Jos Kortekaas
Jos Kortekaas was in his mid-twenties when he started at Coke Plant 2 in 1974. A few years earlier, he had been rejected during the medical examination — too small, too vulnerable, they said. He tried again, and this time he was accepted.
“It was dirty work,” he says, “but something was happening. You were making something.”
He began as a maintenance technician in shift work, surrounded by heat, noise and smoke. A lot of smoke. The plant was an imposing world of glowing refractory chambers, coal, gas and steel. He came home covered in soot, but satisfied. Showering after a shift felt like a luxury.
He loved the craft, the technology, the improvisation.
“You had to be able to hear it, smell it, feel it. We were good at that.”
Only later did he realise what the work had cost him. At first, the dirt simply came with the job. But over the years, doubt crept in.
Too many colleagues fell ill.
“Men from my shift died of cancer. Sometimes I think: it’s a miracle I’m still here.”
For years, his work clothes went home with him, washed by his wife.
“We brought the factory inside.”
He moved into day shifts, organising work, planning schedules, guiding the transition to computers. It was also the time when knowledge from experienced workers began to disappear.
“We tried to document it, but a lot was lost.”
He remained in between worlds: too technical for the office, too critical for the shop floor.
“To management I was someone from outside; to the men I was someone from above.”
The plant was once called the most modern in Europe. But when he worked there, yellow smoke hung over the site.
“It was patched up, not renewed. A good factory — you don’t smell it, you don’t see it. This one smoked and stank all the time.”
He reported leaks, unsafe situations, intervened when rules were broken. It did not make him popular.
“They turned against me. But I felt it had to be done.”
He remembers evacuations: alarms, gas smells, clouds of extinguishing dust. Once he cycled straight through it on his way to work.
“I got completely covered in dust. I reported it. Nothing happened.”
When he later spoke out publicly about pollution and the condition of Coke Plant 2, former colleagues turned away from him in the street.
“That hurt,” he says. “But someone had to say it.”
It felt like a rupture — not just with the company, but with an entire community.
At retirement, little remained: a helmet strap, some old padlocks, a folder of photographs. He has not returned to the site since.
“I can’t. And I know there are still people who would rather not see me.”
He is now 77. Two new knees, a worn ankle, deteriorating lungs.
“That comes with age,” he says — though it sounds more like self-protection than conviction.
He measures particulate matter himself, speaks with Tata and residents, still asks questions.
“That’s what I can contribute.”
He follows the plans for green steel with mixed feelings.
“It’s a good plan, but they are twenty years too late.”
He understands the complexity: every pipe, every furnace connected, like a line of dominoes.
Still, he hopes it will succeed.
“If they really make it clean, we can be proud again.”
He says he does not miss much — except the people who are no longer there.
“I had a good life there,” he says.
“But the steel we made will outlast the people who made it.”
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