ABSTRACT
David Powell was awake early that summer morning. It was about seven o'clock, the beginning of another day in college. Attracted by the beautiful morning - the air was still, the sky a radiant blue - he walked to the north-west facing window which overlooked the end of the eastern valley in Gwent. The view was normally majestic, stretching from Newport in the south through Cwmbran and up past Pontypool - green hills, a sloping green valley. What he saw was hideous. Black smoke was rolling down the valley, forming a layer over the Cwmbran area. The smoke spewed upwards several hundred feet from a source behind a hill to the north and poured down the valley, home to approximately 50,000 people. David Powell gazed at the source on the near horizon. Something was wrong. A factory ablaze? An oil tanker in flames?1
