Alchemy 101, and still the only 20 thread you need to read.
- Thread starter Sinister
- Start date
Southern Fried
Well-Known Member
Nah, he's kinda "middle". "New" to tankers but "old" enuff to know to ask questions.
"New Breed" expects everything in the world to change "the rules" just for them.
Southern Fried
Well-Known Member
More like "Breed of His Own".
Duck
Sarcastic remark goes here
When I was a kid my mom worked in a lab.
She used to bring home hydrochloric acid for washing dishes.
Not for everyday use but..
OK picture this, you take a clean plate and put something like gravy on it. You can hold that under the sink and the water flow will wash it off immediately.
Same thing happens when you take an old saucepan with the copper on the bottom exterior and it's tarnished & a dark brown color, and you squirt hydrochloric acid on it.
Instantly makes it look brand new.
And that wasn't even straight hydrochloric acid either. If I remember right, she said she had diluted it specifically for the task of restoring old pots and pans and other things made of copper brass, bronze, etc. I think she said it was 10 or 20% & the rest was water. But it was 4 times as strong as drain cleaner.
Well in an effort to teach me to be careful & conservative with it's use, she took me outside and squirted a little bit of it on some aluminum foil to show me how corrosive it is. It ate the aluminum.
OK,.. well,... she should have left out the part about the process creating gases and pressure if it's in a sealed container.
I put some in an empty 2 liter Pepsi bottle with strips of aluminium foil, capped the bottle and threw it in the back yard.
About 30 seconds later it exploded.
Not as fun as filling a balloon with oxygen and acetylene though.
She used to bring home hydrochloric acid for washing dishes.
Not for everyday use but..
OK picture this, you take a clean plate and put something like gravy on it. You can hold that under the sink and the water flow will wash it off immediately.
Same thing happens when you take an old saucepan with the copper on the bottom exterior and it's tarnished & a dark brown color, and you squirt hydrochloric acid on it.
Instantly makes it look brand new.
And that wasn't even straight hydrochloric acid either. If I remember right, she said she had diluted it specifically for the task of restoring old pots and pans and other things made of copper brass, bronze, etc. I think she said it was 10 or 20% & the rest was water. But it was 4 times as strong as drain cleaner.
Well in an effort to teach me to be careful & conservative with it's use, she took me outside and squirted a little bit of it on some aluminum foil to show me how corrosive it is. It ate the aluminum.
OK,.. well,... she should have left out the part about the process creating gases and pressure if it's in a sealed container.
I put some in an empty 2 liter Pepsi bottle with strips of aluminium foil, capped the bottle and threw it in the back yard.
About 30 seconds later it exploded.
Not as fun as filling a balloon with oxygen and acetylene though.
Sunnie Lynn
Active Member
Watch out for this kid, he's "accidentally" making pipe bombs in the back yard.When I was a kid my mom worked in a lab.
She used to bring home hydrochloric acid for washing dishes.
Not for everyday use but..
OK picture this, you take a clean plate and put something like gravy on it. You can hold that under the sink and the water flow will wash it off immediately.
Same thing happens when you take an old saucepan with the copper on the bottom exterior and it's tarnished & a dark brown color, and you squirt hydrochloric acid on it.
Instantly makes it look brand new.
And that wasn't even straight hydrochloric acid either. If I remember right, she said she had diluted it specifically for the task of restoring old pots and pans and other things made of copper brass, bronze, etc. I think she said it was 10 or 20% & the rest was water. But it was 4 times as strong as drain cleaner.
Well in an effort to teach me to be careful & conservative with it's use, she took me outside and squirted a little bit of it on some aluminum foil to show me how corrosive it is. It ate the aluminum.
OK,.. well,... she should have left out the part about the process creating gases and pressure if it's in a sealed container.
I put some in an empty 2 liter Pepsi bottle with strips of aluminium foil, capped the bottle and threw it in the back yard.
About 30 seconds later it exploded.
Not as fun as filling a balloon with oxygen and acetylene though.
AK7
Well-Known Member
Well,if ya would have planned this a little better, you could have went to MATS.
Keendriver
Hates all of you
At least he's not doing it in the house.
This is a step in the right direction.......
AK7
Well-Known Member
Sinister
pari animositate
They showed us a picture today of a guy burned with Sulfuric, and he looked kinda like that.
AK7
Well-Known Member
I know and I did that on the dumb phone. Lol
Sinister
pari animositate
Nah, he's kinda "middle". "New" to tankers but "old" enuff to know to ask questions.
"New Breed" expects everything in the world to change "the rules" just for them.
One thing about this orientation, and this whole last 2 weeks, is that I'm realizing I know NOTHING.
I am a total moron in this class.
