re: Incident at BASF in Geismar

But you don’t get asphyxiated working on a PSV outside if there was nitrogen in the pipe.

Even if you stuck your head in a nitrogen pipe, you would probably black out, fall down and be breathing ambient air again.

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You could easily have enough nitrogen flow out of an open line to create a big hypoxic area.

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I disagree

Easily? Yes, if the energy source wasn’t isolated. If it was a line break with a N2 purge on it (for whatever reason) the workers should have had breathing air supplied.

One or two of three things possibly happened here:

The line itself wasn’t isolated and bled down properly

Proper ppe was not given or worn

They broke into the wrong piece of equipment, somehow.


ETA Having worked in ops at one of these two particular units for over a decade, I doubt it was a purposeful N2 purge on a line during maintenance. This DOES happen sometimes in different plants when working with highly flammable hydrocarbon lines that you don’t want Oxygen intruding into, and you cannot completely clean before making breaks.

Trying to read this thread, with all the acronyms and safety discussions, as a non plant baw...

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Once you have enough nitrogen in your lungs to interrupt the exchange of oxygen into the bloodstream causing you too black out, you are going to die before it would be flushed out of the lungs by breathing ambient air.

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This.

I get that there is some logic behind what you guys are thinking, but you are wrong.

Guys get asphyxiated, pass out, fall out of the IDLH atmosphere, start breathing again and live. This has happened many times, including in the plant I worked in.

Read Trevor Kletz if you don’t believe me.

Heard they were inside the phosgene chamber...

Yes they did in the early 80's. Some across I-10 at Conoco (now Philips) were gassed.

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EA6B

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Yea, what he said

Not hard at all to picture how a guy could do something like crack flange on a 4" PSV and get loaded on N2 and die from it.

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From what I understand, the unconscious body does not continue to breathe if CO2 levels in lungs aren’t high. And if there’s no oxygen inhaled, there’s no CO2 released from the blood to be exhaled by the lungs.

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All correct, your bodies signal to breath is when CO2 level reaches a certain level as you posted. Anything that screws that process up can be deadly. Snorkelers/ free divers who have trained their bodies to ignore the instinct to breath as CO2 builds up are at risk of drowning from what is known as “shallow water blackout”. They are not breathing when their body needs to, and the oxygen in the bloodstream can decrease to the point they pass out and drown. I am not medically trained in this area so my description of the process might be lacking. I worked around cryogenic liquids for a long time, and scuba dived a lot so I tried to learn enough to stay alive. Over the years it became aware to me that the safety training provided to me, and other personal by our employers was severely lacking for the environment we were working in. Unfortunately people died before they got serious.