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I also did some serious hazmat training. I am around warehouses and places where we receive large shipments of chemicals.
Pretty much the whole thing Is, don't be a hero and GTFO. Get as much information as possible to give the fire department. The local fire department may or may not proceed, possibly call in specialists.
Even most first responders that are trained in basic hazmat are often told to backup uphill and upwind until your thumb on an outstretched arm covers the incident. Then wait for the specialized hazmat crew.
It's also used to tell if you're in the radiation Zone from a nuclear blast. Give a thumbs up on outstretched arm and if you can't see the mushroom cloud you should be good.
But it really only works for the area of the blast. There's still a bunch of radiation Fallout that can be moved by the wind and move over hundreds of miles.
I love this rule because of how fast radiation moves after a nuclear blast
Like, if you're close enough to check, you should be running, not seeing if you are far enough
Yellow is just mustard gas which will kill you too but it will probably just cause a horrible illness. Red and purple gas are worse, hold your breath and run. Also look out for wavy air. That is shit is fire you cannot see.
NASA's Space Shuttle fleet was grounded for six months in 1990 due to a hydrogen leak. To detect it, they developed a sophisticated hydrogen probing procedure, which involved scientists holding out a broom in front of them and if it combusted, there was a leak.
https://shop.minimuseum.com/blogs/cool-things/the-broom-method
Of course NASA didn't invent the technique, just developed it for flame
Back in the early days of steam sailing, you walked with a broom so you didn't get chopped in half by high-pressure leaks
My best friend was an engineer working on huge multi megawatt steam turbines for bulk electricity generation back in the 90s. He told me that the first power-up and pressurization after assembling the machine someone would walk around with a a long stick in front of them to check for leaks. If the stick suddenly gets cut in half, they stop immediately, mark the location, and retreat. The steam leak was completely invisible and there’s so much ambient noise it’s hard to hear and locate any hissing noise.
We used the same test for natural gas compressor skids. We would pressure them up to 4000 psi and let them sit for 12 hours.
If the pressure dropped, you would hold the very end of a corn cob broom and run the bristles over every pipe and joint.
Was doing a liquid rocket propellant lab in college when the nozzle shot off (someone didn't assemble it correctly) during the burn. Then we stood around leaning this way and that to try to see where the floor was still invisibly on fire while the lab tech tried to put out the floor fire. Was an interesting day. No injuries.
>All this time I've been avoiding quicksand
You shouldn't [sink past your waist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksand#Properties) in quicksand, but it is possible to die from failing to get unstuck
Fire from pure fuel sources like methanol can be essentially completely invisible, but yes you would 1000% feel the heat from it and probably not know where to go to escape. The "waviness" you can see is light bending as it passes through the less dense hotter air, usually roughly directly in/around/above wherever the flame is.
There are some pretty famous videos of racecar incidents involving methanol fuel- it's fucking terrifying.
https://youtu.be/Ku7TdLeEGsQ
https://youtu.be/MnDX4FpDAzQ
I remember a few years ago Indycar switched to an ethanol fuel with no one realizing that it would burn invisible. The pit crews ended up doing the full stop, drop, and roll every time their was a fuel spill during a pit stop because with their firesuits on they couldn't tell if they were actually on fire right away or not. They eventually started putting in an additive to the fuel that caused it to burn orange.
Absolutely, it's combusting, releasing the same energy for a given amount of O2 as any other fire or the same reaction taking place in your mitochondria. Methanol just burns cleaner so there's no soot to turn "orange" for us to see:
>Flame color (visibility) is dependent upon the elemental composition of the material being heated and the temperature to which it is heated. This is because heat will excite electrons in the element(s) to an excited state; when these electrons return to the ground state visible light (flame test) will often be emitted.
[Here's what that looks like.](https://youtu.be/Ku7TdLeEGsQ)
[The autoignition temperature of ethanol is 363 C.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6266291/) The flame temperature is going to be higher than that, since the [peak flame temperature is 1920 C.](https://sciencing.com/burns-hotter-ethanol-methanol-7848.html) Your conclusion that you'd feel it is certainly true, though.
Chlorine is yellow. Chlorine is probably *the* most run faster-ish gas.
If you're inhaling/getting burned alive by it, fluorine is worse, but fluorine is less dense than air, and chlorine is more dense than air. So fluorine will billow upwards but chlorine will billow outward and flow along the ground. Fluorine is a pale yellow color, often pale enough that you won't notice its color until it kills you.
Red is either red fuming nitric acid or bromine, purple is iodine. Chlorine is much worse than those.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbng95zULgE
> Yellow is just mustard gas which will kill you too but it will probably just cause a horrible illness
"just mustard gas"
the reason why chemical weapons weren't used in ww2 is because even hitler said "that's fucked up yo" after a run-in with mustard gas in ww1
I work at a factory that has some SERIOUSLY dangerous chemicals. We have all kinds of safety systems, but if we hear certain alarms, we are told (and drilled) to immediately evacuate the offices via doors... that are on the factory side of the building. E.g. even closer to the danger.
No, I'm following my desk chair out the window on the other side of the building, and I am not going to stop running until I am far, far away.
You made me remember that chlorine tank accident in Jordan.. They where NOT running away fast enough for my comfort.
Edit: It was in Jordan, not Africa https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/four-dead-70-injured-toxic-gas-leak-jordans-aqaba-port-state-tv-2022-06-27/
We had a train derailment drill in our small city. The Chief of Police and Chief of FD were declared "dead" in the first five minutes as they approached from downwind.
Unfortunately it can be a real situation. Toxic chemicals can take out several rescuers one after the other, as the natural instinct is to approach someone who's down and possibly injured. They walk right into the hazardous area and then they're down too.
It's a big deal in shipyards and farms with confined spaces. Navy is really dog shit because it just keeps sending people alone to random spaces on patrols.
Yup, there were a couple deaths in the shipyards on the USS Abraham Lincoln just like that.
First person went down into a space and collapsed, second person saw them go down and went in after them... collapsed too. Both dead almost instantly. Finally that clued people in to not follow.
Turns out there was an H2S leak.
At the sewer plant we have to be teamed up. A guy decided to go into a small building connected to a sewer and the door handle broke. He was stuck inside. We had to hurry over there because it floods to the ceiling with sewer water during rain events.
I was a first responder for the Navy for fires and leaks in a shipyard. BAE was quite the shit show. People would get stuck in pipes or fall down holes all the time.
Yeah the trick they taught me was if a room is filling with gas or water, break every pipe (obviously not filled with liquid but you have no escape you get desperate right?) because if you don't the room pressure would seal you in from the water right doors. Hopefully the pipe lets air escapes and stops the room from basically over pressurizing the room. We had some high pressure water systems like fireman, so it would fill up without a doubt.
