7mo ago

You can pry these high voltage lines from my sizzling dead fingers

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Sand Won't Save You This Time - Derek Lowe "Things I Won't Work With" on chlorine trifluoride.
This is a chemical compound that will burn asbestos tile.
- I mean, sure, things like that are super dangerous, but at least they're obviously, flashily dangerous and for that reason have a lot more attention paid to them. The real nasties are arguably the ones that aren't so flashy but are much more common amd don't have immediate effects. Formaldehyde and benzene will give you cancer, and acrylate monomers will make it so you one day wake up allergic to the modern world.
  
  Oh sure, but the comic says "most hectic chemical engineer workday".
  In the article Lowe describes a spill incident:
  It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
  I'm guessing that was pretty hectic.
  
  I work with both civil and chemical engineers. Chemical engineers do site commissioning and every single one I have worked with wants to write a book about their war stories. It's bad, it's really bad. It's facing down temperatures that shouldn't exist on earth, hurricanes, it is climbing into skids and calibrating sensors, it's being fucked over by some decision made months ago to save money, it's air in lines that should be moving fluids. Hell just this month I am out with one and figure out the solution is to shove a 2x4 under a tank and try rocking it so a pump can be primed all the while my phone is blowing up with demands that I explain why we are over budget.
  Civil engineers on the other hand rarely visit sites and when that happens it is a dog and pony show. Walk around with a clipboard and a white helmet doing well not much. The majority of their work is putting stuff in an excel sheet made by a better mind a decade or more ago. Having a PE means you are really good at insisting that no improvements are ever to be made nor should a site ever be updated based on the new conditions. There is a reason why your town took 8 years to build a new pumping station and it flooded a month later.
  The field itself is an unholy combination of micromanagement and neglect driven by egos that think seniority means competency.
  Still bitter about last year when I arrive to save the day at a site. Standing knee deep in water, where there is not supposed to be water, and thinking about the 4 meetings I had with the civil engineer about the colors of the warning lights. Clearly he had his priorities straight.
  
  So you're saying that you don't like trying to relight the thermal oxidizer for the formaldehyde stream that went out due to spillover from another process, with an emergency flare? Got it.
  
  The thing I am currently afraid of is solvent recovery. It's becoming more and more a thing in my work. We are heating up something that explodes and using high voltage. What part of this is sane?
- Oh man fuck florine fires... It's a devil in liquid form.

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