Welcome. Please add your war stories to this page. I have a short one to get started.
It was a dark and stormy night. Just kidding. It was actually Bayonne, New Jersey. A small barrel had washed ashore. It was labeled boiler descaler. The MSDS sheet for the product indicated that it had a pH around 2. Very hot stuff. It seemed to be empty, but it was sealed. A buddy of mine drew the short straw and got to suit up and check it out. He was on the emergency response haz mat team for the fire department. Something he volunteered to do. His day job was working for a emergency response firm. He was a bit nuts.
The mission was to open the drum to see if there was anything left in it. The fire department was on standby with fire hoses ready to wash him down if it exploded. Sounds fun! He opened the drum lid and the humidity reacted with the trace amount of acid left in the drum. In short he was covered in acid and it was burning though his chemical level “A” suit and his thermal protective layer. The fire hoses washed him down. He ended up with some second degree burns but was otherwise OK. The suit had been completed burned by the acid. Had he not had it on, not much of him would have been left.
The scary part of this was that the drum had washed up in a populated area. It would be easy to imagine a kid messing around with the drum. But being from NJ they are probably pretty smart about that now.
The Coast Guard told us that this stuff is used to clean the boilers in cargo ships. When the crew of the cargo ship wants to get rid of the empty drum, they throw the drum overboard and shoot some holes in it. They must have missed. Not the best plan.
Does anyone else have a simlar story? Share it here. Thanks and be safe!
I deal with scalant and it smells like something gone bad. But we actually use it to substitute for a soft water system. I work for semitool semiconductor facility. I have cleaned up many spill from sulfuric 98% which isn’t bad unless it starts reacting with the wax on the tiles and then the tiles itself. To Hf which is the worst. I was cleaning an HF spill had to suit up and wear an scba. I cleaned it for 35 minutes running water on this unit. It still came back as a 0-1 on ph. 35 minutes. Finally we noticed that H20 was not going to do it so finally put crushed calcium carbonate down to powder form and nutrilized the Flouride. So don’t be stupid like me and use calcium carbonate.