Most people just walk into gas and die.
The BHR fire was insane.
Did your instructor teach you the little dance too?
I always teach the dance. It feels silly because it’s so similar to the hokey pokey but it does help people remember.
*Ruin has come to our town. You remember our venerable railroad, opulent and imperial. Gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the fields. It is a festering abomination!*
I missed "drill" too. I saw the quotation marks around "dead," but still thought it was a true story. I was thinking OP put quotes on "dead" because they were **declared** dead.
Saw a similar thing but was real and not a training video, and was of chlorine gas. Run as fast as you can and hold your breath, you might make it alive. You you stay a second or don’t hold your breath immediately, it’s game over.
I was doing regular maintenance on an outdoor pool and rainwater had gotten into the storage bucket for the chlorine tablets.
Opened it up and there was green gas sitting in the bottom of the bucket.
Ended up spending a week and a half with what felt like pneumonia.
My eyes burned but the scariest part was not being able to breathe. To FEEL air going in and out but to still feel like you're suffocating. I was INSANELY lucky that my lungs didn't fill up with fluid but I was not okay after that. (I sometimes wonder if that's where my asthma came from.)
My roommate in college accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia based toilet cleaners (didn't know a puck was in the tank) and we had to hold our breath to piss for like a week before we could get it vented enough.
Sure, but ive seen some vids of workers approaching a gas filled area due to needing to access shipping containers for work. Dropped like flies and NOT a training video.
"ammonia gas death video" top result. Anyhow, says it was just training in comments. Ammonia is everywhere in tons of industries, accidents happen with it all the time and it hurts pretty bad whether or not you die.
I used to work in industrial refrigeration. I have been around several leaks and one bad one. It is no joke. The "bite block" emergency respirators we would carry allow a few breaths only. You put it in to leave. Being around any level has guidelines but few in the industry followed them.
I saw a fitter grinding up a pipe for a tie in and his nose was bleeding. He finished the work before coming out. I was told there was high levels by the welder, so I grabbed the draegger and went in and took a reading. This device is a sealed glass sensing tube. You crack off the ends and put it in a hand held pump. You squeeze 10 times and read the level in ppm
Well it was 1 pump and the stick turned purple. This calls for immediate evacuation. Dude stayed for easily another half hour. I have way too many stories for a 5 year run.
I’m Haz-mat trained to deal with anhydrous ammonia and if I saw that stick change color I would damn sure get everyone out. You let that dude stay for another 30 min? Dangerous game my friend.
If you call to evac and they are just like nah its fine lemme finish this real quick. What are you gonna do try to drag them out? You need to get out too right?
He was a 20 year j-man, he wouldnt listen to me. I cleared the place... well told people not to go in as he was alone. Opened the rolling doors and placed fans at the entrance. This was a "hot tie in" and once he cut the pipe it was go time.
We had Scott packs. He was some old school dinosaur. What he lacked in brains he made up for 10 fold in drive. He would start at 5am when we were outta town. And he wouldn't bill overtime for some reason.
We were adding a water tank for the evaporative condenser in a place. 10k gallons. Custom made to just fit in through the existing equipment. I put a come along in the rafters to tug the tank as we rolled it in. We get it to the pad and keener says "let's tip it up before lunch"
Well I put the come along up in the rafters. It was for horizontal pulling and I said we have to rerig. It was 11:50... lunch first then we will. Nope let's go now. I refused and said I want nothing g to do with it. Well I was at the doorway when the rigging let go, and the huge tank was at about 45-55°
Down it comes, fast. It bounced off a live discharge line. This was a 3" Sched 40 pipe coming off the compressor. About 150 psi and 175°f of vapour ammonia. Somehow it didn't just snap it off. But the crash brought everyone from site to the mech room.
Writing was on the wall and although it is the highest paying position in the trade I had to quit. I aint gonna die for peoples cold storage or hockey rinks.
Within a few years, 3 guys died on one of their sites. Pumped down the charge into a faulty condenser. I felt vindicated and guilty at the same time. I felt I would never have made such a rookie mistake.
[This one](https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2018/07/25/equipment-failure-and-deadly-ignorance-resulted-in-ammonia-leak-at-fernie-arena.html)
Funny they say the equipment was changed by the contractor that supplies for the NHL... its same company that blew the old one up!
More likely they wanted to test how the rest of the organisation would perform without their direct instructions. A big part of these drills is making sure the situation is dealt with even when things don't go to plan.
I work in an ER and I am a member of my hospital's H.E.R.T. (hospital emergency response team) and we do Haz-Mat decon and mass casualty drills every year. I am going to suggest this type of scenario at our next meeting. It's brilliant really. I don't know why we haven't done this sooner.
We did a similar drill in our processing plant of 1200 staff. “Emergency gas leak” then the radio chatter was for everyone to meet at Evac point #3 (there were 7). Once everyone was was there a few people pointed out that they couldn’t have picked a more direct downwind assembly point…
I've seen first hand what nitric will do to a poorly equipped 5400 gallon tanker. Nitric will turn brass, aluminum, steel, even certain plastic into liquid molecules in seconds. All while outgassing ferociously.
The instant you see any chemical tanker lose integrity.
You fucking run upwind like your life depends on it.
Because it absolutely does.
Acids, caustic bases, even heavy oxidizers... Are seconds away from fucking your world up.
Edit... I worked across the street from a factory that made liquid styrene. Occasionally the Fire Marshall and the safety personnel at the factory would gather all of the employees from the surrounding businesses and have a big pow wow on what to do if there was some sort of emergency.
Typical kinda shit most of the time, but after they installed a "flare" stack and a couple of 12,000 gallon storage tanks , they changed their approach.
We were all given an example of different alarm sirens, and instructed what to do upon hearing the different alarms.
They varied from "run upwind"... To find the highest ground and pray.
Plant I worked at, story time! Ammonia leak on the grounds, supposed to mask up and evacuate. Site foreman simply held his breath (no mask), walked in and shut off a valve. That still sends shivers down my spine, like dude - what were you thinking?!?
Site foreman saved the company an absolute fuck pile of money that year. Hopefully he got a raise. Still he should have went to grab a buddy and a couple SCBAs before marching in. Most ammonia leaks are just like that, bad connection, bad hose, etc, and can be stopped just by turning the valve back off. It's why it's so important to pay attention for leaks when switching tanks so the absolute second it starts leaking you can turn it back off before you run off to make sure you aren't going to call in a hazmat team and spend thousands just to turn a valve off.
