spk_1:   0:00
Hello, everybody.

spk_0:   0:01
Hello, everybody. And I gotta admit, this is a This is a subject for I have to be very careful not to go. All 13 year old, seventh grade.

spk_1:   0:10
He tends to go that way on the topic of gas. Somebody's sure. Very sure. Yeah, he groomed. Or if they spend less time building, plant and more time building seed.

spk_0:   0:21
We just passed the sun flower field, and they're very short this year. We have we have one sunflower. It was a volunteer in our yard and spice. Let it grow. We may have a few more. Where would you greet me? Those sunflowers several years ago against a big, beautiful, gorgeous Just ready to go.

spk_1:   0:42
Then it was entirely gone. One morning

spk_0:   0:44
the squirrels came out. Just shoot it off at the at the flower and stolen.

spk_1:   0:49
Yeah, they climbed all the way up it, shoot it off and took it.

spk_0:   0:53
We were just please used anyway. Welcome to the show. The big show. The most important and critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our car. And we're in the red studio today

spk_1:   1:07
and we've set a record for earliest version.

spk_0:   1:10
Yeah, sorry about that. Sorry, not Sorry. Sorry. We're both a little bit clipped again today. It's allergy season, so we're trying to fight our way through it now. We are here today to talk about gas gaseous forms. Guests. Gaseous is skip Skip Petya Escape pod. Oh, I'll get it out. Gas escape. Otto's

spk_1:   1:32
being prepared to deal with gas leaks.

spk_0:   1:35
Catholics are various different types. Add descriptions and no, we're not going to seventh grade. We're not. We're not.

spk_1:   1:43
But we are going to the chemistry lab or the biochemistry lab to beat Honest.

spk_0:   1:48
And we're going to the house. We're going to the house

spk_1:   1:51
to we're going to the house and maybe we're going to rural northeast Missouri, where such things are a problem. Yes, from time to time, from time to tie. So the lab first

spk_0:   2:04
in the train

spk_1:   2:04
to give you a feel for the yacht for the kind of problems you can have here. Here we are, working in a lab big room. Ah, long drain sinks running the lengths of tables. Big, big sinks at the end. Somebody the 30 feet down the room is doing something with either extracting some lipid something or other. I forget the exact details, but he's working with either, and he's doing its thing. Being reasonably careful knows that ether is highly explosive gas not being an idiot. Just being a little bit of an idiot. He's not in the hood working with the gas out there, having no problem at all. About 10 minutes later, somebody who's working at the far end of the room about 30 feet away, uh, does an ignition test on something down the way tosses the spent match into the sink. Boom, ultra not spike that. Too bad.

spk_0:   3:10
She just did. Sorry. Sorry about that big, horrible noise you just heard That was her blue. It was an explosion. These things happen. Well, yeah, things get out of control of the explosion Boom.

spk_1:   3:19
Yeah, because the guy who is dealing with the ether wasn't have any any problem. But ether is more dense than air, which means any ether that escaped was not just diffusing away into the error. It was sinking, and it was sinking to the lowest available spot, which would be a drain. And then it was running down the drain, just like water would run down a drain pushed by gravity and it was collecting in the lowest available spot in the room, which was the low end of the sink. And when the other guy tossed his ah spent match in there to make sure it didn't set anything on fire. Oh, wait. There's a whole sink full of explosive gas there.

spk_0:   4:03
Were you in the room at this

spk_1:   4:04
time? Uh, yeah, I was way over yon. I was not in the I was not either of the players. And I was farther away than either one of

spk_0:   4:15
the over yon. It's a big room. Yon in a room. Yang.

spk_1:   4:22
I could have said I was over by the H p l c. But who would have cared about that part?

