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.
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.
Even if the gas in the confined space is not toxic, such as CO2, or N2, it can displace Oxygen, causing you to suffocate.
My foundry job included continual training, which in 1978 when I started was not heard of. But things like lock out/tag out, confined space training, ladder safety, lift truck training were all things that we had to take every year. Of course, the last few years, we also had to take training about hostile work place and how even having a bathing suit calendar in your locker, which was male only, was not allowed.
But since we used both Argon and Nitrogen, A2 and N2, in processing steel, neutral gasses, we had to do the confined space thing, with a Davit arm and a harness hooked up to a person in the space, plus continuous monitoring by a person who only sat outside the space and watched for low oxygen or poisonous gas. Of course, we could not use the cord reel to lift someone out of the space. You would hate it if they caught their foot on something, and you pulled them out, tearing off part of their leg in the process.
I have heard of several people dying on farms here, in manure tanks while trying to rescue someone who fell in. Methane gas from the manure displaces the O2, causing the person who might only have leaned over the tank to pass out, and fall into the tank. The next person tries to rescue them, and a chain reaction often has gotten 3 before the rescue unit got there. It must be hard to just wait, but you have to.
I have been thinking that I would like to take a mine safety and/or confined space rescue course, if I could find someone offering those at an affordable price.
I have no professional or personal need for this, I just think it would be interesting. After all, I just finished taking a class on spotting bombs and bombers, and I don’t have any professional or personal need for that. As far as I know.
And it kind of ties in to a book that I read recently, and want to do a write-up on here. (I can’t do it at the moment for good reasons.)
I just saw that I used the wrong symbol for Argon. I put A2 and it is actually Ar.
I have about 1.5 years of credit from several schools. I started out with the idea of getting a degree and getting a less labor intensive job, but ended up taking classes for personal enrichment.
I found that with overtime I earned more than I would have at a large portion of the physically easier jobs that I was considering. Several times I made more pet year than my one brother, a school teacher with a masters degree and around. 20+ years at the same school. I had to work a lot more than 2_000 hours a year, to make 70K, while Paul had summers off, but for the first few summers, he had to go back to college to finish his training, here in Michigan. After that it is a simple thing to take a few more classes and get the Masters degree, and an automatic pay increase.
Myself, I worked for 4 years instead of spending time and money on.college. Then later I paid for classes while I went, so no debt. I couldn’t get many of the scholarships that were offered to me upon graduation, but I did get a little, which helped me to be able to take 14 credits one semester.
You’re back! I was starting to worry about you!
Hope everything’s okay.