Guests at a birthday party Friday for an Instagram influencer said the sauna was too hot and wanted to jump into the swimming pool to cool off. So dry ice was dumped into the Moscow pool to make the water colder. Immediately after jumping in, the people in the water began to choke, the BBC reports. Several of them became unconscious.
Three people died, including Valentin Didenko. The party was in honor of his wife’s 29th birthday; Ekaterina Didenko, who posts advice on saving money on pharmaceutical products, has more than a million Instagram followers.
Four other people at the party suffered chemical burns, per the Moscow Times. The victims’ cause of death was suffocation, officials said in a preliminary finding.
I blame Trump.
See. See oh two, you climate deniers. It’s global warming and it kills!
They were rushin towards death….sorry had to go there.
An “Instagram influencer” ?!
Oh, Nose! How can we cope?
Idiocracy
Out of the mouths of babes- One of our kids had a student teacher for a semester in third or fourth grade. The teacher gave the kids a gift to remember her, a cutting from a houseplant. I asked the kid what’s the name of that plant? Umm, a lost Russian?
Turns out it was a wandering Jew, Tradescantia zebrina. I still think this kid will be a stand up comedian one day.
These poor folks qualify for the lost Russian title if anyone does. So sad.
…dry ice is not poisonous, but it’s just CO2, so it does not support life. This is the same as breathing your own exhalations from a plastic bag in terms of why it kills you, but you are in an open environment and your lungs are filling and emptying, so you don’t have a “feeling” of sufocation.
We had a nitrogen spiral freezer in my plant that almost had a similar outcome. This used liquid nitrogen changing state rapidly to cool to 150 degrees below 0 in this case (we don’t use it any more, so not any trade secret, it was stupid anyway), but this particular one had a discharge conveyor about 9′ up over an extremely unairconditioned Production floor, so the gaseous, but still warming, nitrogen came out of the opening for the conveyor in large quantities. Because, as with CO2 it is heavier than air, it “waterfalled” down to the floor from the opening.
One of our guys decided a great way to escape the heat was to stand under this waterfall. It was not a frostbite hazard as it was now too warm for that, but the nitrogen drove out all the oxygen because it was still concentrated, and being an inert gas, is not used by your body.
So he’s standing there and starts to cough and get fuzzy. He’s breathing normally and everything, but there’s no oxygen for his body to transport, only nitrogen which it can not. One of the problems with hypoxia is the first thing that goes is your higher functions, so your brain is no longer capable of making good decisions or understanding the situation (and I would argue HIS never could ANYWAY, but I digress…). It became apparent he was in distress when he started to sway and his eyes rolled up, but we did pull him out of the stream and sit his stupid ass down in an actual 21% oxygen environment as God intended, so he was able to recover without any further help, just someone to keep him from falling out of his chair until he did.
He was mad that we took him out of the cold, though. Go figure, he could have been PERMANENTLY cold if we DIDN’T…
…anyway, if you missed it, besides the fact it doesn’t support life, the OTHER problem with dry ice gassing into CO2 is that it is ALSO heavier than air, so it ‘pools’ around you and in confined and low spaces (like a swimming pool) AND STAYS THERE, it doesn’t drift off unless driven by a wind. This leads to hypoxia, then anoxia, then death, with every minute making your brain less likely to even understand THAT you’re dying, let alone WHY.
…but on the PLUS side, it WOULD have waterfalled out of the pool and onto the ground for a REAL cool, spooky look that’s probably why the GOT it, and it would have been made MUCH more Addams Family by the fact that there were ACTUAL dead people in it and guys pulling the corpses out in full SCBA in the lurid illumination of strong scene lighting shot through by the occasional red and blue and sometimes green strobing for an extra surreal touch, so there’s that…
…play with dry ice, secure your Darwin Award.
…although you may get to play with dry ice later, at the morgue, but YOU won’t be the one HANDLING it…
(it’s also possible to get frostbit pretty quickly from handling it if you do it wrong, but that was the LEAST of these folks’ problems, so a different subject for another day…)
2 Black Swan events in one week, CO2 actually doing some harm and an animal that doesn’t require oxygen, big week.
@SNS: ” Because, as with CO2 it is heavier than air, it “waterfalled” down to the floor from the opening.”
Uhhh, nitrogen isn’t heavier than air, it was falling because it was colder than the ambient atmosphere and that made it more dense. You are right that CO2 is heavier than air.
…I stand corrected, @Lowell, I was conflating my gasses instead of inflating with them. Thank you for the correction.
…you’d think I’d not make mistakes like that since I’m a pretty gassy guy, the more so witg each passing year, but then I AM full of hot air a lot too, so maybe by brain flashed off with the nitrogen…
Nitrogen causes no sensation.