spk_0:   4:27
We have a lot of ex military listeners out there, and they love acronyms. The military loves acronyms. Doesn't matter what therefore this love them, they don't want to go to. They don't want to go up to where you're keeping watch over your property. They want to go to the l P o P. Because that's what we go to the L P o P. So

spk_1:   4:55
Okay, I was over by the H p l c. Then for your military folk. What I was telling that story for was to illustrate one of the things you really have to be careful of when you're dealing with leaked gas is their densities, because it makes a whole lot of difference on how you respond to the kind of spill. Some gases are more dense than air, like the either that my lab mate was using. Also chlorine gasses, which are used for a variety of purpose, some of which the chemical warfare gases used in World War I were mostly chlorine gasses, and that made a particularly evil combination, cause that send the shells with the chlorine gas over first and the soldiers would describe the evil green tendrils curling around in the bottom of the trenches. And then they would start showing with conventional weapons, so the only safe place to be was down in the trenches. So first they poisoned the trenches, and then they gave everybody a reason to have to be in the trenches. Chlorine collects in low places. Other kinds of gases, like ammonia, our lessons there. So if a gas is less dense than air and you're trying to get away from it, you hit the floor and crawl out. Uh, the combustion products produced by a fire are the most obvious example because they're produced by a fire. The gas is really hot. Hot gases reluctance that cooler gases. The combustion products were mostly at the top of the room. You're in a burning room, you hit the deck and curl out on your belly, and you're less likely to choke and die. But if you're dealing with a gas that's more dense than air than being on the floor is absolutely the worst place to be

spk_0:   6:47
salty, stirring. Remember years ago, we were going through a situation where the areas that I covered when I was working at a newspaper and they were working on a on a school consolidation thing where the lot of small towns had these little schools and and there was an effort to get them consolidated. And, of course, it was a big controversial thing and yada yada. So the school board, uh, as part of their due diligence, authorized a architectural firm to come in and figure out what it would take to repair how much money it would take to repair to a modern standard. a safe standard. All that was wrong with these various little schools, which basically had been built 50 60 70 years before and maintained, like a broke school district maintained schools, and one of the buildings was condemned out of hand because it had a structurally defective wall. You could literally look through the wall. There were holes big enough in the structural support wall toe look through that were not windows. There's a crack running entirely down the side. That's not what I'm talking. The architect came back from the second school he visited. Excuse me and said You can't open that school. I will not let you over that school. They're like, Why not? That's the one that's in the best shape of all of them, he said, because some maniac installed a propane boiler in the basement. Under the classrooms, propane is heavier than air, so if it were to leak in any way, it would just fill the basement with gas and then explode.

spk_1:   9:00
Yeah, I love to have my kids underneath a bomb or sitting on top of a bomb.

spk_0:   9:07
It originally had been coal power boiler, but you know, of course, Cole went out in about 25 years. Before this, they converted it to propane because that's what was available. Not realizing. Apparently, if they didn't apparently have architect, if they just had a boiler guy do it, not really paying attention to fact that there were no ah, nothing too vent this basement, other than the pipe going out the top for the boiler, which is the spent burnt gas. So if there's any kind of propane leak at all, boo with that boiler's turned on, yeah, that's so much so I think they had to close the school because there's like laws against that.

spk_1:   10:03
So if you had been considering using a propane heater as your backup heat source as a prep, consider where you're putting it and how it's vented. You do not want that in a low space, so any leak collects down in the low space. And then, when you like the thing, you get a flash explosion of the air in the entire room. That would be what we in the prepping community, call Ah prepper fail.

spk_0:   10:29
Yes, and it will be what the non preppers, the sheep old would call a bad thing. So either way, it's ah, bad thing or not a good thing it qualifies as either. Or to be fair,

spk_1:   10:43
we do use propane heaters in our houses are back up heat source. But we don't sit them in the basement. And we intentionally don't tighten the air flow in the house down enough. We know we have good air flow through, and we have both carbon monoxide detectors, which will tell you when the combustion starts getting insufficient and detectors on the units themselves would shut them off if they either detect a leak or the detect incomplete combustion.

