Post a pic that makes you LOL

[4regt4]

Wait. Strike that. Reverse it. Flammable, sure, and also extremely toxic and insidious. Our noses are very sensitive to it because it's so dangerous. And when you're poisoned by it, what's the first thing effected? You guessed it, the sense of smell. It accumulates in small spaces, you go in, you think "That's a really bad smell" but then the bad smell is gone, so you relax, and then you drip dead.

If you've ever worked someplace where you had safety training on entering confined spaces, you can thank hydrogen sulfide.

As to where it comes from, anaerobic bacteria don't eat it unless you'd say aerobic bacteria eat oxygen. No, the anaerobes eat basically the same stuff, and suffer is their oxidizer. So they emit H₂S instead of H₂O. I don't know where the carbon goes, but it's not CS₂ as you might suppose. Some is methane, but that would need more hydrogen than the food has. Some is methane thiol, a.k.a. methyl mercaptan, CH₃SH, which is also horribly toxic, but our noses are even more sensitive to it; that's the stuff they put in natural gas at no more than 8 ppm so you can smell when there's a leak. But that too would require excess hydrogen. So I don't know how it works out.

I understand the toxicity is in the neighborhood of Hydrogen Cyanide, no?

Hans.

 

[kuririn]

 

[OverTheTop]

That or it's an abandoned track that wasn't worth removing when they put that new foundation in. The tops of those rails are pretty rusty. Though to be fair, the foundation looks like it's been there for a little while too.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[Cape Byron]

 

[Cape Byron]

 

[teepot]

As a child, I used to make H2S from hydrochloric acid and ferric? /ferrous? sulphide. I did it to stink up the house, because I was the mad scientist and my mother did not have a clue what I was doing.

Hans.

One birthday I got a chemistry kit. I took it to the basement and read what I could make. I picked stink gas. Added sulfur to wax and lit it. What a smell. A minute or two later I heard my mother yelling, what are you doing and stop it.

 

[Fishhead]

I was in a rented vacation condo for a couple of weeks (but actually there for work) and when we came in and turned on the hot water, the whole place stank of hydrogen sulfide; it can form when water is standing stagnant in a water heater if the it comes with various other sulfur compounds. The place was uninhabitable. We turned on the hot water and went out for an hour. Things were OK when we got back.

What's funny about it?

The metric system.

 

[Antares JS]

View attachment 644479

I'd take a shot at drinking from the bucket, if I couldn't get to the fount. I could learn something fun.

 

[mitchboese]

Wait. Strike that. Reverse it. Flammable, sure, and also extremely toxic and insidious. Our noses are very sensitive to it because it's so dangerous. And when you're poisoned by it, what's the first thing effected? You guessed it, the sense of smell. It accumulates in small spaces, you go in, you think "That's a really bad smell" but then the bad smell is gone, so you relax, and then you drop dead.

If you've ever worked someplace where you had safety training on entering confined spaces, you can thank hydrogen sulfide.

As to where it comes from, anaerobic bacteria don't eat it unless you'd say aerobic bacteria eat oxygen. No, the anaerobes eat basically the same stuff, and suffer is their oxidizer. So they emit H₂S instead of H₂O. I don't know where the carbon goes, but it's not CS₂ as you might suppose. Some is methane, but that would need more hydrogen than the food has. Some is methane thiol, a.k.a. methyl mercaptan, CH₃SH, which is also horribly toxic, but our noses are even more sensitive to it; that's the stuff they put in natural gas at no more than 8 ppm so you can smell when there's a leak. But that too would require excess hydrogen. So I don't know how it works out.

Also heavier than air so it sits at the bottom of sewer manholes. Death trap.

 

[jqavins]

And then your buddy goes in to get you when you collapse, and he dies too.

 

[boatgeek]

And then your buddy goes in to get you when you collapse, and he dies too.

This has drifted pretty far from LOL, but I'm riding this thing all the way down!

Confined space casualties usually have at least a 2:1 and often 4:1 ratio of rescuers to initial victims taken down. Unless the facility has a really good confined space training and rescue plan, it's hard to resist running into the space to check on someone who's down. H2S is particularly nasty since it has a strong smell at low concentrations, then you can't smell it once it gets to concentrations high enough to kill you. So it seems like the air is clearing when it's getting more dangerous.

 

[Jim Hinton]

Hydrogen Sulfide. H2S. Sewer gas. Quite flammable. Fairly toxic. So, anaerobic bacteria eat sulfur when it is found in decaying organic matter and then release it as Hydrogen Sulfude? Water chemists must chime in…

When that lovely odor is present in well water, it's indicative of sulfur reducing bacteria. The odor is indeed a warning, what happens to steel pipe, pumps and casing has to be seen to be believed. I have seen it eat through a 1" thick cast pump casing in less than a year. The pump was epoxy coated, but corrosion is outstanding at finding and exploiting 'holidays', imperfections in protective coating.
Jim