CO2 will actually create an acute sensation, desperation to breathe. It’s soluble in blood, and carried quite readily. It’s concentration is one of the things that regulates your breathing. The more you have in your blood, the harder you’ll breathe. You even have an enzyme to knock it off your hemoglobin in your lungs, because it binds tighter than O2 does. This is also why carbon monoxide and cyanide are lethal. They bind to hemoglobin so tightly, the enzyme can’t free up the hemoglobin to carry oxygen.
First world solution, to first world problems.
@Kali Refugee in Texas, would the sensation of desperation to breathe necessarily overcome the decreased LOC from the hypoxia? The victims I have seen in field settings have been from improperly vented car exhausts and issues with furnaces and chimneys, and it seems like under such circumstances the victims would remove themselves from the hazard area if they felt they had breathing issues beforehand. Those that I’ve seen did not appear to have been struggling or in pain, but more like they got tired and went to sleep, which is also the sensation I have heard described from survivors that got doses sufficient to warrant hyperbaric treatment.
…So my question is, which comes first, the unpleasant sensation, or the hypoxia, or does one follow the other so closely that there is no time to understand, let alone react? I saw it on a street level so I don’t have the advanced information on progression that you apparently possess, and I would like to hear more about what you know about it.
Wow Monday morning science class, complete with a great safety tip. Last time I used dry ice was to install a ring gear on a flywheel. I would have thought, the coughing would have tipped you off that something was amiss, but maybe not…
@Lowell
You forgot to remind him that Nitrogen isn’t inert as well. Only the noble gases are inert. Also, there are plenty of living organisms that metabolize carbon dioxide.
High levels of carbon dioxide levels detected by the brain caused humans to increase respiration. That’s why you can’t kill yourself by holding your breath. I was told Fettanyl can interfere with this brain function and call people to stop breathing when they OF.
…you’re correct it is not TRULY inert, but for most purposes, it behaves like it is, and it is NOT processed in any WAY by the body, so from the physiological point of view, it may as well be…
…and I’m not the only one calling it “inert”, either…
“Gaseous nitrogen is valued for inertness. It is commonly used to shield potentially reactive materials from contact with oxygen for safety or for quality control reasons.
Liquid nitrogen is valued for coldness as well as inertness. When liquid nitrogen is vaporized and warmed to ambient temperature, it absorbs a large quantity of heat; allowing temperatures to be reduced substantially and quickly. The combination of inertness and its intensely cold initial state makes liquid nitrogen an ideal coolant for certain applications such as food freezing. Liquid nitrogen is also used to cool materials which are heat sensitive or soft at room temperature to allow them to be machined or fractured. Examples are used tires, plastics, certain metals and even pharmaceuticals.”
http://www.uigi.com/nitrogen.html
…even though they say shortly BEFORE this…
“Nitrogen gas is slightly lighter than air and slightly soluble in water. It is commonly thought of and used as an inert gas; but it is not truly inert.”
…so yes, while you are chemically correct, my calling it “inert” is on a par with calling every tissue a Kleenex. It’s lazy and not correct, but it IS a sufficient shorthand description for the process I am describing without getting down to the molecular level…
@supernightshade:”…So my question is, which comes first, the unpleasant sensation, or the hypoxia, or does one follow the other so closely that there is no time to understand, let alone react?
The unpleasant sensation is immediate at the first breath taken. How do I know? I’ve stuck my head in a chest freezer full of dry ice storing icebox rivets used for aircraft assembly and repair. The rivets had to be stored below a certain temperature to delay a process called age hardening.
^^^so why do most people NOT escape, or even seem to struggle? Perhaps it’s less marked discomfort at lower, but still cumulatively lethal, concentrations?
…also, @aleon, I’ve driven a few rivets in my time, although never into aircraft. Does not the extreme cold change the fit relative to if they were at room temperature?
Seems to me that one of the problems here are people with too much money comparable to the volume of their brains.
They have a sauna that accommodates HOW many people? And they had THIS much dry ice on hand? (For WHAT?)
I guess I just don’t come from a world in which this sort of thing could ever happen.
I know, let’s capture the CO2 from power plants and pump it into the ground near (D)emocrat cities. What could go wrong?
JohnWick 4?
It’s a gas gas gas!
Next weeks class: The Noble Gasses.
She posted a picture of how devastated she was:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9HccidhVuz/
…oops, I was confusing CO and CO2 earlier with the dead people in houses. My bad.
…guess I’ve never seen anyone die from CO TWO, so maybe they DO mostly self-rescue.
….mostly…
I worked with nitrogen every day for decades. We used massive amounts of it to purge vessels and piping of explosive VOC’s. I was more fearful of the nitrogen than the VOC’s. You can smell the VOC’s and leave but with nitrogen you just fall dead without warning.
Nitrogen is racist!
@Joey Biden March 2, 2020 at 12:21 pm
And it wants to put your molecules back in chains!