Think you have it tough at your job?AVDIIVKA, Ukraine — The armored Mercedes-Benz pulled up to a factory chimney discharging an endless column of milk-white steam and out stepped Musa Magomedov, the broad-shouldered, bespectacled 45-year-old general director of the Avdiivka Coke and Steel plant.
“When the bombing started he did everything right; he ran for the nearest tunnel,” Mr. Magomedov said, standing on the spot where a young mechanic and father of two died in a Feb. 4 rocket strike, five strides from safety. “We tried to fix him up, but he died in the ambulance before he could reach the hospital.”
Caught on the front lines of a grinding artillery war since last July, Avdiivka’s several thousand workers have held on, stubbornly returning to work every day despite 160 documented rocket and artillery strikes, periodic blackouts (one lasted 27 days), an endless list of repairs and, worst of all, the deaths of five colleagues.
An act of heroism in Ukraine’s civil war, for sure, but also one of pragmatism: If the plant, the largest coking operation in Europe and a vital cog in Ukraine’s steel industry, ceases operation, it will almost certainly be for good.
Coke, the fuel used in steelmaking furnaces in Ukraine, is a purified form of coal, produced by special ovens. When the furnaces cool, they crack, and the cost of repairing and restarting them could run to a prohibitive $1 billion or more. Those in the business like to say that a coking plant can be shut down only once.
“We are like a shark,” said Mr. Magomedov, an economist by training. “It has to swim all the time because if it stops, it drowns. We are the same. We always have to be working.”
Avdiivka Coke and Steel sits on the Ukrainian side of the front lines, just five miles from the ruins of Donetsk International Airport. The area is one of several focal points where two cease-fires in the last six months have gone largely unheeded. Wayward rocket and mortar strikes happen so often and are over so fast, Mr. Magomedov says, that sometimes workers simply ignore them and stay at their posts.
No hiding place above ground guarantees safety at the plant, a sprawling 52-year-old behemoth that produces blast-furnace coke, the fuel used in Ukraine’s steel mills, as well as dozens of chemical products, electricity and heat, along with an acrid stench that stays in clothing for days.
After repeated attacks at the plant, rain pours through a gaping hole in the machine-room roof. Mortar rounds have slammed into the coke ovens that heat coal at a temperature of more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,000 degrees Celsius). One rocket strike nearly obliterated a turbine crucial to production. Another ruptured a gas pipe, igniting a nine-hour blaze that Mr. Magomedov still seems surprised he was able to extinguish.
read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/a-ukraine-factory-that-cant-close-and-workers-who-wont-quit.html
