After a couple of days we still dont know much. They red taped the whole unit where the incident happened and now the operators are making there rounds with SCBA air packs on their backs. They still dont know how H2S killed an operator on a unit where no H2S is supposed to be. They are wondering if it was some other type of gas that may set off H2S detectors when at a lethal concentration. The H2S monitors we wear are data loggers also and they checked the unit he was wearing and the highest ppm was 92. This would cause difficulty breathing but normally you need 300 - 500 ppm to reach IDL (Immediate Danger to Life) concentrations. Friday, the day before the incident, we noticed a smell where we were working just across the road from where Gunner was found. One of the electricians said his H2S detector went off when he was entering the building. Then a contract engineer said, as she was getting into her vehicle, her detector went off also. The unit and area we were working in stunk really bad but my detector never went off but I kept it with me the whole day just incase. I guess they notified the owning departments and they ran gas detectors all over but found nothing. What ever set off the alarms has gone and must be intermittant. Unit detectors picked up a spike of gas around the same time that we had this first account of H2S as the wind moved the invisable cloud around the units to the North East. Even though the stink was still there the posionous gas was gone for now. We were hoping that this event was a lone anomily in operations and would not happen again. The events on Saturday would prove otherwise. The operators carry a unit around to scan sample points on the unit to log their rounds. The last scan on Gunners unit was at 3:06 pm and he was discovered Saturday around 3:16 pm when he wouldn't respond on the radio. The operator was moving toward Gunner , who was already down on the concrete, when his detector went off. Training tells us to get a SCBA on and he probably scrambled to get to the nearest one, get it turned on and donned. I am sure only a couple of minutes had passed before he was dragging Gunner to the North East edge of the unit where he was met by two other operators who preformed CPR on Gunner. They said it was probably only about 5 minutes before the EMTs got there but it felt like an hour. Being that Gunner was a young operator who had only been there less than two years emotions ran high as they tried desperately to revive him......Gunner was pronounce dead at Crawford Memorial Hospital.
Unfortunatly in most accounts of people going down from H2S exposure, if you dont have someone there to see you go down and rescue you in a matter of a couple of minutes, then there really are no happy endings to the incident. H2S is something that is prevelent in the plant and you can not become complacent about it. The good news is that they shut our project down until they find out more about what happened because we are so close to where it happened. But the best you can do is hope that all the equipment works properly and keep your fingers crossed.
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