Hi there, hopefully this is allowed haha. But I'm co-authoring a book that's set partially in a massive steel refinery, and since I know next to nothing about it, I thought maybe I could ask actual workers to weigh in to help me make it at least somewhat realistic, lol. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I'd just really like it to not be like, blatantly stupid or totally unrealistic. I tried Googling it but I'm finding it hard to gather good info, especially since most of the resources I've found talk a lot about the chemistry or are just short clips of machinery or workers - it's not enough. I really know nothing about this and need it explained like I'm 5, lol.
(A couple of people have just told me to watch the end of Terminator 2, but I think I need to actually know a bit about this to write it really well, haha - I have to actually describe what's going on, and plus I want the events to make sense in the setting, at least enough that you can suspend your disbelief.)
In a nutshell - the bad guy is a truly terrible boss who blatantly ignores all kinds of safety stuff, as long as the work gets done and makes a profit he really doesn't care if any of the workers live or die. And in the end he, his assistant, and his corrupt safety officer basically get offed by getting trapped in the refinery, which is full of safety regulation issues, and they ultimately get killed through the very failings they ignored earlier.
So I was wondering:
- If a massive refinery and production facility suddenly had all their staff poof out of existence, what would (or could; it's set in the future so tech is flexible) keep running without human guidance?
- Is having big pools of molten ore and slag in a position in the ground where people could easily fall in realistic? How long would it take that stuff to cool down? (The events of our story take place over a few days, so it'd be great if somehow they could realistically stay hot for most of that, but if not then that's good to know too).
- What kinds of PPE do you tend to wear, and if you had the worst boss in existence who treated you as completely expendable, what PPE do you think he'd cut? What would you end up wearing to work in a situation like that?
- Any suggestions on what could semi-realistically (and/or creatively) incidentally kill my evil bosses as they tried to escape the unsafe refinery would be welcome, haha.
So yeah, I hope this post is okay here, and any input is very welcome :)