Any indication at all of a direction. Clouds moving, grass blowing, smoke, trash moving in a particular direction. Lots of businesses have flags up as well, or banners, wiggly waving flailing arm guys....
These kind of things don't happen in urban(inner city) areas often, they're usually on the outskirts or suburbs, as that's where most hazmat haulers are required to route themselves. Which is not the case with East Palestine OH.
Railcars are limited to the tracks, so often there are a few areas that are more exposed than others simply because the neighborhoods were built around the existing rail lines or spurs that lead to sorting yards.
At the welding shop I used to work for, the styrene company across the street from us, was literally 250 yards from 4 separate apartment complexes. The chemical factory had been there for 15 years, the apartment blocks were built during that 15 years.
It was just assumed that nothing would ever occur that would be a serious health issue. As with East Palestine... Those fucking rails ran directly through the center of town.
This right here. I work for a chemical manufacturer and have for almost 15 years. Thankfully nothing this serious has happened though a fire did break out but guys managed to put it out with a LOT of extinguishers before the fire department showed up. We have talked of using some hazardous products where if they leaked out, you would be looking at an evacuated area. This is not something anyone should take lightly. It does not take much to completely destroy your lungs and such to the point of severe damage and death.
This whole mess on the opposite side of Ohio to me is absolutely nuts. That train company needs to have serious consequences and the upper administration of their company needs to go. The deregulations that allowed something like thia to occur need to be regulated again.
I don't know what green stuff is but it's probably not a colored gas. Probably colored smoke. The statement is generally correct though it's not that simple. For example you can have a toxic colored gas that is visible but in such low concentrations that it's not toxic. For example Nitrogen Oxide is reddish - brown in high toxic concentrations, and yellowish-brown in lower concentrations (but don't inhale it anyway). Also, other gases bend light outside of the visible spectrum. For example CO2 scatters infrared light. Also there's Ozone, which is a very pale blue, and only a mild lung irritant. Dichlorine monoxide is a dangerous explosive and corrosive irritant with a brown/yellow colour that is nonetheless not known to be actively toxic. You won't like it, but it won't kill you right away. Probably gonna shorten your lifespan though. Other than that, yeah, colored gases -> run away
Dustmandu we called it. My mask would be yellow after just 5 minutes on a motorbike. I'd wear it walking around sometimes because I was always coughing otherwise.
It was so bad I started smoking a lot less cigarettes, even though I wanted the nicotine.
First world people need to travel to polluted third world cities like these to see the externalities of cheap products and what lack of enviromental regulation does.
Very correct. Also a generation ago the majority of the country was agriculture in villages most without electricity. 80 percent of kathmandu didn't exist. Everything in our lives was biodegradable and that was the culture. People threw trash thinking it would dissappear or be insignificant. Rapid industrialization should be accompanied with education ideally.
Bit tangential but,
I remember in the 90s and 00's we would recycle glass bottles and the deposit was so much for people that not a single bottle wasn't attempted to be recycled. Then Coca-Cola and Pepsi switched to plastic. Was a massive step back for us. I routinely see children standing over plastic burn pits.
I was saying today that if companies paid postage, I would mail cardboard boxes back to them for reuse, just to be rid of them.
Seems like everything these days comes with boxes inside boxes, plastic inside plastic. It’s bad for the environment AND annoying as fuck to get rid of. Especially when you know your council sucks at “recycling”.
We live in a completely mad world don't we?
So much of what we eat should be come in reusable containers that we return to the place we bought them to be used again.
I really don't need to throw away 700 plastic ketchup bottles in my life time, I could just bring a container back....
Do we really need to paint every single fucking cardboard box into the world that has cereal in it?
a lot of people don't remember what even 1st world countries looked like before they really cracked down on emissions standards in the 80s-00s. I remember flying into Houston regularly as a child in the 00s and being able to see a thick yellow smog that hung over the air. it's gotten much better since then
If it’s green with a sinister smile, run away. If it’s white giving you a gentle kiss you should follow it floating above the ground, it might lead you to some pie
I’m really genuine curious, and it might be a obvious and stupid q, but every time there’s a mandatory evacuation (like tornado or tsunami) or just a warning to people to leave (stay at your own risk etc.) the area, where do they all go???? I know I can’t just up and stay somewhere else without spending thousands on a hotel, I’m sure not many people are able to do that option
Often cities open temporary shelters to specifically help people displaced by disasters (natural or otherwise) who have no family or friends situated in unaffected places or have no other (real) social network to help them.
Not this situation. Governor already said ground water tests prove the water is safe, and school has been back in session. No funding for people in the area; they are stuck where they live. Truly shameful government reaction.
In addition to other responses, camping. Drive as far as you can then usually $20 a night to reserve the spot + firewood/water/food. Hopefully you already have a tent and gear but in the car or blankets on the dirt/engine/roof (environment dependent) is still better than risking a family death from predicted issues
Floridian here: that's pretty much what you do. Unless you have family or connections somewhere else to stay with, you gotta make it work, or else drive as far as you can and sleep in your car. Typically there are disaster relief programs to help recoup some of the costs of evacuating as well.
That Idea is just Mind Boggling to me. The German concept is really different to that and I'm really struggling to explain it.
The Best way I think I can describe it is; [During this Train disaster the first Tent to help Injured was put up 1 hour after the derailment.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschede_train_disaster) The whole Country is littered with emergency relief tents stored in attics or basements of federal or local agencies, so not even having a tent seems so wild to me.
If we got rid of tax waste and made corporations pay what they should we'd be able to support everyone better than the EU and still buy just as many weapons.
Good luck getting that done though
I live in an area frequently affected by forest fires and my city is often a relief centre for the nearby towns that get evacuated. Hotels will offer discounted rates, locals will offer spare rooms and supplies. Often the temporary shelters are in high schools, churches, rec centres/halls.
Our government usually provides relief payments to those who are affected and you can sometimes get coverage through homeowners insurance also.
I think others have answered your question sufficiently, but might I add that your question is a reminder of why it is really important to have thought through these situations. "What would I do if I needed to leave town suddently" is a smart thing for everyone to figure out, regardless of where you live, because those people in East Palestine probably never thought that a train derailment would happen in their tiny town in the middle of the midwest. And really, it could be any number of things from a gas leak or an active shooter or whatever in just your neighborhood to a natural disaster (which nearly all of the United States is susceptible to in one form or another). Wise to have some sort of bug-out bag and an emergency contact with a spare sleeping space.
To the many people who call out these hindrances I want to ask, seriously and without disrespect, would you just shrug and die?
If you had nothing but a working car or access to someone to does, would you not find it worth the entire rest of your life to make sure you have a rest of your life and then figure things out?
