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Comment by comex

9 years ago

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

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Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern and as he reached a plank platform six feet below the opening, he was instantly overcome and fell unconscious into the water below. The man on the surface immediately ran to the nearby plant for help. Several workmen responded and two of them entered the cistern to render aid. They met the fate of the first worker. A passerby who had been drawn to the scene by the crowd which had gathered was told by an excited bystander that several men in the cistern were drowning. Upon hearing this, he shouted, "I can swim, I can swim" and pulled away from a company employee who was trying to restrain him. Now there were four bodies in the well.

Shortly afterward the fire department arrived at the scene with proper rescue equipment. 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. All five persons died in the cistern.

Tests of the cistern atmosphere revealed that H2S in a concentration of about 1000 parts per million was present when the five deaths occurred. The water pumped up from the deep well contained dissolved hydrogen sulfide which was released in the unventilated cistern.

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comex

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BuildTheRobots  9 years 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 :(

  • Swannie  9 years ago

    Absolutely. This is also well known in the amateur caving community too, who follow similar practices to those outlined by yourself. I too find this crazy.

    As they say in the diving industry about water and confined spaces: a deceptively easy way to die.

    • BuildTheRobots  9 years ago

      I've just realised that the word document linked to actually seems to be dated 1974 (google makes it seem possible that the incident was 1971). It doesn't excuse anything but I like to think we've gotten a bit better since then. I get the impression in caving circles at least, "bad air" is much better understood these days.

      (irrelevant, but for the record, cave diving scares the pants off've me =) )

      1 reply →

  • Luc  9 years 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  9 years 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.

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takinola  9 years 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  9 years 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?

ptaipale  9 years 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

"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 )

  • prawn  9 years ago

    Another case involving pig shit.

    "The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit."

    Tough way to go.

    From this excellent, long-form piece on Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/boss-hog-the-dark-s...

  • Pyrodogg  9 years ago

    I worked one summer for my uncle helping to construct new farrowing barns for pigs. One of the clearest lessons I got was to never, EVER, get down near the manure pits of the barns in use and that if anyone did have problems, to not go in after them.

    After that, was lessons about watching for risks of fire and knowing where to GTFO.

    I don't remember any at-the-time recent issues with asphyxiation and there were well known cases of barn fires every 5-8 years (we were replacing one that burnt down the year before). Still, the bigger warning I remember was about safety near manure.

  • seszett  9 years 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  9 years 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.

oxymoron  9 years 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.

  • esaym  9 years ago

    >"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."

    Funny story and probably TMI.

    I used to work in aviation maintenance on large military aircraft. We regularly had to enter into "confined spaces" (fuel tanks, wings, ect) and were required to take a hand-held "air sniffer" with us that would alarm if any of about 5 or so monitored gases got too high.

    I would always fart into the thing to see what would happen and it would always read 0 on all monitored gases. However on one day, I had perhaps the worst smelling "flatulence" ever and while inside the center fuel tank of a P3, I let one rip right into the sniffer. H2S went from 0 to 1ppm, but strangely carbon monoxide (CO) went from 0 to 7ppm. I always expected the H2S, but I don't know what the heck CO was doing in my bowels..

  • VonGuard  9 years 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.

  • refurb  9 years 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  9 years 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.

  • Retra  9 years ago

    It can also be produced by bacteria that would would normally emit H2O, as in an oxygen deprived environment they can produce H2S instead.

chimeracoder  9 years 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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Safety

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

  • Florin_Andrei  9 years 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  9 years 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.

Pyxl101  9 years 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.

nickpsecurity  9 years ago

Wow, that's crazy. Terrifying stuff.

palmer_eldritch  9 years 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...

  • mikestew  9 years 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  9 years 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.

  • andyjohnson0  9 years 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  9 years 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.

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  • petewailes  9 years 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  9 years 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?

      3 replies →

  • ptaipale  9 years ago

    Well, maybe not. It's a mistake, a lapse of judgement, but not that extraordinarily stupid mistake.

    • palmer_eldritch  9 years 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.