“KTVU reports Saturday that guests of the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose reported smelling a chemical odor - similar to a rotten egg -and feeling faint, light-headed and short of breath.”
What would have caused this? Any ideas?
Isn’t the Rotten Egg smell usually Hydrogen Sulfide?
Shouldn’t the thread title read: “One dead from suicide and eight others sick”?
Or Mercaptan (not knowing the first thing about chemistry, I assume is related). One dead and 8 sick that felt better when they got out to fresh air makes me think it was natural gas.
But everyone knows what the natural gas additive smells like. If it were natural gas it’s odd that all the reports were that it was a chemical smell and smelled like rotten eggs, rather than it simply smelled like gas.
I don’t. I don’t know if I’ve ever even been around the use of natural gas.
AFAIK natural gas (mainly methane) is odorless. But a smelly gas (probably some mercaptan) is added as a warning.
Agreed, so they either ruled it out or haven’t decided (or publicized) that it was gas. Granted, it could have also been some other more dangerous chemical and that, along with a death could cause a panic in the area so they’re keeping quiet until they have all the facts and they’re ready to do a press release.
But also, reporters very rarely report anything as a fact that wasn’t handed to them and told it was a fact. So the info they’re being fed is likely just that ‘it smelled like rotten eggs’.
This all, IMO, plays into overuse of the word ‘allegedly’. Just yesterday there was a report about a woman in prison that ‘allegedly’ gave birth, in a cell, with no help from anyone. The headline is “Video allegedly shows woman giving birth in Denver jail cell alone, with no assistance”, the article shows the actual video of her giving actual birth to an actual baby with no assistance. It’s NSFW, but easy to find. I understand they don’t want to get roped into a lawsuit if they’re wrong, but we can all see it happening on video. These type of things always remind of this image.
I take that back–the burners from science labs in high school/college may have been natural gas (or maybe not?). Can’t remember any special smell, though. (I’ve never seen a non-electric stove outside of TV and movies.)
Yes, sorry. :hangs head:
The 8 sick could have been mass hysteria or it could have been real illness.
H2S generation is a semi-popular means of suicide, particularly in Japan. See, e.g., https://chemm.nlm.nih.gov/chemicalsuicide.htm and Suicide with hydrogen sulfide - PubMed
Kills plenty of people in the oilfield if they aren’t taking measures against it. LD50 is relatively low, and while obnoxiously scented on first exposure, olfactory response is easily saturated. IOW, you can’t smell it for very long, and it’s easy to blunder into an atmosphere incompatible with sustaining life.
CO generation—charcoal brazier indoors, etc… might be a culprit too for the OP.
Well, it was a hotel room. What could one use in a typical hotel room?
I’m thinking maybe she was being considerate in using a space where her family wouldn’t find her body, but taking bunch of other people out in the process kind of takes away from that.
If natural gas burns cleanly, there should be no odor. The odoriferant was added in large part because of this mostly-forgotten disaster.
Many people reported having headaches and dizziness in certain wings of the school in the preceding days.
One of the ‘features’ of the H2S method is that it can be performed using ordinary household chemicals. Somewhat akin to mixing bleach with ammonia, only H2S’s hazardous concentration level is much lower, IIRC.
Easy to do with chemicals easily found in many countries. Which is why it’s popular, I suppose.
8 sick and one dead? Using my powers of detection whatever it was that was used, there were 9 of them…What comes in '9’s? 9 ladies dancing?
It was the Salmon Mousse. 
You don’t smell it when it’s burning, you smell it if there is a gas leak or burner turned on but not lit. It’s quite distinctive, you can’t miss it.
The Smithsonian documentary series “America in Color” covered it in the first episode of the second season.
