12 ms·

Another notable excerpt from the linked state safety agency document (http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cis_wsh_cet5041_90142_7.doc http://www.michigan.gov/docu

• palmer_eldritch 11y ago
  > The fire chief entered the cistern wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus. After reaching the plank platform, he removed his face mask to shout instructions to those on the surface and he, too, was instantly overcome. Now that one is probably deserving a Darwin Award...
  • petewailes 11y ago
    The problem is understanding just how fast it affects you, and how little you need in your system. I imagine his line of thinking was "Well, if I just shout and don't breathe in, it'll be fine". Simple mistake to make.
    • avar 11y ago
      Isn't the problem that he did breathe after shouting to those men, and then died? What if you remove your mask, shout, and don't breathe back in?
      • tehmaco 11y ago
        The gas will be inside the mask when you put it back on.
      • qbrass 11y ago
        The problem is that at high enough concentrations, a single breath is all it takes. Did you remember to purge your mask before taking a breath when you put it back on?
      • CamperBob2 11y ago
        The thing about H2S is, it's every bit as dangerous as HCN, but it has a better PR agent. If you wouldn't take off your SCBA mask in a room full of HCN, "even for just a sec," then you shouldn't do it in a room suspected of being full of H2S either. The fire chief would have known that H2S is hazardous, but his training unfortunately (and obviously) didn't communicate just how hazardous it is.
  • ptaipale 11y ago
    Well, maybe not. It's a mistake, a lapse of judgement, but not that extraordinarily stupid mistake.
    • palmer_eldritch 11y ago
      It wouldn't be that bad if he wasn't the fire chief and there was already four bodies. These two facts make things a little worse imo.
  • andyjohnson0 11y ago
    You might want to find a better way to describe the death of a person who was brave enough to risk their life to try to save other people. Hint: these are people.
    • HarryHirsch 11y ago
      Bravery on its own just isn't enough. This complete fool forgets all his confined space training, endangering not only himself but also his men, who now have one more victim to extricate. The rest of the rescue crew are people, too. Submariners have the word "oxygen thief" for this magnitude of idiot.
      • bostonpete 11y ago
        Well, the accident in question happened nearly 50 years ago. Who knows what kind of training was in place at the time or even how well understood this sort of problem was.
        • HarryHirsch 11y ago
          "Little House on the Prairie" has a scene where the father digs a well and tests the air downhole with a candle. That's awareness of the danger in a literary work more than 100 years ago. Farmers and well-diggers have been aware of the phenomenon for centuries, it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger.
          • simias 11y ago
            Hindsight is 20/20. Don't be so quick to judge other people, we all mess up from time to time. Fortunately in my line of work "messing up" means pushing a bad commit, not dying at the bottom of a well.
          • mindcrime 11y ago
            it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger Not as much as you might think. Firefighters routinely fought fires without SCBA up until at least the 70's, and probably into the 80's in rural areas. And if they weren't using SCBA for structure fires, they probably weren't using them for rescue calls in most cases. It was a cultural thing... for a long time, firefighters just didn't understand/appreciate the importance of SCBA. In hindsight that seems hard to believe, but it's been a slow process to get to a place where every firefighter is rigorous about making sure they use SCBA at all required times. (To some extent, that could be said about other protective gear as well, including turnout gear and PASS alarms). Also consider that many (probably most) fire departments don't receive a lot of specific training on confined space rescue. Of course, you might ask, "why not?" and the simple answer is "time". Especially with volunteer firefighters, you can only get folks out for so much training a week. And fire calls are many times more common than confined space calls, so most training time is spent on the routine firefighting stuff. Similar thing with hazardous materials training... it's a relatively recent thing for the majority of fire departments to receive specific haz-mat training, and even then, unless the department runs a specialized haz-mat team, their personnel probably only train to the "awareness" level. I don't mean to excuse the fire chief, as I don't know the details of that specific story. But for something like that to happen, especially that many years ago, isn't a complete surprise. Source: I was a firefighter and certified firefighting instructor throughout most of the 90s / early 2000's. My dad was also a volunteer firefighter and I've had a lifelong interest in the fire service.
  • mikestew 11y ago
    Says the guy arm-chairing the situation on HN. In contrast to anyone that's actually done such a thing, reads this and thinks, "yeah, but for the grace of $DEITY go I, because a single lapse in judgement is all it takes, and in a stressful situation single lapses in judgement come in boxes of a dozen."