spk_0:   11:19
I tell you what, I could reach around right now in this car. This very car, the reach around with my hand and grab a carbon monoxide detector app. I've got it right here in my hand. So that's how many of these things we have would keep him in our car. Okay. To be fair, we would actually keep him in our car. I used to taking this cause I replaced one is still in the back seat, but anyway,

spk_1:   11:44
but we do keep them where we actually burn things.

spk_0:   11:46
Yes, anywhere we burned thing. We have one of these carbon monoxide detectors may also keep them in the rules that we sleep well, there's anything burning there or not. So gas. Propane. What else could there be? Well, we're just about interestingly, we're just about to drive past an agricultural service center.

spk_1:   12:09
Who, oh, what could be safer than an agricultural service center in the great wide open? I mean, they're grow our food with it. Truly, there's nothing dangerous there,

spk_0:   12:20
like maybe that big, huge propane truck sitting right there. Or maybe that anhydrous

spk_1:   12:28
tag sitting back there and hydrates being anhydrous ammonia. It's used as a fertilizer source. You spray it over the ah fields to provide ammonia to the fields, and then the bacteria turned that into forms the plans can use in. Life is all good and stuff, but it's an extremely toxic gas in the ammonia form.

spk_0:   12:49
No, I'm going to tell you, if you don't live in a row lawyer, you may not have seen that much of anhydrous. Well, there's a law hot of it out here.

spk_1:   12:58
There's just tanks of it sitting all over the place,

spk_0:   13:01
and I just could. It's great nitrogen source.

spk_1:   13:03
There's whole train fools of it going through regularly

spk_0:   13:06
through your town. Did you know you got toxic gases going right through the middle of your town every single day on those trains? I know that, but did you know that? Did you realize how much toxic stuff is going through town on that train track half a mile from your house?

spk_1:   13:22
The last emergency response training session salty and I attended are, ah, local emergency responders steams try and come up with scenarios that are pretty realistic so people can figure out how they would handle him. And the last one they came up with was derailment of a pneumonia tank carrying train in a local intersection that carries a lot

spk_0:   13:50
of it in a small town. Interestingly, they just had a derailment there about a month ago. It wasn't about ammonia train. It was ups, actually.

spk_1:   14:00
Yeah, but we drove by and saw the derailment, and we both thought Yeah, in ammonia.

spk_0:   14:05
Right there. It was. It was, in fact, packages of U. P s trucks. But, you know, somebody didn't get there. Uh, there Goodies from rooms to G o. Um, so basically ammonia. And there's even a kicker to throw with the ammonia because we have. Not only do we have these ammonia tanks being hauled by people who have training, you have to have training to do this and used by people who have training, you have to have training to use it. Not only do we have that, we got the tweakers, the meth heads, apparently, and I'm not an expert on how this is done, but apparently you can use ammonia as one of the ingredients. And in math,

spk_1:   14:52
it's a strong reducing agent. That's why it's so dangerous,

spk_0:   14:55
right? But these tweakers go out and they tap these ammonia tax to take the ammonia. Is this firm this tank of sitting out here in the field? Will you go out at night? And they tap the stupid thing? So you know, something drugged out tweaker is that they're messing with this poisonous stuff.

spk_1:   15:16
Oh, I'm sure he's being really careful, though.

spk_0:   15:22
Caustic, poisonous stuff. Yeah, So, yeah, it's That's a That's a problem. Um,

spk_1:   15:31
here's another one of things you gotta watch out for. We're very familiar with this one. As people who scuba dive. You know what you call a compressed gas tank with the valve? Correct? A bomb, a rocket

