1 killed, 10 sickened in chemical incident at Mass. restaurant

The incident happened Thursday night in a Buffalo Wild Wings when an employee began using a common floor-cleaning agent to mop the kitchen floor became severely and unexpectedly sickened; other employees and eventually customers were driven out of the building by powerfully noxious fumes, with several feeling ill enough to take themselves to the emergency room for evaluation. The employee who had been mopping the floor was transported by ambulance and pronounced dead at the hospital.

Quote:

"We were just sitting at the bar, and kind of the smell of, like, ammonia and chlorine came over us, and a bunch of people started coughing," said Jim Jorefice, who was inside the restaurant with some coworkers at the time. The three men said they asked a restaurant employee if everything was OK and were told some chemicals had spilled in the kitchen. "At first, I just thought it was the dishwasher, someone poured some chemicals down, but then, it got stronger and stronger," Jorefice said. Eventually, they moved to a window employees had opened. Then, firefighters arrived in gas masks and told them to leave the restaurant immediately. Super 8, a sodium hypochlorite, is frequently used in sanitation. "This is a product that we've been told is a common product used in floor cleaning," Patterson said. "For some reason tonight, there was just a reaction that led to this."

This reminds me of a situation which took place recently regarding a spilled cleaning agent on an airplane reportedly sickening 3 crew and resulting in a diversion of the airplane and transport of some crew and passengers to the hospital. The event was covered in a thread here, and the consensus seemed to be that all of the reported sickness must have been mass hysteria, based mostly on the assumption that a cleaning chemical that would be so toxic when spilled would not be allowed on an airplane to begin with.

But here we have a very similar situation - some apparently spilled multi-purpose cleaner, of a very common variety, which is normally used every day in similar establishments across the country without incident including the very one at which this accident occurred, which on this particular night somehow produced fumes so noxious they overcame and killed the person working with them and led several others to seek medical attention. It's not known yet how this happened, but the language of the article suggests that investigators believe inadvertent contamination or contact with some other substance could have caused a unique reaction.

It's interesting to note that had that employee not been killed, this entire incident could also be summarily dismissed as nothing more than mass hysteria because some people smelled a chemical, just like the incident on the airplane. I suppose it still could, and it's possible the employee might have somehow mass-hysteria'd so hard that he actually mass-hysteria'd himself literally to death, whereas the remaining employees and patrons who were driven out suffered only a more typical nonfatal variety of mass hysteria; however I'm leaning toward the death indicating that there was actually something harmful about the fumes this time. It makes me wonder if some kind of inadvertent contamination and unexpected resultant reaction might have actually made the crew on the airplane physically ill in a non-psychosomatic way after all.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/36ReXMj