    • anigbrowl 11y ago
      If you have the training, been apprised of the situation, are wearing the right breathing equipment, and you have 4 bodies lying on the ground in front of you, then you have had all the warnings you could possibly expect to get. Disregarding safety in the face of so much evidence about the danger is either perverse or stupid. I can agree with your excuse for the other people (to some degree) but the fire chief doesn't get a pass on this one.
• ptaipale 11y ago
  Shit kills. I guess this happens everywhere in the world, but over here (Finland), there are the occasional deaths at farms where H2S released from remains of cow manure, stored in a tank, kills people. https://www.mela.fi/sites/default/files/lietelanta.pdf https://www.mela.fi/sites/default/files/lietelanta.pdf "Description of event A farm-owner suffocated inside a manure tank which was lacking oxygen and contained toxic gases. Also his brother, who went in to help, died. A tank of liquid-form manure was almost empty. A pipe at the bottom of the tank was blocked. The farm owner decided to enter the tank and finalize emptying the tank. However, he lost consciousness and fell to the bottom. His brother, who was close by, saw what happened and went in to save the unconscious man, but he was also overcome in a moment. Four hours later a family member discovered the victims. Fire service was called to help, and with pressure air breathing equipment, they retrieved both men. They were both found to be dead. Cause of death was a poisoning by methane and hydrogen sulfide." (Taken from farm advisory leaflet on manure https://www.mela.fi/sites/default/files/lietelanta.pdf https://www.mela.fi/sites/default/files/lietelanta.pdf )
  • seszett 11y ago
    Here this happens with decaying green algae on the Brittany coast. It kills wild animals and every so often the people who clean up beaches and oyster farmers.
  • celticninja 11y ago
    this is a very common occurence on farms and unfortunately as farms tend to be family run you get a few deaths in the same family.
  • leoc 11y ago
    It's common in Ireland as well, where beef and dairy are big: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27754408 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27754408
  • understand17 11y ago
    blabla
  • prawn 11y ago
• oxymoron 11y ago
  I once took a university course called "Chemical Equilibrium" which required some lab time. The labs were about examining solutions with unknown ions and figuring out what they were. A common tool in doing so is by bubbling hydrogen sulfide gas through the solution, which will cause the precipation of certain cations. Needless to say, we were warned about the dangers of H2S, and told that if it ever escaped the fume hood we would know immediately by the smell and should evacuate the premises before we succumbed to olfactory fatigue and poisoned ourselves. Another fun gas used in the same course was HCN. All in all, A very solid lesson in not fooling around outside the fume hood, and from the anecdote above a possibly life saving lesson which can't be said for most university courses... For those who do not know, H2S is also a key part of the vile smell in flatulence, so strictly speaking it's a rather common substance in nature albeit in "safe" concentrations.
  • refurb 11y ago
    If I remember correctly, a fatal concentration of H2S is actually lower than HCN (hydrogen cyanide). Many people each year succumb to H2S poisoning. It's a pretty insidious poison.
    • wycx 11y ago
      And for those interested, H2Se has an LC50 about an order of magnitude lower than H2S. Fortunately S/Se in crude oil is likely to be >10000. It smells like garlic.
  • VonGuard 11y ago
    It occurs in deep wells that cave divers swim into as well. They often have to swim through an H2S layer, which can numb their lips and any exposed skin. It's generally a race to get through this layer and into the caves below as fast as possible.
    • tripzilch 11y ago
      so holding your breath doesn't help against H2S very well?
• nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Wow, that's crazy. Terrifying stuff.
  • LoSboccacc 11y ago
    and then there's FOOF https://web.archive.org/web/20150825171826/http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php https://web.archive.org/web/20150825171826/http://pipeline.c... (Webarchive since original seems down)
    • Morpholemew 11y ago
      Original has moved to a new host: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...
      • CamperBob2 11y ago
        Bummer, more ads, more whitespace, larger text, and harder to navigate. :( Probably just as well, that blog usually costs me several hours of work.
    • dkuder 11y ago
      Dr. Lowe moved. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...
    • mikeash 11y ago
      "If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic." I've seen this article before, but I will never get tired of reading it again.
      • digi_owl 11y ago
        Given that a number of tests listed beforehand are with compounds that have their own "won't work with" articles, yeah one do wonder about the sanity of the chemist behind the paper.
