That reminds me of this guy I use to know, Roy. You have to picture it, Roy was a good 'ol boy who lived in the hills of WV and who completely fit the stereo type. Large beer gut, long hair, no front teeth, IQ 85 at best, ect, but good guy none the less. Roy had a wood stove and a bunch of scrap lumber left over from a concrete job that was in need of disposal. Besides it was damn cold. Not having any good kindling, Roy tossed in about a quart of gasoline. The problem was he didn't have a match ready and took some time to fetch it. By this time the vapors begain fumigating the flue pipe and the area around the stove. This was my que to walk outside. So dismissing my exclamation that it was going to explode, he threw in a lit match. It exploded, mostly up through the flue pipe resulting in a column of fire that shot out the top of the chimney about 15ft and blew off the rain cap, and damn near set fire to the couch. Point of note, you should not use gasoline for any other purpose than what it's designed for.
always remember, liquid burns, vapors explode.
Incidentally, if you melt styrofoam with gasoline in a metal container, it makes an icky sticky flamable substance that is much more controlable. I'm sure you can guess what this 'substance' is very similar too.
always remember, liquid burns, vapors explode.
Incidentally, if you melt styrofoam with gasoline in a metal container, it makes an icky sticky flamable substance that is much more controlable. I'm sure you can guess what this 'substance' is very similar too.
Chemical Warfare
A silly but potentially fatal event. Some years ago I was working at an Auto Dealership (Ron Tonkin Honda)........when a technician accidently sprayed brake cleaner down a carb as it was running, rather than carb clean.
The event inexplicably emptied out the shop from the fumes.
Upon inspection of said can of brake clean, it said something like""WARNING" Combustion of this product produces toxic fosgene gas"
Now I've heard of Fosgene gas...wasn't it used in WW1 as a chemical warfare agent???? We all gathered around as we read the warning label...laughed a bit, till someone sprayed a pool of the stuff on the cement floor of the shop & lit it.
So here it was, a pool of burning 'stuff'....some dared others to bend down & take a whiff.........Foolish me stepped up to the dare, I approached bent down & took a good snoot-full. The most bizzare sensation..the stuff literally shut-off your ability to breathe!! JEEZ!!! No wonder! I took off running away & after what seemed like an eternity by body decided to work again.....chest rising to draw in air....It was like a light-switch!
_____________________________________________________Rick.....
A silly but potentially fatal event. Some years ago I was working at an Auto Dealership (Ron Tonkin Honda)........when a technician accidently sprayed brake cleaner down a carb as it was running, rather than carb clean.
The event inexplicably emptied out the shop from the fumes.
Upon inspection of said can of brake clean, it said something like""WARNING" Combustion of this product produces toxic fosgene gas"
Now I've heard of Fosgene gas...wasn't it used in WW1 as a chemical warfare agent???? We all gathered around as we read the warning label...laughed a bit, till someone sprayed a pool of the stuff on the cement floor of the shop & lit it.
So here it was, a pool of burning 'stuff'....some dared others to bend down & take a whiff.........Foolish me stepped up to the dare, I approached bent down & took a good snoot-full. The most bizzare sensation..the stuff literally shut-off your ability to breathe!! JEEZ!!! No wonder! I took off running away & after what seemed like an eternity by body decided to work again.....chest rising to draw in air....It was like a light-switch!
_____________________________________________________Rick.....
Some chlorinated hydrocarbons generate phosgene gas (carbonyl chloride) when burned. This gas also was a reagent the Germans used in their chemical industry circa WWI. They discovered it made a dandy poison gas, more potent than the chlorine that was first used at Ypres.
Running or any other form of exertion when exposed to a harmful dose of chlorine or phosgene is a bad idea, as it enhances the effects, the fatal one of which is pulmonary edema (your lungs fill with fluid, and you suffocate). You was lucky...
Running or any other form of exertion when exposed to a harmful dose of chlorine or phosgene is a bad idea, as it enhances the effects, the fatal one of which is pulmonary edema (your lungs fill with fluid, and you suffocate). You was lucky...
One of my first projects using high voltage. To get to the point I had 3 gel cell batteries hooked up in series to get 36V for some 700W motors. They were 12 or 15AmpHour cells, so they had some juice.
Anyway, they were powered through some H bridge circuits which were interesting to solder, because the controllers that I bought only had large pads to solder on the very large gauge wires. Well I ended up accidentally dripping some solder from the massive solder pad between two of the leads, got it to contact lots of crap it wasn't supposed to.
