Molten glass leaking from furnace was 'like lava'

A furnace produced what looked "like a lava flow" after it cracked and leaked 340 tonnes of molten glass, a senior firefighter has said.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, 13 crews tackled the incident at the O-I Glass factory at an industrial estate in Edinburgh Way in Harlow.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service said nobody was hurt and they were not treating the incident as suspicious.

Group manager Andy Message said he was "really proud" of the crews' efforts for working in "challenging conditions", adding that it was "not a run of the mill incident".

Speaking to presenter Sonia Watson on BBC Essex, he said the molten glass looked like lava coming from the bottom of the furnace.

Crews and factory staff helped reduce the amount of molten glass in the furnace down to about 15 tonnes.

The president of the British Bottlers Institute, Ed Binstead, told the BBC the factory was one of the best in the UK.

Based on similar incidents, he said it would take about a year before things were up and running again.

"It's not just like patching up a crack in your wall, you'll probably have to rebuild the whole furnace," he said.

"They run 24-7 at extraordinary heat. It's going to take a long time before even that cools down, before the inspectors and get in and see what went wrong."

The editor of the YourHarlow news website, Michael Casey, said he was in the factory recently with local Labour MP Chris Vince.

"It's very hot in there," said Casey, who said his father worked there for more than 37 years.

Vince said he had been told the factory produced hundreds of millions of glass bottles a year.

"I can testify to how actually hot it is in those furnaces."

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