spk_0:   15:47
e. I got a story to tell all of this one. Great, great. It jumping? Yeah, there was a guy who was there were building a bridge and this has been back in the seventies. Uh, look, I told guy who is a very reliable guy. Told me this story. He was a high steel welder and he was working on a bridge. Uh, and basically they had built the new bridge. And it was one of these bridges where there's two bridges across the river. One is eastbound, one is westbound. So they built the new bridge, and it was built as a convertible bridge. For those of your wandering, it's the Quincy, Illinois Bridge because they got really old bridge and really new bridge and the new bridge they built, much to everybody's amazement, a very smart way they built it convertible so they could easily mean ain't into an east west bridge. The signs all turn around, and it's actually really well designed for that. So they built the new bridge and then immediately shut the old bridge down because they may just a basic maintenance on the old bridge, and then they re Ferb the old bridge Well is toward the deck off of it. We're doing all kinds of stuff. And one of the workers got angry. One of the high steelworkers, Ah Wilder, got angry. So what they have done is they had a bunch of of these giant, actually a settling bottles. Big, but big bottles, big oxygen bottles, Any he reached over to these bottles and he cut the restraining chain or unhooked. They're staying. Chain and light. Lay them all down while several people watch. Warning what in the world this guy was doing? Just laid them down one right after the other. And this bridge is 50 75 feet above the water. Then he took out a giant hammer or these big, huge, riveting hammers reached over and just knocked the whole, uh, stage assembly part off the back of it. Of course. This'll oxygen by oxygen bottle mind you shot down the river like a torpedo. And he did four or five before somebody got him. Stop. Of course they'd start running towards him, and then they realize

spk_1:   18:33
he was gonna hit another one. He's hitting the

spk_0:   18:34
thing with a metal hammer. Spark the oxygen bottle. Yeah, not so much. Finally, somebody got brave enough to go over there and restrain the guy.

spk_1:   18:48
Unfortunately, there wasn't as much else to explode there with the oxygen out there on the bridge, just subtly. Yeah, it's when you lose Theus settling as well, then you've got

spk_0:   19:02
the worst problem. But it was still in the bottle. Those bottles were pretty pretty tough. Those of us who've dealt with scuba bottles, they're really pretty tough.

spk_1:   19:11
Yeah, were you run into problems with the mostly is when they get jostled and the vowels get cracked open. That's why you always change your bottles down or strapped with very vigorous straps. Those bottles down. It's not just because they're big, heavy things and may fall over, which is true. It's that if the valve cracks, it acts as a rocket with a very poorly controlled nozzle, and it just takes this big heavy tank and starts throwing it around in random directions all over the place. If the gas happens to be burnable or explosive, you or toxic, you got a second problem. But even if it isn't, you've got a major hazard. Need to get the heck out of Dodge until that thing runs out of gas. Oh,

spk_0:   20:00
yeah, there's that. Yeah. What else you got on gas and that all you gotta guess?

spk_1:   20:05
Personally, I'm not a big believer in the whole keeping gas masks around in case of gas attacks thing. Because that one strikes me is such a low probability event. I will. Yeah. Whatever.

spk_0:   20:19
I would say yes, but on that one for normal people, I would I think that's slowing.

spk_1:   20:26
You didn't live right next

spk_0:   20:27
to me. Oh, really? Facility something that maybe you don't live very far from a, uh, finery

spk_1:   20:35
down wind of a nag facility down end of a refinery down wind of a gas handling place like Thea natural gas line controllers and things like that. There are places right where it was just a

spk_0:   20:50
railroad track, especially

spk_1:   20:52
frankly, though, given how were supplied, if I thought we were a real risk of gas, I just keep scuba gear, the scuba gear set up and ready to put on and turn on in a minute. Because in case you haven't thought about it, that is effective Gas safety. Because you're breathing only from the tank and you have a mask to completely cover your eyes. Many of these gases are very irritating to the eyes.

