Whipped Cream Difficulties

I don’t want to seem snarky here, though I am going to snark a little bit on a certain media outlet and not the people who died. This is a tragedy, and I think there’s an important lesson here.

Three people and a dog died in Elgin on Wednesday.

The reports say that they were hunting hogs. One of their dogs escaped and fell into a cistern, and one of the hunters went after it. He passed out, and two people went in after him. The fourth one stayed out and called 911.

“Because of the gas in the hole, we think – and we’re speculating here, we’ll let the autopsy bear this out. But we’re speculating that the gas overcame them and they were not able to maintain any kind of buoyancy on top of the water, and therefore, they sank underneath the water,” Cook said.

One major media outlet claims they died from “high levels of hydrogen — a toxic gas“. While it is true that hydrogen is toxic, in the sense that if you just breathe hydrogen instead of air YOU WILL DIE, more literate outlets are reporting it was actually an accumulation of hydrogen sulfide (H2S).

H2S is nasty.

The key point here, though, is: your safety is the priority. If someone goes into a confined space and passes out, I know the desire to help is hard to resist. But: don’t do it, unless you are a trained responder with self-contained breathing equipment. Otherwise, you’re just giving the first responders two victims to rescue instead of one.