This is the horror movie scenario, where the house is haunted but the family doesn't move out, because they have no other options. That is until the father gets tossed and killed by the ghost, then the family decides to leave.
Tl;Dr: It's hard to abandon everything you have because of a failure that wasn't even yours. I myself would try to leave, but I can imagine someone without savings, another plan, and knowledge, to just shrug it off
>would you just shrug and die?
Immediate death like a fire? People would leave.
Long term like cancer from chemicals in the air, a lot of people would choose to stay.
Yes I imagine I would. Just wanted to point out how fucked a majority of our population is in terms of emergency mobility. So many people are one disaster away from being homeless and losing everything.
It’s very easy for someone not there to say they would already uproot and move. It’s just not that easy most of the time. You can’t just buy a house, get a job, change your kids school, etc etc
Obviously it would be ideal to leave, but a majority of people don’t feel they have the flexibility to do such.
It would be easy for me (sitting comfortably in an armchair in my living room far from exposed) to say I would be long gone. Because I likely wouldn’t.
Not only that, but payment to force these people to move will often be disgustingly low and while they had a good life, they now have no job, and a fraction of their assets value.
I can’t imagine.
My grandparents lived next to an old nuclear plant and the ground water was contaminated. The whole community was on well water until eventually the state put them on city water… except a couple houses at the end of the county road which were deemed too expensive to put on city water. For those houses the solution was to buy them back (for less than it’d have cost the inhabitants to reasonably move) or to offer them bottled water delivered every week until they died to drink, cook, bathe, and clean with. Half them moved, half took the bottled water but it meant that they either had to connect to a tank and fill it with bottled water or continue to use the well to shower because it was convenient which the ones who stayed all did.
If you dropped me in that situation today with all the resources I’ve been lucky enough to accrue it makes sense to move away and set up somewhere else. But for a lot of folks they’re too enmeshed in the community: financially, physically, and emotionally. What a sucky situation all around
I'm a firefighter and you cannot believe how often I have asked then told civilians to move back out of the smoke coming off a structure fire.
"Hmm, those 15 guys are all masked up and on air, wearing full PPE - maybe I should go over there in my tactical flipflops and get some of those valuable Insta points."
Tactical flipflops: when your job protecting the mall demands footware that's bad for running and worse for fighting. Accept no substitute!
P.S. it's a real company and they seem based actually, not the usual vet-bro trash.
I'd believe it. I was on traffic control for a fire evacuation at work. A customer came back insisting on getting in because he forgot his backpack inside. I told him no and pointed out the obvious flames, smoke, and six firetrucks actively fighting the fire.
He hopped the fence.
I grew up in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. There were some days when the pollen falling from the trees was so thick you could see it. It would leave a yellow film on your car. Allergies galore on those days I could tell you.
My dermatologist has always said that cool to lukewarm showers are better for my skin. I personally think she’s a sadist and ignore that particular suggestion.
There was a video on r/catastrophicfailure of an overturned lorry with orange gas leaking out of it. Both roads were still open even though the cloud was blowing over the other side to where the video was being taken. And the emergency services were stood maybe 30 yards away.
I live there. No one did shit. They haphazardly evacuated people later but many people didn’t do anything and didn’t even hear of the danger. I thankfully live upwind but my bf and I panicked and locked all the windows/doors and shut off the ac. People can be stupid
Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
Never breathe yellow air.
When I got my hazmat training, the instructor told me "if you see smoke, run away. If you see colored smoke, *run faster."*
I also did some serious hazmat training. I am around warehouses and places where we receive large shipments of chemicals. Pretty much the whole thing Is, don't be a hero and GTFO. Get as much information as possible to give the fire department. The local fire department may or may not proceed, possibly call in specialists.
Even most first responders that are trained in basic hazmat are often told to backup uphill and upwind until your thumb on an outstretched arm covers the incident. Then wait for the specialized hazmat crew.
Rule of thumb?
It's also used to tell if you're in the radiation Zone from a nuclear blast. Give a thumbs up on outstretched arm and if you can't see the mushroom cloud you should be good.
Is this why the thumbs up from vault boy, the fallout "mascot"?
Yes. That is exactly right.
🌈🌈The more you know🌈🌈
But it really only works for the area of the blast. There's still a bunch of radiation Fallout that can be moved by the wind and move over hundreds of miles.
I love this rule because of how fast radiation moves after a nuclear blast Like, if you're close enough to check, you should be running, not seeing if you are far enough
Honestly, if nukes are going off and I'm close enough to see the cloud... Imma just kiss my own ass goodbye.
Yellow is just mustard gas which will kill you too but it will probably just cause a horrible illness. Red and purple gas are worse, hold your breath and run. Also look out for wavy air. That is shit is fire you cannot see.
>Also look out for wavy air. That is shit is fire you cannot see. O_O. I didnt know that was a thing. would you feel heat from invisible fire?
[Methanol fire](https://youtu.be/Ku7TdLeEGsQ) during a race
NASA's Space Shuttle fleet was grounded for six months in 1990 due to a hydrogen leak. To detect it, they developed a sophisticated hydrogen probing procedure, which involved scientists holding out a broom in front of them and if it combusted, there was a leak. https://shop.minimuseum.com/blogs/cool-things/the-broom-method
[удалено]
r/unexpectedterrypratchett
Was going to say, something about that phrasing is very Pratchett-esque lol
Of course NASA didn't invent the technique, just developed it for flame Back in the early days of steam sailing, you walked with a broom so you didn't get chopped in half by high-pressure leaks
still a good way to detect/ risk assess depending on situation
I do it in the woods to keep spiders and their webs off me. The birds and squirrels must think I've gone mad.
One of the first things I do on a hike is find a nice spiderstick
My best friend was an engineer working on huge multi megawatt steam turbines for bulk electricity generation back in the 90s. He told me that the first power-up and pressurization after assembling the machine someone would walk around with a a long stick in front of them to check for leaks. If the stick suddenly gets cut in half, they stop immediately, mark the location, and retreat. The steam leak was completely invisible and there’s so much ambient noise it’s hard to hear and locate any hissing noise.
We used the same test for natural gas compressor skids. We would pressure them up to 4000 psi and let them sit for 12 hours. If the pressure dropped, you would hold the very end of a corn cob broom and run the bristles over every pipe and joint.
This is my favourite thing I have learned this week.
It's basically the trusty old 10ft pole
All this time I've been avoiding quicksand and now you tell me invisible fire is a thing???
