Saved Cumbria.

As for Tom Tuohy, who went on to have a long and successful career in the nuclear industry, his courageous leadership is not in doubt.

A statement from the Windscale site this week recalled his decision to use water on the fire.

It said: “It was an incredibly dangerous operation, but a brave decision which proved to be a turning point in a potential disaster.”

Former Whitehaven mayor Alan Daugherty, 83, who was a health physics monitor, worked alongside Tuohy and believes he deserved a medal. He said: “We just did what we could. But Tom always looked after his men: he was a man’s man, who called a spade a spade, and wouldn’t ask his men to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself. He just got on with the job, and there was absolutely no panic. He deserves some recognition for what he did.”

n Tom spent his last years in Australia, where he died on March 12.

PColeman@cngroup.co.uk