Employees hospitalized after chemical spill at Rhode Island facility – IOTW Report

Employees hospitalized after chemical spill at Rhode Island facility

PAWTUCKET, R.I. (WPRI) ─ Employees of a Pawtucket medical manufacturing facility were evacuated Thursday after several workers began to feel sick.

First responders were called to the Zoll Medical facility on Narragansett Drive for reports of a woman who was having difficulty breathing, according to Chief Tina Goncalves, Pawtucket’s acting public safety director.

Goncalves said the woman was evaluated on scene and first responders determined that an odor in the air was causing her symptoms. more here

9 Comments on Employees hospitalized after chemical spill at Rhode Island facility

  1. Anonymous
    APRIL 30, 2021 AT 2:23 PM
    “How do you know that some type of chemical spill has occurred but not know what the chemical was?”

    People who screw up so bad the President of the company has to shut multiple production shifts down and make ginormous Workers Comp and hazmat mitigation payouts aren’t ABOUT to TELL what they did, especially not to the authorities

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  2. I was doing some research on a 1/8 PWR back in the 80s using Nitrogen to leak test and a woman came through the area and said the Nitrogen (she wasn’t aware that it was Nitrogen – she just saw the tanks) was making her sick!
    She had a bun in the oven and wanted to sue everyone – in case it was born deformed or something.

    People are nuts.

    izlamo delenda est …

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  3. Tim, I seem to recall that back in the days when people still worked in office buildings and not from home, every few months we’d get a story about a building which was making people sick, and everybody would be sent home until hazmat sorted it out.

    It seems like it was usually a government building, and the culprit was microwave oven popcorn, but the facility would be closed for a month for remediation.

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  4. Thirdtwin,
    The Senate had a case of rotten onions that did the same thing.
    Not a month, though – America would have been safe for a month.

    izlamo delenda est …

    2
  5. Tim
    APRIL 30, 2021 AT 3:13 PM
    “I was doing some research on a 1/8 PWR back in the 80s using Nitrogen to leak test and a woman came through the area and said the Nitrogen (she wasn’t aware that it was Nitrogen – she just saw the tanks) was making her sick!”

    …could be a misunderstanding too. We have a very large liquid nitrogen tank for our spiral freezer and someone derfed a safety valve with a forklift, so a low cloud of evaporating N2 rolled across the parking area, showing very white against the 0430 darkened landscape and attracted the local cops for some reason.

    The lady cop jumped out of her cruiser (pre-SUV days) and wanted to know what it was since the cloud was pretty big and you couldn’t read the tank. We told her “Nitrogen”. She got this horrified look, said “HYDROGEN?!?!?” and started furiously backpeddling to her car and grabbed her mic off her shirt, probably to report an impending Hindenberg Disaster forming up on her watch which she was not mentally prepared to deal with. With visions of paying for a full-scale citywide evacuation we all but tackled her to clarify it was (a) NITROgen, and (b) harmless as long as you stayed out of the liquid and the ensuing cold cloud.

    …kind of a shame, really.
    …if it weren’t for the potential hazard of panicking fleeing people, a city wide evacuation would have been glorious…

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