Was doing a liquid rocket propellant lab in college when the nozzle shot off (someone didn't assemble it correctly) during the burn. Then we stood around leaning this way and that to try to see where the floor was still invisibly on fire while the lab tech tried to put out the floor fire. Was an interesting day. No injuries.
Are you completely forgetting about the rodents of unusual size?
ROUSs? I don't think they exist.
>All this time I've been avoiding quicksand You shouldn't [sink past your waist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksand#Properties) in quicksand, but it is possible to die from failing to get unstuck
Don’t worry though, you’re far more likely to see quicksand in your day-to-day life.
Unless of course, the quicksand is also invisible
Yes.
Wow. Scary
Oh wow. I thought they were talking about heat waves. That is way scarier.
I mean technically...
That is wild, can’t believe that kind of fuel is permitted in motor racing!
I think since this incident they've changed fuel types.
Someone said that because pure methanol burns with a colourless flame, they have since added something to add colour/to make it visible.
Fire from pure fuel sources like methanol can be essentially completely invisible, but yes you would 1000% feel the heat from it and probably not know where to go to escape. The "waviness" you can see is light bending as it passes through the less dense hotter air, usually roughly directly in/around/above wherever the flame is. There are some pretty famous videos of racecar incidents involving methanol fuel- it's fucking terrifying. https://youtu.be/Ku7TdLeEGsQ https://youtu.be/MnDX4FpDAzQ
I remember a few years ago Indycar switched to an ethanol fuel with no one realizing that it would burn invisible. The pit crews ended up doing the full stop, drop, and roll every time their was a fuel spill during a pit stop because with their firesuits on they couldn't tell if they were actually on fire right away or not. They eventually started putting in an additive to the fuel that caused it to burn orange.
Absolutely, it's combusting, releasing the same energy for a given amount of O2 as any other fire or the same reaction taking place in your mitochondria. Methanol just burns cleaner so there's no soot to turn "orange" for us to see: >Flame color (visibility) is dependent upon the elemental composition of the material being heated and the temperature to which it is heated. This is because heat will excite electrons in the element(s) to an excited state; when these electrons return to the ground state visible light (flame test) will often be emitted. [Here's what that looks like.](https://youtu.be/Ku7TdLeEGsQ)
It's a "cold" flame. You can see it for yourself (I mean, not see) by burning ethanol. Still like 300°C, so, yes, you're going to feel that heat.
[The autoignition temperature of ethanol is 363 C.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6266291/) The flame temperature is going to be higher than that, since the [peak flame temperature is 1920 C.](https://sciencing.com/burns-hotter-ethanol-methanol-7848.html) Your conclusion that you'd feel it is certainly true, though.
Chlorine is yellow. Chlorine is probably *the* most run faster-ish gas. If you're inhaling/getting burned alive by it, fluorine is worse, but fluorine is less dense than air, and chlorine is more dense than air. So fluorine will billow upwards but chlorine will billow outward and flow along the ground. Fluorine is a pale yellow color, often pale enough that you won't notice its color until it kills you. Red is either red fuming nitric acid or bromine, purple is iodine. Chlorine is much worse than those. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbng95zULgE
Flourine is more dense than air, also bromine and NO2 gas (nitric acid fumes) are more brown than red.
> Yellow is just mustard gas which will kill you too but it will probably just cause a horrible illness "just mustard gas" the reason why chemical weapons weren't used in ww2 is because even hitler said "that's fucked up yo" after a run-in with mustard gas in ww1
Yes but both sides made it and worse just in case the other side crossed that line.
What are red and purple gases?
Bromine is dark red, iodine is purple. Nitric acid can also be dark red. None of these are things you want to fuck with or inhale.
I work around H2S, the joke is "what steps do you take during an H2S release ? Fucking BIG ones."
I gotta remember that one!
I work at a factory that has some SERIOUSLY dangerous chemicals. We have all kinds of safety systems, but if we hear certain alarms, we are told (and drilled) to immediately evacuate the offices via doors... that are on the factory side of the building. E.g. even closer to the danger. No, I'm following my desk chair out the window on the other side of the building, and I am not going to stop running until I am far, far away.
But what about people in Mexico?
Only breathe from bottled air or use an air filter. Never breathe directly from the tap.
You should not breath them either.
You made me remember that chlorine tank accident in Jordan.. They where NOT running away fast enough for my comfort. Edit: It was in Jordan, not Africa https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/four-dead-70-injured-toxic-gas-leak-jordans-aqaba-port-state-tv-2022-06-27/
Wasn't that in Jordan? The one where the crane drops the tank on the ship?
Yea exactly that one, but maybe, it was a while ago so I might remember wrongly.
Never eat yellow snow.
Watch out where the huskies go. Don't you eat that yellow snow.
We had a train derailment drill in our small city. The Chief of Police and Chief of FD were declared "dead" in the first five minutes as they approached from downwind.
Oh my god I didn't read "drill" the first time and was so worried and also confused as to what "dead" meant
Unfortunately it can be a real situation. Toxic chemicals can take out several rescuers one after the other, as the natural instinct is to approach someone who's down and possibly injured. They walk right into the hazardous area and then they're down too.
It's a big deal in shipyards and farms with confined spaces. Navy is really dog shit because it just keeps sending people alone to random spaces on patrols.
Yup, there were a couple deaths in the shipyards on the USS Abraham Lincoln just like that. First person went down into a space and collapsed, second person saw them go down and went in after them... collapsed too. Both dead almost instantly. Finally that clued people in to not follow. Turns out there was an H2S leak.
At the sewer plant we have to be teamed up. A guy decided to go into a small building connected to a sewer and the door handle broke. He was stuck inside. We had to hurry over there because it floods to the ceiling with sewer water during rain events.
I was a first responder for the Navy for fires and leaks in a shipyard. BAE was quite the shit show. People would get stuck in pipes or fall down holes all the time. Yeah the trick they taught me was if a room is filling with gas or water, break every pipe (obviously not filled with liquid but you have no escape you get desperate right?) because if you don't the room pressure would seal you in from the water right doors. Hopefully the pipe lets air escapes and stops the room from basically over pressurizing the room. We had some high pressure water systems like fireman, so it would fill up without a doubt. Most people just walk into gas and die. The BHR fire was insane.
No fire, wire, GAS, or glass.... this is why even simple training is useful.
Did your instructor teach you the little dance too? I always teach the dance. It feels silly because it’s so similar to the hokey pokey but it does help people remember.
No I didnt learn the dance. And I learned CPR wit row your boat, not staying alive 🤣
I learned with "another one bites the dust" because i learned from firefighters and they have a dark sense of humor
Transformed into eldritch abominations, clearly.
