A CENTURY OF TURMOIL AND TRAGEDY AT RHEINMETALL FACTORY

THE explosions and tragedies at the Rheinmetall factory in Somerset West have been going on for a century.

Back in the 1920s, when it was named the De Beers Dynamite plant, my late father’s childhood memories were of periodic explosions.

Schoolboys whose fathers worked in that factory would leap up in panic in the class, and run down the road to the dynamite factory for fear that their fathers were among the latest to be killed. My condolences to the latest bereaved. May the latest company have success in preventing future deaths.