Slashdot Mirror
Rotten Office Fridge Cleanup Sends 7 To Hospital
bokske writes "An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill. Firefighters had to evacuate the AT&T building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday, after the flagrant fumes prompted someone to call 911. A hazmat team was called in. Just another day at the office."
I've worked in a chemistry lab that shared space with a lab using some really noxious amine compounds (cadaverine is named that way for a reason...). Mostly they weren't hospital-toxic, just nasty. Whenever they had to open their fridge we cleared out of the room for 10 minutes to let the fumes dissipate up the venting hoods.
That's really interesting. I have the opposite reaction— my immune system doesn't recognise new pollens until I've been exposed to them for about a year. Living abroad was heaven.
I once was fined $145 for "creating an unattractive environment in public" when I spilled some rotten milk... Let that be a lesson to you young folk!
I worked for a company that built label printers. They conveniently placed an automatic label printer at every fridge. You pressed a button, and a label would print out with an expiration date. Anything past expiration or without a label was tossed daily.
-mkb
Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.
Now, from TFA:
Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment - she can't smell because of allergies.
I don't think a lack of the sense of smell makes you immuned. They were grossed out by a harmless smell, apparently. RTFA.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
My son has a business that cleans foreclosed homes. Their #1 rule is that you never open the fridge. During one clean-up the tape holding the door closed broke while loading a fridge into the trailer. The resulting smell had worker and onlookers vomiting in the street.
The hard part is getting him there exactly when we have the first few thunderstorms of the season. That's when most of the grease from the previous fall and winter gets scoured from the pipe walls.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I figured I would have been a Dirk Gently comment in here at some point. Something about a lurking refrigerator springing forth a Guilt God...
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
The worst smell I've ever encountered: In a former life, I used to be a sheriff. One day I went to impound an old station wagon -- I could smell it from many feet away. I broke a window on the side of the car with the intent of seeing what's what, and immediately vomited on the street and ran away as fast as I could. I called the fire department to come with their Scott air packs to hook up the car and tow it to furthest back corner of the impound yard. After getting it to the impound yard, we examined it and discovered a liquified goo in a couple of large garbage bags in the back of the station wagon. The goo also contained small bones. We sampled it and sent the goo to the crime lab, thinking that it was parts of a rotted-away body. It turned out to be the remains of a large dog.
Nobody could go near that car without breathing apparatus. The smell apparently wouldn't kill you (I'm still here) but it sure did make me sick.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I had a similar experience when one of my kids unplugged the deep freeze where we'd stored a quarter hog that we'd gotten as a present, and no one noticed for about 6 months. One day I wondered why there were so many flies around the back of the garage, opened the deep freeze, and instantly puked. It wasn't a matter of "being tough" or "strong stomached"; something raced from my olfactory nerves to the ancient, reptilian part of my brain which immediately issued the "purge upper GI tract" interrupt.
It was horrible. I ended up painting my nose and upper lip with Vick's Vapor Rub, tying two bandanas and a sweatshirt around my face, and shoveling out the re-frozen pigslush with a snowshovel. Neighbors from down the block were coming outside to find the cause of the stench.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Smell alone can cause violent reactions. While I was in the kitchen one time, for some reason the smell of the cut tomatoes got to me and I started getting very ill.
The tomatoes were perfectly fine, there was nothing toxic in the air, but the tomato smell was just so incredibly overpowering I was a hair's width away from puking.
I worked for a company that built label printers. They conveniently placed an automatic label printer at every fridge. You pressed a button, and a label would print out with an expiration date. Anything past expiration or without a label was tossed daily.
How did the printer know what the expiry date should be? Or was it always just one week hence or the like?
Wusses....
I went to New Orleans four times after Katrina doing relief work/cleanup. Same thing there, people's home fridges that had been obviously without power for months, were full of food and of course had been under water as well. We'd wrap them in duct tape, put it on a dolly and work them out to the curb, all the while the duct tape isn't holding and the contents are pouring all over our Tyvek suits.
Granted, we had N95 masks, but those don't filter smells, just the mold and such. Sure, the smell was anything but pleasant, but no one ended up in the hospital. I went into a grocery store 6 weeks after Katrina that had been under water twice. Yeah, I had my mask on, but there were half a dozen guys in there cleaning it up with just jeans and t-shirts. No projectile vomiting in sight.
I spent a year working as the sysadmin for an elementary school, then three years at a high school. Some teachers are too lazy to carry their food to the workroom fridge down the hall, so they buy cube fridges with their own money and keep them in their classrooms. Unlike in other workplaces, the principal didn't have the balls to say they weren't allowed. I witnessed multiple instances of the following:
- The fridge will be plugged into a power strip, extension cord, or a combination thereof, causing the fridge to lose power when the teacher rearranges anything.
- They'll have a fridge, microwave, and several computers all sharing a 20 A circuit, since the building was wired in 1959. It'll trip.
- The barely-literate janitors will unplug them for the summer and keep the doors shut, unaware that the teachers still have them filled with something like yogurt. As the sysadmin, I know this, since I'm the one who has to clean up after the janitors to set computers back up--or replace scanners that they knocked off tables because they don't know how to unplug components.
We once had a planned power failure for tree pruning over the winter break. At the building supervisor's suggestion, I opened the full-size fridge in my workroom, emptied it, tied the doors open, and unplugged it. I think I was the only person in the school to do that.