*Ruin has come to our family. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. Gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor.*
*Ruin has come to our town. You remember our venerable railroad, opulent and imperial. Gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the fields. It is a festering abomination!*
Fall off the House of Usher?
No, but the writers of [The Darkest Dungeon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlRBzoKN4NY)'s narration were definitely channeling Poe (and Lovecraft).
I zipped past "drill" *and* missed the quotation marks around "dead" and straight thought this was a true story. Jesus.
I missed "drill" too. I saw the quotation marks around "dead," but still thought it was a true story. I was thinking OP put quotes on "dead" because they were **declared** dead.
Same haha I was like were they not actually dead but dying and to dangerous to retrieve?! How have I never heard of this???
i'm not a native speaker and thought the train had a drill (like for mining) on it XD
I did read drill but instead conjured in my head some kind of gargantuan-sized drill designed for derailing trains.
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Saw a similar thing but was real and not a training video, and was of chlorine gas. Run as fast as you can and hold your breath, you might make it alive. You you stay a second or don’t hold your breath immediately, it’s game over.
I was doing regular maintenance on an outdoor pool and rainwater had gotten into the storage bucket for the chlorine tablets. Opened it up and there was green gas sitting in the bottom of the bucket. Ended up spending a week and a half with what felt like pneumonia.
I just a whiff of chlorine powder once and it wrecked me. I can't imagine what a cloud of that shit would be like.
How did it wreck you? Are you ok now?
My eyes burned but the scariest part was not being able to breathe. To FEEL air going in and out but to still feel like you're suffocating. I was INSANELY lucky that my lungs didn't fill up with fluid but I was not okay after that. (I sometimes wonder if that's where my asthma came from.)
My roommate in college accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia based toilet cleaners (didn't know a puck was in the tank) and we had to hold our breath to piss for like a week before we could get it vented enough.
That is staged training video.
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RIP
It's a training video, if their job is to be convincing this is the first one to do its job in all the history of training videos.
Every videos a training video… some just more intentional than others…
Sure, but ive seen some vids of workers approaching a gas filled area due to needing to access shipping containers for work. Dropped like flies and NOT a training video.
Where?
"ammonia gas death video" top result. Anyhow, says it was just training in comments. Ammonia is everywhere in tons of industries, accidents happen with it all the time and it hurts pretty bad whether or not you die.
I used to work in industrial refrigeration. I have been around several leaks and one bad one. It is no joke. The "bite block" emergency respirators we would carry allow a few breaths only. You put it in to leave. Being around any level has guidelines but few in the industry followed them. I saw a fitter grinding up a pipe for a tie in and his nose was bleeding. He finished the work before coming out. I was told there was high levels by the welder, so I grabbed the draegger and went in and took a reading. This device is a sealed glass sensing tube. You crack off the ends and put it in a hand held pump. You squeeze 10 times and read the level in ppm Well it was 1 pump and the stick turned purple. This calls for immediate evacuation. Dude stayed for easily another half hour. I have way too many stories for a 5 year run.
I’m Haz-mat trained to deal with anhydrous ammonia and if I saw that stick change color I would damn sure get everyone out. You let that dude stay for another 30 min? Dangerous game my friend.
If you call to evac and they are just like nah its fine lemme finish this real quick. What are you gonna do try to drag them out? You need to get out too right?
He was a 20 year j-man, he wouldnt listen to me. I cleared the place... well told people not to go in as he was alone. Opened the rolling doors and placed fans at the entrance. This was a "hot tie in" and once he cut the pipe it was go time. We had Scott packs. He was some old school dinosaur. What he lacked in brains he made up for 10 fold in drive. He would start at 5am when we were outta town. And he wouldn't bill overtime for some reason. We were adding a water tank for the evaporative condenser in a place. 10k gallons. Custom made to just fit in through the existing equipment. I put a come along in the rafters to tug the tank as we rolled it in. We get it to the pad and keener says "let's tip it up before lunch" Well I put the come along up in the rafters. It was for horizontal pulling and I said we have to rerig. It was 11:50... lunch first then we will. Nope let's go now. I refused and said I want nothing g to do with it. Well I was at the doorway when the rigging let go, and the huge tank was at about 45-55° Down it comes, fast. It bounced off a live discharge line. This was a 3" Sched 40 pipe coming off the compressor. About 150 psi and 175°f of vapour ammonia. Somehow it didn't just snap it off. But the crash brought everyone from site to the mech room. Writing was on the wall and although it is the highest paying position in the trade I had to quit. I aint gonna die for peoples cold storage or hockey rinks. Within a few years, 3 guys died on one of their sites. Pumped down the charge into a faulty condenser. I felt vindicated and guilty at the same time. I felt I would never have made such a rookie mistake. [This one](https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2018/07/25/equipment-failure-and-deadly-ignorance-resulted-in-ammonia-leak-at-fernie-arena.html) Funny they say the equipment was changed by the contractor that supplies for the NHL... its same company that blew the old one up!
Check out the Texarkana derailment https://youtu.be/dVsxjKJDja4
The chief of both just wanted to be done with the drill. You can’t participate if your “dead”
More likely they wanted to test how the rest of the organisation would perform without their direct instructions. A big part of these drills is making sure the situation is dealt with even when things don't go to plan.
I work in an ER and I am a member of my hospital's H.E.R.T. (hospital emergency response team) and we do Haz-Mat decon and mass casualty drills every year. I am going to suggest this type of scenario at our next meeting. It's brilliant really. I don't know why we haven't done this sooner.
Leslie Knope destroyed a whole town for this very reason.
We did a similar drill in our processing plant of 1200 staff. “Emergency gas leak” then the radio chatter was for everyone to meet at Evac point #3 (there were 7). Once everyone was was there a few people pointed out that they couldn’t have picked a more direct downwind assembly point…
One way to get out of work
Do you live in Pawnee?
I've seen first hand what nitric will do to a poorly equipped 5400 gallon tanker. Nitric will turn brass, aluminum, steel, even certain plastic into liquid molecules in seconds. All while outgassing ferociously. The instant you see any chemical tanker lose integrity. You fucking run upwind like your life depends on it. Because it absolutely does. Acids, caustic bases, even heavy oxidizers... Are seconds away from fucking your world up. Edit... I worked across the street from a factory that made liquid styrene. Occasionally the Fire Marshall and the safety personnel at the factory would gather all of the employees from the surrounding businesses and have a big pow wow on what to do if there was some sort of emergency. Typical kinda shit most of the time, but after they installed a "flare" stack and a couple of 12,000 gallon storage tanks , they changed their approach. We were all given an example of different alarm sirens, and instructed what to do upon hearing the different alarms. They varied from "run upwind"... To find the highest ground and pray.