You want 210 long, and 253,000 loaded and hauled tomorrow, I can do that.
Loading, unloading, and hauling MethylEthylBadShit...
Yeah...I'm an idiot.
Ego trip? Yeah, not for me. There's guys at QC with these super fancy Peterbilts that they lease through some custom trucks outfit that QC tied themselves into. Really nice trucks..except they don't realize Peterbilts are way louder on the inside that a W900 ever was, and I'm not at all impressed...but I digress...I can imagine those guys are the ego-huge guys at this company.
They got nothing on me, and what I've done.
But...I'm still at zero as far as hazmat, and I never carried an ego anyway (despite what I've displayed here over the years, I hope you all got the joke...) because I've always thought that as soon as you get that ego, you get relaxed, and that's when things jump up and bite you.
So I have no problem looking like the dumb new guy asking questions when it comes to caustics, and corrosives, and inhalation hazards. I interrupted class a BUNCH of times today and made the guy go back and recap stuff because I couldn't write it down that fast.
I will ask a million "dumb" questions, and not care if it saves my life. Or yours. Or my kids. Or your kids.
Theres a re-hire in the class, with 47 years driving. I'm 42...just for contrast. Pretty sure I can learn some stuff from this dude. He's coming back as an O/O, and tomorrow is his last day. We're in orientation until Thursday. I really wish they would make this 47 year hazmat driver stick around the whole time, because he had some really good input today.
Yeah...whole new element.
Maybe I'm even a little spooked. Tell anyone and I'll kill ya.
All you need to know about air offs.
When the little valve thingy at the top of the tank starts making lots of noise, your air pressure is high enough, go ahead and turn that valve off for a minute
Oh, and acid really does burn when it touches your skin. Even a tiny little drop. So, never assume that the "clean" hose you are uncapping is really clean.
When the little valve thingy at the top of the tank starts making lots of noise, your air pressure is high enough, go ahead and turn that valve off for a minute
Oh, and acid really does burn when it touches your skin. Even a tiny little drop. So, never assume that the "clean" hose you are uncapping is really clean.
Southern Fried
Well-Known Member
Thing is it just takes a moment's distraction and you're in deep trouble.
I know this because it happened to me. On an MDI delivery to Grand Rapids I got delayed by an ice storm. Made arrangement to deliver around 7pm Friday night. Hauled butt and got there about 6pm. Of course, nobody had told the customer. The regular chem guy had gone home at 5. But they needed it so hey.... we got a guy who knows.
So I pull around back, back down into the ice-covered bay, pull on my chem suit, grab my respirator mask and slither my way to the back of the trailer. "Their guy"is back there, getting ready to "take a sample". I hook up the pressure air. Buddy taps me on the shoulder and tells me he can't get the plug out of the discharge pipe. I look down and the lock ears are open. OK, at this point I've madev 3 mistakes:
1. I'm still holding my "mask" in my right hand.
2. I've assumed that this guy actually knows what he's doing.
3. I didn't check what he'd done.
Like a dummy I think "Oh, just ice" and tap the plug. What I didn't realize was that the "guy" was the maintenance guy and had received exactly one load... under supervision... two years ago. He'd opened the inner valve wide open and cracked the outer one. So the pipe was full of pressurized MDI. The plug popped out and a 2inch thick stream of chem roared out. It hit me about waist high and sprayed up. Got me full in the face...... and both eyes. The pain was intense. Fortunately I still had presence enough to hit the emergency switch that closed the inner valve. But I was blind.
Their "emergency eye-wash was near froze up and emitted just a tiny amount of water. Led me to a shower. Cold water only. Eyes felt like they're full of ground glass. I got enough sight to finish the load. The dumbass in charge tells me "I guess you can park in our parking lot", hands me a little squeeze bottle of "eye wash". Tells me, if you think you need it we might be able to drive you to a hospital (40 miles away), let us know". Then the MF goes home. Only the "maintenance" guy and a couple of workers left. The guy runs around and gathers up several more of the squeeze bottles from "first aid kits". I spent the night trying to wash this crap out of my eyes and being terrified I'd lose my sight. Next AM I'm ordered out of the lot by the guy plowing the lot. Drove about 30 miles in near whiteout to a pilot where I got their permission to use a hot shower for about an hour.
The only thing that saved my butt (and my eyes) was the very low temps that night. When the MDI sprayed it instantly crystallized. Had it stayed as hot liquid I wouldn't be posting this now.
No matter how well you know "procedure" that's all it takes... one dumb mistake. WEAR the ppe.... every damn time. And don't trust the "help", do it yourself.
