I just learned something new to me. One can suffer phosgene poisoning, as in the poison gas, from a leaking refrigerator! A friend of ours ended up in the emergency room when the refrigerator decided to fail in the worst way possible. It turns out that CFHCs break down into phosgene gas when heated. The frig apparently had an electrical short and that burned the coolant line and the refrigerant. Ouch.
No serious injuries in this case, but people (usually service personnel who didn’t flush out the coolant lines well enough before brazing the pipes) have been killed by this gas.
I design industrial control systems for a living, and one of our customers makes phosgene gas. It’s used to make plastics, pesticides, and other stuff, it’s not like folks just buy containers of phosgene at ye ol local hardware store. Phosgene is used in the production of the plastic that eyeglass lenses are made out of, for example.
According to my safety training, phosgene gas smells like freshly cut grass. That smell is a big warning sign if you work in a plant that makes phosgene. A lot of the safety training in a chemical plant boils down to “there’s no such thing as a good siren” and “if a siren goes off, follow the guys in company shirts because they know where the safe spots are” (as an aside, I have also learned that cyanide smells like bitter almonds).
Phosgene was used as a chemical weapon in WWI. Thousands of people died from its use. It’s nasty stuff. People have died in industrial leaks. I wouldn’t expect enough phosgene to be created just from brazing pipes to be fatal, although I can definitely picture it making someone sick. It’s more of a danger in a large fire. The refrigerant in a commercial office air conditioning unit or something like a restaurant freezer can easily create toxic levels of phosgene in a large fire. I don’t have statistics, but I do know that some firefighters have died from this type of phosgene poisoning.
I have heard of refrigerator technicians ending up in the hospital, but I’ve never heard of any actually dying from this type of poisoning. If anyone has a cite for that I’d like to see it.
Hey, did you know that radiologists are x-ray opaque? The safest place to stand when an x-ray is taken is – behind the radiologist --. Also, a friend of mine was working in a match factory. When one of the machines caught fire, he headed over towards it to see if he could do anything useful. Then he noticed everyone else was going the other way
Another friend did some mine work. It was a noisy place: when they had an alarm, they pumped odourant through the ventilation, and … everybody left …
Way back in the day when everyone at every business used to smoke indoors, my HVAC guy would always make a point of saying you shouldn’t smoke in the (walk-in) cooler because if there’s any leaks, the refrigerant can get drawn through the cigarette and turn into phosgene gas.
I’m nearly positive I started a thread about it many many years ago asking for confirmatin. I’ll have to try to dig it up later.
And I learned that some long time ago from a movie that depicted people being herded into the “showers” at the concentration camps, where someone (maybe a child?) exclaims “it smells like almonds!”