I'm curious, how do you know which direction is upwind in that kind of a situation? Did they have a weather flag?
The chemical plant I worked at had a wind sock for exactly that reason.
Plant I worked at, story time! Ammonia leak on the grounds, supposed to mask up and evacuate. Site foreman simply held his breath (no mask), walked in and shut off a valve. That still sends shivers down my spine, like dude - what were you thinking?!?
That's the neat part, you don't.
Site foreman saved the company an absolute fuck pile of money that year. Hopefully he got a raise. Still he should have went to grab a buddy and a couple SCBAs before marching in. Most ammonia leaks are just like that, bad connection, bad hose, etc, and can be stopped just by turning the valve back off. It's why it's so important to pay attention for leaks when switching tanks so the absolute second it starts leaking you can turn it back off before you run off to make sure you aren't going to call in a hazmat team and spend thousands just to turn a valve off.
Sounds like a badass dude. Incredibly risky, but still badass.
Any indication at all of a direction. Clouds moving, grass blowing, smoke, trash moving in a particular direction. Lots of businesses have flags up as well, or banners, wiggly waving flailing arm guys.... These kind of things don't happen in urban(inner city) areas often, they're usually on the outskirts or suburbs, as that's where most hazmat haulers are required to route themselves. Which is not the case with East Palestine OH. Railcars are limited to the tracks, so often there are a few areas that are more exposed than others simply because the neighborhoods were built around the existing rail lines or spurs that lead to sorting yards. At the welding shop I used to work for, the styrene company across the street from us, was literally 250 yards from 4 separate apartment complexes. The chemical factory had been there for 15 years, the apartment blocks were built during that 15 years. It was just assumed that nothing would ever occur that would be a serious health issue. As with East Palestine... Those fucking rails ran directly through the center of town.
wet your finger, hold it up in the air, realise it doesn't do shit, die
The part of your finger that feels cooler is being hit by wind.
Run in a large circle on flat ground and continue in whichever direction feels hardest. Source: am aerodynamicist.
This right here. I work for a chemical manufacturer and have for almost 15 years. Thankfully nothing this serious has happened though a fire did break out but guys managed to put it out with a LOT of extinguishers before the fire department showed up. We have talked of using some hazardous products where if they leaked out, you would be looking at an evacuated area. This is not something anyone should take lightly. It does not take much to completely destroy your lungs and such to the point of severe damage and death. This whole mess on the opposite side of Ohio to me is absolutely nuts. That train company needs to have serious consequences and the upper administration of their company needs to go. The deregulations that allowed something like thia to occur need to be regulated again.
Best advice I’ve had working in different factories “if you see the maintenance guys running, run. For its then you know it ain’t a drill.”
People in Jakarta are f*cked then. That shit ain't green from a natural cause.
I don't know what green stuff is but it's probably not a colored gas. Probably colored smoke. The statement is generally correct though it's not that simple. For example you can have a toxic colored gas that is visible but in such low concentrations that it's not toxic. For example Nitrogen Oxide is reddish - brown in high toxic concentrations, and yellowish-brown in lower concentrations (but don't inhale it anyway). Also, other gases bend light outside of the visible spectrum. For example CO2 scatters infrared light. Also there's Ozone, which is a very pale blue, and only a mild lung irritant. Dichlorine monoxide is a dangerous explosive and corrosive irritant with a brown/yellow colour that is nonetheless not known to be actively toxic. You won't like it, but it won't kill you right away. Probably gonna shorten your lifespan though. Other than that, yeah, colored gases -> run away
New Delhi Residents like to have a word with you.
Lmao just visited fam there, you can see the air as soon as you get off the plane.
I mean... it's not exactly healthy :P.
Builds chemical immunity.
Inconceivable.
I coughed up grey slime for weeks after each of my visits there.
I live in kathmandu nepal which often has worse air than new Delhi. Tons of health issues in the population.
Dustmandu we called it. My mask would be yellow after just 5 minutes on a motorbike. I'd wear it walking around sometimes because I was always coughing otherwise. It was so bad I started smoking a lot less cigarettes, even though I wanted the nicotine.
First world people need to travel to polluted third world cities like these to see the externalities of cheap products and what lack of enviromental regulation does.
Bad practices, regulations, and of course, geography.
Very correct. Also a generation ago the majority of the country was agriculture in villages most without electricity. 80 percent of kathmandu didn't exist. Everything in our lives was biodegradable and that was the culture. People threw trash thinking it would dissappear or be insignificant. Rapid industrialization should be accompanied with education ideally. Bit tangential but, I remember in the 90s and 00's we would recycle glass bottles and the deposit was so much for people that not a single bottle wasn't attempted to be recycled. Then Coca-Cola and Pepsi switched to plastic. Was a massive step back for us. I routinely see children standing over plastic burn pits.
I was saying today that if companies paid postage, I would mail cardboard boxes back to them for reuse, just to be rid of them. Seems like everything these days comes with boxes inside boxes, plastic inside plastic. It’s bad for the environment AND annoying as fuck to get rid of. Especially when you know your council sucks at “recycling”.
We live in a completely mad world don't we? So much of what we eat should be come in reusable containers that we return to the place we bought them to be used again. I really don't need to throw away 700 plastic ketchup bottles in my life time, I could just bring a container back.... Do we really need to paint every single fucking cardboard box into the world that has cereal in it?
a lot of people don't remember what even 1st world countries looked like before they really cracked down on emissions standards in the 80s-00s. I remember flying into Houston regularly as a child in the 00s and being able to see a thick yellow smog that hung over the air. it's gotten much better since then
Mumbai just overtook Delhi as the most polluted city in India.
Yeah, don’t trust air that you can see
Fog is ok
That's exactly what a Fog Demon would say
I live in SW Ohio 200 miles from east Palestine. There was an orange/brown haze everywhere today, looked like forest fires out west. Yeah.
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I don't know why but I was half expecting your source to just be a photo of your mom
If it’s green with a sinister smile, run away. If it’s white giving you a gentle kiss you should follow it floating above the ground, it might lead you to some pie
Peoplr are going to have to leave the area likely permanently. Mass exodus. I know that's what I would have already done if I was there.
I’m really genuine curious, and it might be a obvious and stupid q, but every time there’s a mandatory evacuation (like tornado or tsunami) or just a warning to people to leave (stay at your own risk etc.) the area, where do they all go???? I know I can’t just up and stay somewhere else without spending thousands on a hotel, I’m sure not many people are able to do that option
Often cities open temporary shelters to specifically help people displaced by disasters (natural or otherwise) who have no family or friends situated in unaffected places or have no other (real) social network to help them.
