The same women (preferably widows) were employed to extrude and cut the dynamite paste after having been mixed. In those small 'cutting cottages', deeply set between thick cement walls, linked by underground passageways and narrow corridors, everything was made of wood... for two reasons: first, the chance of producing sparks was reduced to a minimum. Second, wood splinters (in case of deflagration) are less destructive than concrete...
Also the knife was a wooden one. And they were barefoot.
No space for jokes and laughters here... a good worker is an alive one. Imagine yourself doing this kind of work every day of your life...
The first and the last images of this collage are of the same mixing room… the mixer and the basement simply disappeared, in 1961. Notice how the mixer, vaporizing during the explosion, 'protected' the wall immediately behind...
The second one shows how one of those (unexploded) chambers appears now.
After half a century the whole area (a contained one, about 50 square meters) seems to have been bombed (well, obviously...)
All the windows of Avigliana broke for the violence of the explosion, that propagated to a warehouse (existing no more) with 1800 Kg of cartridges.
13 people in the factory died.
[ Given the danger of the process (and an easily boycotted one, simply inserting extraneous objects in the paste, producing sparks...) in 1952 a remote control system was introduced. It consisted in a televion control, and represented a great technical innovation in those times. After loading the mixers, the workers left the site and monitored the process through four monitors.
Another safety measure: since the beginning, the engines that powered the mixers were positioned well outside the building. This is the explanation of those holes in the semi-circular walls...]
At the end of the production cycle the finished and stabilized cartridges were 'shipped' to the upper level warehouses through a sort of small internal railway. Hover on the image... not much remains, now, of those external structures. I hope to visit the upper level soon... right now it is not reachable.
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