Safety procedure when working around sour gas wells (natural gas with H2S) is that, if you see somebody drop in front of you, you do not touch him, approach him

Safety procedure when working around sour gas wells (natural gas with H2S) is that, if you see somebody drop in front of you, you do not touch him, approach him, or anything else. You just get the hell outta there. If he's been dropped by H2S, trying to move him is just going to cause you to go down too. Besides being bloody lethal, H2S is notorious for being corrosive. H2S forms metal sulfides with any exposed metal it can access, and the hydrogen byproduct often diffuses through the metal and forms expanding holidays in positions of stress, potentially to the point that the metal will crack. I've worked around high power free-space infrared lasers where a single stray reflection could instantly blind you permanently (and you can't see infrared light scattering off of stuff like you can with visible lasers). I'd rather spend years working with those than spend one afternoon in a lab with a sample of H2S at 140 GPa. I don't care if it's inside a diamond anvil cell inside a cryostat. High pressure H2S has got to be a freakin' nightmare to work with. I'm sure H2S has lots of funky properties nobody knows about because practically nobody wants to work with the stuff. Kudos to the PI who convinced a bunch of grad student peons to put their lives on the line... I suppose.