Since I was just testing, I was only using 16Ga wire from the batteries. However, when exposed to short circuit of 36V... a couple feet of 16Ga wire will QUICKLY melt its insulation and turn glowing red. The room filled with smoke almost immediately from the melted plastic and the wire burned a nice "S" shape in the carpet before I took the soldering iron and knocked the wire off the battery terminal. Came out coughing and never again using high power to test a recently soldered circuit.
Anyway, they were powered through some H bridge circuits which were interesting to solder, because the controllers that I bought only had large pads to solder on the very large gauge wires. Well I ended up accidentally dripping some solder from the massive solder pad between two of the leads, got it to contact lots of crap it wasn't supposed to.
Since I was just testing, I was only using 16Ga wire from the batteries. However, when exposed to short circuit of 36V... a couple feet of 16Ga wire will QUICKLY melt its insulation and turn glowing red. The room filled with smoke almost immediately from the melted plastic and the wire burned a nice "S" shape in the carpet before I took the soldering iron and knocked the wire off the battery terminal. Came out coughing and never again using high power to test a recently soldered circuit.
Phosgene is how polycarbonates are made.
Gasoline and polystyrene -- the basis for "jellied gasoline".
Guess where I'm sitting right now?
My brother and I discovered this one at about age 10. The ratio of gas to styrofoam can be varied to make a NAPALM (NAptha and PALM oil) like goo to a thick paste that will burn with a thick black smoke and won't go out even in the rain.
I had to replace the AC evaporator in my wifes car. I didn't have a vacuum pump so I got thie brilliant idea to flush the system with a fresh can of R12 and then pump the system down using engine vacuum. Well, I got the AC fixed, but this yellow - green cloud came out of the tailpipe at the freon burned. It stunk real bad so no one really wanted to take a whiff.
The owner of the house that I am currently staying in died due to a rare cancer. Guess what he did for 35 years. He worked in the plant that made the polymers used for polycarbonate manufacture. They used phosgene gas.
There was a big stink back in the 70's about a PVC plant somewhere in the Midwest that had workers dying of a rare liver cancer, most likely due to the vinyl choride momomer. Some of the workers were sniffing the stuff to get high, though there was probably enough inadvertant exposure to go around.
it was bisphenol-A, and it was outside Philadelphia.
Very few commercial chemical reactions "go to conclusion" -- i.e. 100% efficency, one of the remnants of turning ethylene and chlorine into VCM and thence PVC are some nasties which cause chlor-acne.
There may have been another incident with bisphenol (not surprising), but there was a big stink at a BF Goodrich plant in Kentucky (not Midwest after all) regarding rare liver cancers induced by vinyl chloride monomer (I got curious and looked it up after posting - key words are " vinyl chloride" coupled with "cancer"). It turned out that the vinyl chloride monomer is very carcinogenic, and folks sniffing the stuff/cleaning out the polymerization chambers/just working in the plant were all at risk for liver/brain/lymphatic cancers. Another at-risk group were beauticians, as it was a common propellant in hair spray for a while. Beauticians were exposed to concentrations of monomer equivalent or greater than PVC plant workers. The industry went to great lengths to hush up the essential nastiness of vinyl chloride, but the truth eventually got out.
Chloracne is another beast alltogether, I believe associated with things like polychlorinated biphenyls and various dioxins, with their own mechanisms for wreaking havoc. The vinyl chloride monomer, with a chlorine (electron-withdrawing) tacked right on to a double-bonded carbon, is extremely labile, and reacts inside the body to form several products, some of which home right on to DNA, with predictable results.
Chloracne is another beast alltogether, I believe associated with things like polychlorinated biphenyls and various dioxins, with their own mechanisms for wreaking havoc. The vinyl chloride monomer, with a chlorine (electron-withdrawing) tacked right on to a double-bonded carbon, is extremely labile, and reacts inside the body to form several products, some of which home right on to DNA, with predictable results.
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Fosgen is a paralytic of nervous system, used in chemical weapons of mass destruction. Ftoroplast (also known as Teflon) when hot releases Fosgen as well. Why do I know? Because a lady in our laboratory that worked on so called Kremlin Pills (electronic devices to stimulate peristaltic) was going to use it as an insulator immune to acids, but this decision was canceled.
