In the depths below every iron-producing blast furnace lurks a salamander — an angry black and yellow mix of boiling iron, slag and coke, so named owing to the ancient belief that the amphibians were born in fires.
“It’s the heart,” explains René Rockstroh, operations director of the blast furnaces at German steelmaker Salzgitter, as he wanders around an eerily quiet oven that would normally be filled with liquid iron at 1,500C.
This will probably be the last time that Rockstroh, a three-decade veteran of the company, will oversee a full furnace refurbishment. By 2033, the steelmaker plans to have shut down each of its three units for good.
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