> The fire chief entered the cistern wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus. After reaching the plank platform, he removed his face mask to shout instructions to those on the surface and he, too, was instantly overcome.
Now that one is probably deserving a Darwin Award...
Says the guy arm-chairing the situation on HN. In contrast to anyone that's actually done such a thing, reads this and thinks, "yeah, but for the grace of $DEITY go I, because a single lapse in judgement is all it takes, and in a stressful situation single lapses in judgement come in boxes of a dozen."
If you have the training, been apprised of the situation, are wearing the right breathing equipment, and you have 4 bodies lying on the ground in front of you, then you have had all the warnings you could possibly expect to get. Disregarding safety in the face of so much evidence about the danger is either perverse or stupid. I can agree with your excuse for the other people (to some degree) but the fire chief doesn't get a pass on this one.
Bravery on its own just isn't enough. This complete fool forgets all his confined space training, endangering not only himself but also his men, who now have one more victim to extricate. The rest of the rescue crew are people, too. Submariners have the word "oxygen thief" for this magnitude of idiot.
Well, the accident in question happened nearly 50 years ago. Who knows what kind of training was in place at the time or even how well understood this sort of problem was.
"Little House on the Prairie" has a scene where the father digs a well and tests the air downhole with a candle. That's awareness of the danger in a literary work more than 100 years ago. Farmers and well-diggers have been aware of the phenomenon for centuries, it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger.
it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger
Not as much as you might think. Firefighters routinely fought fires without SCBA up until at least the 70's, and probably into the 80's in rural areas. And if they weren't using SCBA for structure fires, they probably weren't using them for rescue calls in most cases. It was a cultural thing... for a long time, firefighters just didn't understand/appreciate the importance of SCBA. In hindsight that seems hard to believe, but it's been a slow process to get to a place where every firefighter is rigorous about making sure they use SCBA at all required times. (To some extent, that could be said about other protective gear as well, including turnout gear and PASS alarms).
Also consider that many (probably most) fire departments don't receive a lot of specific training on confined space rescue. Of course, you might ask, "why not?" and the simple answer is "time". Especially with volunteer firefighters, you can only get folks out for so much training a week. And fire calls are many times more common than confined space calls, so most training time is spent on the routine firefighting stuff.
Similar thing with hazardous materials training... it's a relatively recent thing for the majority of fire departments to receive specific haz-mat training, and even then, unless the department runs a specialized haz-mat team, their personnel probably only train to the "awareness" level.
I don't mean to excuse the fire chief, as I don't know the details of that specific story. But for something like that to happen, especially that many years ago, isn't a complete surprise.
Source: I was a firefighter and certified firefighting instructor throughout most of the 90s / early 2000's. My dad was also a volunteer firefighter and I've had a lifelong interest in the fire service.
The problem is understanding just how fast it affects you, and how little you need in your system. I imagine his line of thinking was "Well, if I just shout and don't breathe in, it'll be fine".
The problem is that at high enough concentrations, a single breath is all it takes. Did you remember to purge your mask before taking a breath when you put it back on?
The thing about H2S is, it's every bit as dangerous as HCN, but it has a better PR agent. If you wouldn't take off your SCBA mask in a room full of HCN, "even for just a sec," then you shouldn't do it in a room suspected of being full of H2S either.
The fire chief would have known that H2S is hazardous, but his training unfortunately (and obviously) didn't communicate just how hazardous it is.
Now that one is probably deserving a Darwin Award...