Father Finds Son Dead in Vat of Acid

[snopes]

An 18-year-old fell into a vat of sulfuric acid and died after apparently being overcome by fumes.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070923/D8RRFSQG0.html

There'd better be a very thorough OSHA investigation of this one.

Wow. I'm surprised there was much of a body left to find and identify.

[applepwnz]

Originally Posted by Lightningdan

Wow. I'm surprised there was much of a body left to find and identify.

Yeah, I would think that he would have died from the acid basically melting him before he died "from the fumes" as well

[nancyfancypants]

This reminds me of one of the saddest plant accidents I dealt with as an employee benefits administrator. I worked for a company that had a lot of sawmills in the South. One night, a 21 year-old man fell into a vat of creosote (a wood-treating chemical). The next shift, his father (the assistant plant manager) found him. That guy's death still haunts me to this day.

[Nonny Mouse]

Originally Posted by Lightningdan

Wow. I'm surprised there was much of a body left to find and identify.

Assuming there was enough body left to find--which there clearly was, since it was found--identifying it should be as simple as putting two and two together. A man doesn't come home from work; the next day a corpse is found at his workplace. The connection's pretty obvious.

My highly inscientific guess is that the soft tissue was dissolved but the bones were not.

Nonny

[Noemi]

Originally Posted by Doug4.7

There'd better be a very thorough OSHA investigation of this one.

I'd have to ask on Tuesday but I think that OSHA investigating a workplace fatality is the standard procedure in all states. The thing is, that there may be no way to make that part of the process safer or there may be other factors that played into the situation that meant that it was unavoidable.

[DaGuyWitBluGlasses]

Originally Posted by Nonny Mouse

Assuming there was enough body left to find--which there clearly was, since it was found--identifying it should be as simple as putting two and two together. A man doesn't come home from work; the next day a corpse is found at his workplace. The connection's pretty obvious.

My highly inscientific guess is that the soft tissue was dissolved but the bones were not.

Nonny

Acid is actually not that great at ripping apart flesh. It could take 24 hours for only the acid in your stomach to rip apart meat products.

It's the other end of the PH scale that is flesh destroying.

[TuFurg]

I'm wondering if it's not just a poorly worded article and that the reason he fell in was that he was overcome by fumes instead of that being the cause of death. I supposed it's possible that the vat was nearly empty therefore the reason to think it was something other than the acid that killed him.

Either way...

[lord_feldon]

Typically when one falls into something that's not air while unconscious, you die pretty quickly anyways.

[Malruhn]

The article doesn't go into how concentrated the acid was. A weak solution could have just made him... soft... rather than eating away all the soft tissue. Effectively, he could have just drowned.

However, a solution that was strong enough to produce vapors concentrated enough to knock him unconscious would kind of make my above proposal moot.

So, being mooted (ewww!), I will fall back on an old pet peeve. Metals produce "fumes", everything else produces "vapors" - at least in official legal terms. The guy was killed by acidic vapor. (/peeve)

[Mad Jay]

I think what they mean is "An 18-year-old fell into a vat of sulfuric acid after apparently being overcome by fumes and died "

[applepwnz]

Hmm, now I know this is based on personal experiance which can be faulty, but I know that in Chemistry class (In HS, College, etc) that strong acids such as sulphuric acid (H2SO4) never really made vapors (or fumes for that matter) that caused me to pass out, act strangely, or otherwise. (I tried putting some of the most strongly concentracted sulphuric acid we used on my hand and it didn't do anything but cause a mild itching sensation.) So I'm not sure how some guy could be overcome with the vapors/fumes.

[Jay Temple]

That's because of your green blood. Damn your cold Vulcan logic!

[Agent 99]

In college, I scrubbed dorm bathrooms to pay the rent. The dorms were going under inspection so my supervisor had me put some pretty intense acid on the ring in each bathtub. One was particularly tough so I was really scrubbing the acid and leaning into the tub while kneeling on the floor. I was pretty close I guess because the next thing I knew, I was laying on my back on the tile floor.

So in my experience, if the boy was close to the vapors in question, passing out seems possible.