I know this because it happened to me. On an MDI delivery to Grand Rapids I got delayed by an ice storm. Made arrangement to deliver around 7pm Friday night. Hauled butt and got there about 6pm. Of course, nobody had told the customer. The regular chem guy had gone home at 5. But they needed it so hey.... we got a guy who knows.
So I pull around back, back down into the ice-covered bay, pull on my chem suit, grab my respirator mask and slither my way to the back of the trailer. "Their guy"is back there, getting ready to "take a sample". I hook up the pressure air. Buddy taps me on the shoulder and tells me he can't get the plug out of the discharge pipe. I look down and the lock ears are open. OK, at this point I've madev 3 mistakes:
1. I'm still holding my "mask" in my right hand.
2. I've assumed that this guy actually knows what he's doing.
3. I didn't check what he'd done.
Like a dummy I think "Oh, just ice" and tap the plug. What I didn't realize was that the "guy" was the maintenance guy and had received exactly one load... under supervision... two years ago. He'd opened the inner valve wide open and cracked the outer one. So the pipe was full of pressurized MDI. The plug popped out and a 2inch thick stream of chem roared out. It hit me about waist high and sprayed up. Got me full in the face...... and both eyes. The pain was intense. Fortunately I still had presence enough to hit the emergency switch that closed the inner valve. But I was blind.
Their "emergency eye-wash was near froze up and emitted just a tiny amount of water. Led me to a shower. Cold water only. Eyes felt like they're full of ground glass. I got enough sight to finish the load. The dumbass in charge tells me "I guess you can park in our parking lot", hands me a little squeeze bottle of "eye wash". Tells me, if you think you need it we might be able to drive you to a hospital (40 miles away), let us know". Then the MF goes home. Only the "maintenance" guy and a couple of workers left. The guy runs around and gathers up several more of the squeeze bottles from "first aid kits". I spent the night trying to wash this crap out of my eyes and being terrified I'd lose my sight. Next AM I'm ordered out of the lot by the guy plowing the lot. Drove about 30 miles in near whiteout to a pilot where I got their permission to use a hot shower for about an hour.
The only thing that saved my butt (and my eyes) was the very low temps that night. When the MDI sprayed it instantly crystallized. Had it stayed as hot liquid I wouldn't be posting this now.
No matter how well you know "procedure" that's all it takes... one dumb mistake. WEAR the ppe.... every damn time. And don't trust the "help", do it yourself.
Totally agree.
Worst I ever did was get some sulfuric acid on me. Why? because I assumed the clean hoses were actually clean. This was a pain in the ass load that all of us at my terminal had to do on occasion. Nobody wanted to do it. It was the first tank I actually unloaded, and that was after working there for 6 months. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, basically trying to remember what I was told in orientation. In my two weeks of training after orientation, we never unloaded a tank. Never.
So, I put on the suit, but not the gloves. It's a pain to work with gloves, especially rubber ones, so I decided I would get the hoses all hooked up before putting them on. We used the same hoses all the time with this tanker for this one load. After unloading, you washed out the hoses on site. What got me was the last person to do the unload didn't wash out the hoses. I popped open the cap, and my hand was immediately covered with sulfuric acid.
Luckily, mainly because I was so worried about what I was doing, I had the water hose running right beside me and immediately got the acid off.
Proper use of PPE is crucial to protecting yourself.
I hauled a lot of this:
You don't want to ever come into contact with that mess.
Also, beware of bad habits from your OJT. People like to act tough and do stupid stuff.
You are usually going to have to pull samples of products from the trailer. Not uncommon to see drivers dip a bottle into the top of the tanker with their bare hands into a corrosive chemical to get the sample, or spill it somehow all over their hands wherever they are pulling the sample from. Even a flammable chemical, doesn't matter. Next thing you know, they are eating a sandwich while the truck is unloading, with that same hand that had the chemical all over it. Nevermind that it is absorbing into the skin just from touching it, now you are ingesting it as well with your food.
Make a habit of not touching the stuff, and not breathing the stuff.
No telling what the long term effects are from touching these chemicals, or inhaling them. The more I thought about it though, the more I was ready to get away from it.
You are usually going to have to pull samples of products from the trailer. Not uncommon to see drivers dip a bottle into the top of the tanker with their bare hands into a corrosive chemical to get the sample, or spill it somehow all over their hands wherever they are pulling the sample from. Even a flammable chemical, doesn't matter. Next thing you know, they are eating a sandwich while the truck is unloading, with that same hand that had the chemical all over it. Nevermind that it is absorbing into the skin just from touching it, now you are ingesting it as well with your food.
Make a habit of not touching the stuff, and not breathing the stuff.
No telling what the long term effects are from touching these chemicals, or inhaling them. The more I thought about it though, the more I was ready to get away from it.
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