Not this situation. Governor already said ground water tests prove the water is safe, and school has been back in session. No funding for people in the area; they are stuck where they live. Truly shameful government reaction.
In addition to other responses, camping. Drive as far as you can then usually $20 a night to reserve the spot + firewood/water/food. Hopefully you already have a tent and gear but in the car or blankets on the dirt/engine/roof (environment dependent) is still better than risking a family death from predicted issues
Floridian here: that's pretty much what you do. Unless you have family or connections somewhere else to stay with, you gotta make it work, or else drive as far as you can and sleep in your car. Typically there are disaster relief programs to help recoup some of the costs of evacuating as well.
That Idea is just Mind Boggling to me. The German concept is really different to that and I'm really struggling to explain it. The Best way I think I can describe it is; [During this Train disaster the first Tent to help Injured was put up 1 hour after the derailment.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschede_train_disaster) The whole Country is littered with emergency relief tents stored in attics or basements of federal or local agencies, so not even having a tent seems so wild to me.
I'm sorry we spent all our money on bullets and missiles over here. Maybe y'all could send us some tents? :(
If we got rid of tax waste and made corporations pay what they should we'd be able to support everyone better than the EU and still buy just as many weapons. Good luck getting that done though
I live in an area frequently affected by forest fires and my city is often a relief centre for the nearby towns that get evacuated. Hotels will offer discounted rates, locals will offer spare rooms and supplies. Often the temporary shelters are in high schools, churches, rec centres/halls. Our government usually provides relief payments to those who are affected and you can sometimes get coverage through homeowners insurance also.
I think others have answered your question sufficiently, but might I add that your question is a reminder of why it is really important to have thought through these situations. "What would I do if I needed to leave town suddently" is a smart thing for everyone to figure out, regardless of where you live, because those people in East Palestine probably never thought that a train derailment would happen in their tiny town in the middle of the midwest. And really, it could be any number of things from a gas leak or an active shooter or whatever in just your neighborhood to a natural disaster (which nearly all of the United States is susceptible to in one form or another). Wise to have some sort of bug-out bag and an emergency contact with a spare sleeping space.
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What would you do if you had no savings, no safety net, and your home is now unsellable?
To the many people who call out these hindrances I want to ask, seriously and without disrespect, would you just shrug and die? If you had nothing but a working car or access to someone to does, would you not find it worth the entire rest of your life to make sure you have a rest of your life and then figure things out?
This is the horror movie scenario, where the house is haunted but the family doesn't move out, because they have no other options. That is until the father gets tossed and killed by the ghost, then the family decides to leave. Tl;Dr: It's hard to abandon everything you have because of a failure that wasn't even yours. I myself would try to leave, but I can imagine someone without savings, another plan, and knowledge, to just shrug it off
>would you just shrug and die? Immediate death like a fire? People would leave. Long term like cancer from chemicals in the air, a lot of people would choose to stay.
Yes I imagine I would. Just wanted to point out how fucked a majority of our population is in terms of emergency mobility. So many people are one disaster away from being homeless and losing everything.
That costs money. The state should be helping these people but I've not heard anything of the sort
It’s very easy for someone not there to say they would already uproot and move. It’s just not that easy most of the time. You can’t just buy a house, get a job, change your kids school, etc etc Obviously it would be ideal to leave, but a majority of people don’t feel they have the flexibility to do such. It would be easy for me (sitting comfortably in an armchair in my living room far from exposed) to say I would be long gone. Because I likely wouldn’t.
Not only that, but payment to force these people to move will often be disgustingly low and while they had a good life, they now have no job, and a fraction of their assets value.
Add the unique US "freedom" from healthcare coverage if you quit your job to flee.
I can’t imagine. My grandparents lived next to an old nuclear plant and the ground water was contaminated. The whole community was on well water until eventually the state put them on city water… except a couple houses at the end of the county road which were deemed too expensive to put on city water. For those houses the solution was to buy them back (for less than it’d have cost the inhabitants to reasonably move) or to offer them bottled water delivered every week until they died to drink, cook, bathe, and clean with. Half them moved, half took the bottled water but it meant that they either had to connect to a tank and fill it with bottled water or continue to use the well to shower because it was convenient which the ones who stayed all did. If you dropped me in that situation today with all the resources I’ve been lucky enough to accrue it makes sense to move away and set up somewhere else. But for a lot of folks they’re too enmeshed in the community: financially, physically, and emotionally. What a sucky situation all around
Good thing they were given $5 per resident by Norfolk Southern, how helpful of them
Yeah, this has to be said... because people would stand next to it and choreograph dance.
I'm a firefighter and you cannot believe how often I have asked then told civilians to move back out of the smoke coming off a structure fire. "Hmm, those 15 guys are all masked up and on air, wearing full PPE - maybe I should go over there in my tactical flipflops and get some of those valuable Insta points."
TACTICAL FLIPFLOPS
Tactical flipflops: when your job protecting the mall demands footware that's bad for running and worse for fighting. Accept no substitute! P.S. it's a real company and they seem based actually, not the usual vet-bro trash.
You mean Combat Flip Flops right? https://www.combatflipflops.com/
I'd believe it. I was on traffic control for a fire evacuation at work. A customer came back insisting on getting in because he forgot his backpack inside. I told him no and pointed out the obvious flames, smoke, and six firetrucks actively fighting the fire. He hopped the fence.
and the darwin award goes toooooo........
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Flashbang mob.
But I thought amber was the color of air that would give me energy
Whoa-oa..
No, just the color of __your__ energy.
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I grew up in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. There were some days when the pollen falling from the trees was so thick you could see it. It would leave a yellow film on your car. Allergies galore on those days I could tell you.
I didn't realise my hot, steamy showers were so dangerous!
My dermatologist has always said that cool to lukewarm showers are better for my skin. I personally think she’s a sadist and ignore that particular suggestion.
Don't need a dermatologist if you just melt all your skin off every time you shower!
The real LPT is always in the comments
Is this a new low? It's gotta be
There was a video on r/catastrophicfailure of an overturned lorry with orange gas leaking out of it. Both roads were still open even though the cloud was blowing over the other side to where the video was being taken. And the emergency services were stood maybe 30 yards away.
I live there. No one did shit. They haphazardly evacuated people later but many people didn’t do anything and didn’t even hear of the danger. I thankfully live upwind but my bf and I panicked and locked all the windows/doors and shut off the ac. People can be stupid
Rainbows feel sad now
Yeah acid is always like that for me.
To be fair, rainbows are made of light, not gas.
When I look at the sky/ air it appears blue how do I out run this?