Well, they should get a free training day as a digestion tower diver from their boss.
If I were their boss, I'd totally do it. :D
And: Yes, that is an actual job! You wear scuba gear, and jump into a 40C hot pool of shit, pee, an other "enzymes" and stuff. I think you have to have a dead nose and no wife to do that job. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It wasn't a matter of "being tough" or "strong stomached"; something raced from my olfactory nerves to the ancient, reptilian part of my brain which immediately issued the "purge upper GI tract" interrupt.
awesome story... and told well, but...
and shoveling out the re-frozen pigslush with a snowshovel.
why would you do that? Did you keep the deepfreeze? God, man, why?
The Admin and the Engineer
I have 2 comparable, horrible life experiences:
1. I used to work in residential property management. We had a "skip", where someone behind on their rent just moves out in the middle of the night and you have no idea they're gone until you show up with the Sheriff to boot them out/change the locks. Upon entering this one apartment, it was obvious the power had been off for quite a while. Yours truly was the lucky guy to open the fridge. Not only was it full of food, but in the freezer was what used to be at least a 15 lb turkey. Needless to say, it was more than aromatic. After several attempts to fumigate/disinfect/deodorize, we had to dispose of the fridge altogether and buy a new one.
2. The worst one was, in my early 20's my roommate (at the time) and I lived in a rather seedy section of town in a cheap apartment. The laundry room at the bottom of our common hallway flooded and mildewed the carpets, which began to smell pretty bad. After the smells got unusually overwhelming and after many many many complaints, management entered the unit down one floor and across the hall from our place (the one we walked past to get into our place every night). Turns out our neighbor had been stabbed, and died while trying to crawl for his front door. His body was literally melting into the carpet on the other side of the door. My poor roommate happened to be walking by the door while the homicide cops were there. The body had been removed, but he later said that it looked like someone had dropped a Jello mold on the carpet. **shudder** I will never forget that smell.
This brings to mind the case of Gloria Ramirez, who was admitted to the hospital and whose blood, when taken in a syringe caused those who smelled it to become physically ill. Several of the hospital workers who were near Gloria had to be hospitalized themselves, and the hospital declared an internal emergency (Gloria herself died shortly thereafter). While there are some theories about how the hell this happened, nobody really knows. Bit of a tangent, but TFA made me think of it.
we were cleaning out our fraternity fridge and, while it had never lost power, it still had mystery packages. there were about a half-dozen foil wrapped packages, roughly the size and shape of a jumbo hot dog with bun. One of the pledges (what, do you think brothers would do this work? we were there to supervise)found one of the old timers, who looked at them and seemed stumped. Then his eyes lit up and he said "Holy Shit! It's Jebens' squirrels!"
Apparently there was a brother who would shoot squirrels out his window, and skin them and cook 'em up. The ones he wasn't ready to eat right away he would freeze. We were *this* close to serving them to the pledges for dinner that evening.
Good times.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I was actually basing that on a real-life incident at Hanford in Washington. They had lathes machining plutonium under oil lubrication, and they had drain systems to catch the oil and pump it to a place where they could recover the plutonium.
At one point in the drain system there was a low point, that somehow the designers missed. Plutonium chips would settle there. At some point, enough had accumulated that it exceeded critical mass, and began to heat up, at which point the oil boiled, blasting all the chips up into the oil, where they slowly settled back down, starting the cycle over again. So it didn't explode, it just kept pulsing out these enormous blasts of energy that set off every detector in the whole area, and then stopped again in less than a second. Apparently it was extremely difficult to track down, as you might imagine.
I was told this by someone who worked at Hanford, who said it had happened in the 1960's.
So, yeah, all it'd do is melt the grease, but that's all he needed.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Bring on the comments about how so-and-so knows somebody's grandma that was so affected by smell xyz that something bad happened. Big whoop. Unless it's literally chemicals that are affecting your health, or an airborne pathogen, you don't need medical attention.
How about comments from the spouse of a US Army master sergeant (26 years, now retired) who can describe olfactory assault agents that cause "nausea and vomiting" (per TFA) so severe that the the target is disabled for days to weeks? The gastrointestinal system continues to react to anything ingested with physically debilitating spasms for days, and the sphincter and peristalsis musculatures is strained to such a degree that they can't function properly for weeks. Unless they are allowed to heal by providing hydration and nourishment by other means (ie. IV, as intubation instigates the same reactions) the repeated reactions prevent recovery and the subject can die of dehydration or even starvation. Survival can easily require medical attention. Some test animals were so affected psychologically despite less than fatal physiological damage that they refused food and water and died. Human reactions of this severity are only hypothesized as testing was not done to this extent. Toxic chemicals and pathogens are not the only the only causes of conditions that can require medical attention. Some of these agents are nothing more than high concentrations of otherwise nontoxic compounds resulting from natural processes. Having been discovered/created, these agents were not weaponized because of the concentration requirement. It was estimated that more casualties would occur due to production and handling up through delivery (situations of high concentration) than by most battle situations (situations where dispersion would rapidly lower concentrations) resulting in more friendly fire hits than target neutralization. She declines to pass along the specifics, but her training manuals describe the effects vividly.
In short, you're wrong; medical attention can be necessary from exposure to nontoxic, nonpathogen agents.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B