Actually the nasty stuff released by overheated Teflon is different (carbonyl fluoride), but still nasty. Teflon is essentially long chains of carbon atoms saturated with fluorine (CF2-CF2-CF2, etc). Oxygen has no chance at cracking the C-F bonds, so the only game left in town is the C-C bonds, hence carbonyl fluoride.
Grew up there, graduated for WVIT.
........back when it was still WVIT.As poisons go, there is a factory in Institute, forget the name off hand, don't think it's Union Carbide, that manufauctures MIC (Methyl Isocyanide).
I remember years ago when someone 'turned the wrong valve' and they lost a couple of liters. I lived just west of that area, but evacuation considerations east of were taken seriously.
Reminds me of the distastful joke pertaining to this stuff of 'who killed more Indians than George Custer?' ......Union Carbide
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Silicon Valley used to be a big compromise between industry and agriculture, so you'd get stuff like nasty but relatively benign stinks from sugar refining and meat packing plants, agricultural accidents involving leaking/venting from the anhydrous ammonia tanks that farmers used for fertilizer, bizarre venting from petroleum refineries (an oleum leak that inspired widespread evacuation), and various small accidents in semiconductor plants. I used to work right next to one of these (Monolithic Memories, long defunct) that had periodic accidents that would drive "bunny suited" workers out to the parking lot. The witch's brew of chemicals involved in semiconductor processing must be seen to be believed.
The incident I was referring to was Rohm and Haas, now part of Dow. Probably the same issue. I would think that workers in beauty shops would be exposed to a lot of aldehydes and ketones.
One of the stupidest things I ever did -- I was interviewed for a job by Goodrich, and I kept referring to them as Goodyear.
One of the stupidest things I ever did -- I was interviewed for a job by Goodrich, and I kept referring to them as Goodyear.
One stupid thing I've done, being a student, when I played in University rock band; I designed a supported equipment, so if something was wrong I repaired it.
Once during preparation of a new program it was hot Siberian summer, so we were on stage half - naked, so hot it was. I heard distorted sound and jumped out of stage to listen, what it is. Then I saw a tiny smoke going from under chassis of one amp on the edge of the stage. I took screwdriver, undbolted it's cover, opened it, but saw nothing there: tubes, transformers, electrolytics... It had a voltage doubler, so one electrolytic cap had more than 300v on it's body. It was covered by a plastic pipe, but it's top had open spot. Smoke was going from under the chassis, so I took the amp by both arms and lifted toward myself, to look under the chassis. Suddenly I felt an electric shock on my naked chest!
I dropped the amp, sat down and was sitting few minutes trying to relax...
Once during preparation of a new program it was hot Siberian summer, so we were on stage half - naked, so hot it was. I heard distorted sound and jumped out of stage to listen, what it is. Then I saw a tiny smoke going from under chassis of one amp on the edge of the stage. I took screwdriver, undbolted it's cover, opened it, but saw nothing there: tubes, transformers, electrolytics... It had a voltage doubler, so one electrolytic cap had more than 300v on it's body. It was covered by a plastic pipe, but it's top had open spot. Smoke was going from under the chassis, so I took the amp by both arms and lifted toward myself, to look under the chassis. Suddenly I felt an electric shock on my naked chest!
I dropped the amp, sat down and was sitting few minutes trying to relax...
I don't remember that one - maybe I was elsewhere when it went off. However, I do remember the ninnyhammers that filled up trash bags with acetylene or hydrogen and set them off on the roof - the whole building shook. Then there were the lovable jokers that stole large chunks of sodium from the lab stocks and lobbed them off the roof into puddles, where they would blow up after some time sizzling and building up heat.
I drove through New Martinsville on the way to Moundsville where I am now. Starting at I-77 and driving north on WV route 2 will expose you to all sorts of "exotic" smells. None of them make my eyes burn like the morning fog rising off of the river on a calm day. It seems acidic, probably from the coal burning power plants. The person who died of the rare cancer worked at the Mobay / Bayer plant near New Martinsville.
I live 1200 miles south in Ft. Lauderdale. My wife grew up in Moundsville. The lady who lives across the street from me is from New Martinsville. The lady that used to live next door to her was from Paden City. Strange coincidence.
Another lesson learned from my childhood......Never throw a lit firecracker into an outhouse. A major stinky brown substance was everywhere and the whole campground smelled like...... Lesson: Methane + firecracker + human waste = a big smelly mess
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