spk_0:   21:19
Now if I do not If somebody were really, really, really wanting to D'oh uh, air and gas safety and they wanted to keep something in their house that would be Malta have multiple uses. I would actually advise them to look at a firefighting apparatus type thing. The downside is it does require maintenance. You can't just have when you have to. You have to rebuild the regulators every year or two, and you have toe the heir to the tanks. All the all of these tanks, the scuba tanks, everything. We have to get them inspected every year or they will not refill them. You don't want to let one go for five years without having been inspected. And after five years, they have to be, um, on Hydra checked, which

spk_1:   22:09
means they put him in a big water tank, which will contain the explosion if the things give way, and then they over pressure them to make sure they can still take the pressure they're supposed to be able to take

spk_0:   22:21
right now. Those of you who aren't I'll just throw this in there because you might be curious. You are not familiar with scuba tanks. Scuba tanks have various different Phil levels, depending on the material they're made out of, for example, a woman at a lady, which is standard sized vacation. If you go out on a on a boat and they have a bunch of scuba tanks out there, I'm also guarantee it'll be a lady's aluminum eighties. They pressure those things up, too. Um, they're rated for 3000 ish pounds. Depends on it.

spk_1:   22:54
Depends on if you're in Florida,

spk_0:   22:56
not aluminum ones. That really doesn't. Yeah, but it depends on whether there I'm not getting there. About £3000. There's a rating variances. If it has a special marking, you can overfill it a little bit. Yeah, I gotta. But through 6300. And that's what a full Phyllis. Now, obviously, there's a lot of head room above. That is to what you can fill the tanks now you get steel tanks, have high pressure and low pressure. We personally dive with high pressure one hundreds, and then I also have some low pressure. One 20 five's looking 1 24 twenties Hugh fungus stacks there dig just a humongous

spk_1:   23:43
One of them is as much as I can carry.

spk_0:   23:45
But in Florida, when your cave diving, they intentionally ignore on the steel ones. You can do it on the stealing, not intentionally ignore be, huh? Ratings. They double put in double burst disks and pump him up, too. I mean, it's like you're walking around with bombs. Yeah, because the more air you have, the longer you can stay in the cave.

spk_1:   24:13
They cave, dive and running out of air when your cave diving is more dangerous than carrying around an overpressure tank.

spk_0:   24:21
Right? So we don't do that. We take our tanks down there, we put normal fills in them because we don't want to destroy this, right? It's all right. Thanks. But you know, these guys are walking around with 40% over ville, so you can do it. They're in some leeway in the steel tanks.

spk_1:   24:42
They know if they fail, they mostly fail on Phil too. Which is why they fill them in big, thick walled containers.

spk_0:   24:51
It also keeps the the temperature down. Yeah, because when you're moving, filling with water through it heats up. Okay.

spk_1:   25:01
Uh, one other thing about the tanks. If one does a valve cracks and it does start to leak, and it is a corrosive gas. Uh, you wanna be very thoughtful about whether or not you just run for the hills or try and get over there and get sucker turned off even if it's chained up. Well, I run because, yeah, most of the time, when the gas first starts coming out of a seal, if a seal fails, then the pressure of the gas will eat away of it. It's like getting a tiny little hole in a dam, and pretty soon the flow of water in the damn just eats the whole thing away. And you get a, uh, massive fail. Yeah, he's won t eat

spk_0:   25:46
me out with this damn thing. That's my thing,

spk_1:   25:48
but that, But that's kind of the idea. You don't want to let even a small stream through because the small stream erodes very quickly and becomes a catastrophic fail in a hurry. Well, the disks and the seals they have on gas restraint devices are the same way. If you get a fail with it. If it will often start with a very small leak. But you don't just say Oh, well, it's a very small leak. I'll be fine and go on you. Ah, stop that sucker and get it fixed right away. Because if you let it run, it's liable to turn into a catastrophic fail. You're giving me the look because I made him think about dams. 1,000,000

spk_0:   26:30
failures. It's I don't like dam failures.

spk_1:   26:32
It's worth knowing if you might be anywhere around where pressurized gas is being run. I thought it was a good thing for a proper to know. So brought it up,

spk_0:   26:40
okay? And we're gonna leave one last point. Don't live below a damn ever period the end because they're gonna fail. And you're going to die in the most horrible way. One drop of rain and you're dead. Boom. That's it.

spk_1:   27:03
You can trust that. Salty. And I will never have a house down stream from a damn.

spk_0:   27:09
You could take that one to the bank. Okay, we're out. See you next time. Bye.