![]() ![]() Haslett is credited with creating a gas mask that resembles today’s respirators. Centuries later, in the late 1700s, Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian mining engineer, invented the first device with a respirator to help protect miners working and breathing in unsafe mines. In ninth century Persia, the Banu Musa brothers developed a rudimentary gas mask to help protect workers in polluted wells. In ancient Greece, sponges were used as a primitive type of gas mask. While you might think this crude, beaked mask was the first example of people using a tool or device to filter the air they breathe, there are earlier examples. In the beak area of the mask, dried flowers, spices and other aromatic substances were added to help filter what the plague doctors were breathing in. These medics from yesteryear wore prominent birdlike masks to ward off “bad air,” which was thought to be a cause of the plague. In our first installment of “Hazmat through history” back in The Glow Worm Spring 2016 issue, we took a look at plague doctors during the bubonic plague of the 17th century. ![]() Do it right it is better to be safe than sorry. What experience has taught me, and these site assessments have confirmed, is that there are no small jobs as far as safety is concerned. Safety gear can be time consuming to get on and a bit of a pain in the rear, and as a result, we can be tempted from time to time by the old, “Oh, it’ll just take a second” type of jobs to not get fully geared up. Yes, even at the two sites where “there’s nothing there,” we found asbestos. Well, wouldn’t you know it…when we got the lab results back, over a quarter of the samples came back with chrysotile asbestos (some as high as 80 percent) and a few additional samples came back with wollastonite (a silicate industrial mineral used as an asbestos replacement that often contains fine quartz). ![]() We got our samples, made sure to handle everything as if it contained asbestos and got our gear cleaned up properly after the job. However, industrial sites can have a pretty high potential for asbestos, so if we’re going to be carving out samples, it’s better to be safe than sorry. I know a lot of us have become used to working with masks during the pandemic, but full-face respirators are not generally a fun piece of equipment to wear all day. When we actually started sampling, the respirators came out too. So out came the usual gear for a gas site: hard hat, safety boots, safety glasses, coveralls made with DuPont™ Nomex®, gloves and the gas monitors. Still, regardless of the site, I’ve learned to take safety seriously. There wasn’t much infrastructure left there. These sites were in rural locations and, for a couple of them, the comments we received were, “Oh, there’s nothing there, so you probably won’t have to do anything with them.” Looking at the information provided, I could understand why the client thought so. I recently had a client come to us for an assessment of five gas sites before the infrastructure was removed and the sites were decommissioned. Generally speaking, my job is not what most people think of when they find out I’m an engineer. Although my job involves soil and groundwater a majority of the time, I am also involved in radon and hazardous building materials assessments. As an environmental engineer, my life deals with looking for things that many clients hope I don’t find. ![]()
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