Comment by 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...
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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?
The gas will be inside the mask when you put it back on.
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.
Well, maybe not. It's a mistake, a lapse of judgement, but not that extraordinarily stupid mistake.
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.