Battery gassing.
An odd happening- Hydrogen sulfide inhalation from car battery killed mother, daughter, medical examiner says. The malfunctioning battery might have been nothing more than a nuisance, except in th...
Forum Discussion
MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
After two, not three or four, sniffs, H2S obliterates the olfactory sense. Cannot smell it anymore. We had extensive training in the refinery*. Regarding the remark about H2S and cyanide: inhalation of potassium cyanide is 100 percent fatal. A snort of H2S is not fatal but it does not take long to poison the system perhaps ten or twelve breaths.
First thing, Potassium Cyanide (KCN) is a white powder so unless you stick some up your nose or ingest it you won't be poisoned at all. Hydrogen cyanide has a LC50 (lethal concentration that will kill 50 percent of those exposed) of somewhere between 500 and 700 ppm. Hydrogen sulfide has a LC50 of about 700 ppm. So I don't see much difference, H2S might not be more deadly but it's just as deadly.
I worked with KCN daily in a lab with no special precautions other than gloves and eye protection and lived to tell the tale. We did keep a special Cyanide First Aid Kit just in case. We finally decided to get rid of it and use a different procedure. Not because of the dangers of KCN but because the first aid kit was so expensive and hard to get and we had strong doubts that the EMS people, who were the ones who would of had to use it, would ever get here in time to do any good. We timed them a couple times when they were called for other incidents and it was taking them at least 10 minutes to get to the site.
People in the metal extraction and plating industries work with KCN by the barrel full.