• chimeracoder 11y ago
  Unrelated, but reading this reminded me of the story. One of my chemistry teachers in high school made a lab where we had to identify various substances by smell. H2S was one of those substances, and we were told it had a distinctive sulfuric smell. I remember trying to smell the substance by wafting[0] (as previous teachers had instructed us) and thinking 'hm, I thought I smelled that a second ago, but now I can't'. My teacher's response was 'oh, you're just not smelling it hard enough. You really need to take a big sniff' and stuck his nose over the petri dish to demonstrate. Fortunately I was skeptical enough of him by this point in the semester that I ignored him. Only later did I look it up and discover that H2S is not actually odorless - it smell like rotten eggs. But it also dulls your sense of smell at the same time[1]. This is only one of several times when he almost killed us with labs in that class (my favorite was when he came just a second away from lighting a classmate on fire with Thermite[2]). I'm really glad I'm not in high school anymore. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQis0nnap74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQis0nnap74 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Safety [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
  • Florin_Andrei 11y ago
    Well, I made H2S on a few occasions in high school, and I always thought it has a powerful odor of rotten eggs. I have no doubt about it. You make a little H2S in a test tube, you will know, along with everyone else in the room and perhaps in adjacent rooms too. I don't doubt that it deadens the sense of smell, I'm just saying it's nowhere near odorless on first contact. Of course, I never made an amount large enough, nor did I stuck around long enough, for the sense impairment to occur.
• jkyle 11y ago
  This entire description is like a text book example of what not to do from one of the many, many safety classes I had take as a construction worker.
• takinola 11y ago
  I once took an H2S safety training class. The first rule of working in an area with known H2S is if you see one of your colleagues suddenly drop to the floor for no apparent reason get the hell out of the area and whatever you do, don't stop to render aid to the fallen. After you have reached a safe well ventilated place, you should put on your safety gear and then head back to rescue the incapacitated. There are too many stories like this where a whole bunch of people die trying to rescue the first victim so it makes total sense but it is kind of weird working in an environment where you know your colleagues will not help you (at least at first) if something goes wrong. Btw: H2S doesn't really dull your sense of smell because of prolonged exposure. It only becomes odorless at deadly concentrations. So it turns out you don't know if you cannot smell it because it isn't present or it is just about to kill you.
  • ggchappell 11y ago
    > It only becomes odorless at deadly concentrations. That is really strange. Because at non-deadly concentrations it seriously stinks. Do you know why it has this weird backwards smelliness property?
    • idlewords 11y ago
      It paralyzes the nerve cells in your nose.
• BuildTheRobots 11y ago
  The friends I play Urb-X with are hyper aware that it's the heavier-than-air gasses that pool and that kill you. I find it amazing and depressing they didn't have any sort of safety gear or air monitoring. In the UK, I'm sure this would have breached both working at height and enclosed spaces working regulations. Even if we're exploring something as pathetic as an old ROC bunker only _one_ of us (usually me) goes down first and is attached to the end of a rope. If I stop talking then the person topside can do what they like to try and get me out, but under no circumstances do they come down behind me. We've also usually got a third person sat in the van (so just off site) communicating with us via radio and with GPS coordinates and road directions written down ready to give to the emergency services should it all go entirely to hell... Sorry for the ramble; It's a horrible tragedy, but as what I've stated above is the level I expect for an unplanned slightly drunken Sunday-afternoon explore, I _really_ expect people in a commercial setting to know better. Probably more to the point, whoever ordered them to go in there deserves to be strung over the coals.... tldr: it's _really_ easy to go from 1 person slightly injured to multiple people dead :(
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • Luc 11y ago
    I've thought about getting a used H2S detector on eBay, but ideally you'd want to test and calibrate them, and there's the rub.
    • BuildTheRobots 11y ago
      I've looked into it in the past and keep looking at atleast a £500 cost -usually more if you want O2, CO, CO2, H25 (I think those were the ones I decided I was interested in).... and _then_ there's the certification cost, so I really can't justify it (though I'd love to). My friends dad used to be a safety inspector duwnt' pit in the 70's and he's been trying to convince me to get an old Davy Lamp and to just pay attention to what the flame is doing, but I've yet to find a nice one (or inherit his). I have been known to ignite my cigarette lighter on every other rung when going down a ladder but in hindsight, that has the potential to end extremely badly.
• JoblessWonder 11y ago
  I'm more upset that he calls it a PDF when it is clearly a word document...
• cmarschner 11y ago
  Isn't that why you would want a canary?
  • rasz_pl 11y ago
    apparently US safety "regulations" make it cheaper to use workers
    • bborud 11y ago
      Besides, you won't have to deal with animal rights groups.
• Pyxl101 11y ago
  If you knew approximately where the dangerous gas was, could you take a deep breath and run in with your breath held? If you prepare for it, you can probably hold your breath for a good minute and some.
• jdietrich 11y ago
  These kinds of multiple fatalities are remarkably common - 60% of people who die in confined spaces were attempting to rescue someone else. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/86-110/ http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/86-110/