Chlorine Gas: A Case of A Kitchen Chemical Weapon Mistake

5 months ago

No one in their right senses goes out with the thought of not coming back to the house at night neither does anyone ever go to work with the intention of making a chemical that will send them to their early grave. If I was a chef or the manager of a restaurant, I wouldn't go to my business location with the intention that I would not be coming back because my intention is to serve people meals and not poison neither do I expect to meet with anything toxic that could possibly take my life but this wasn't the same for the people in this post whose went to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings.

The date was November 7th, 2019, and Ryan Baldera who was a 32-year-old man started his day by going to his place of work and he was the General Manager of Buffalo Wild Wings in Burlington Massachusetts. Before leaving, he said goodbye to his wife and 3-months-old son, and went to work. While at work, he was told that there was an emergency in the kitchen as there was a liquid on the floor that was pungent.

Just like the random Joe would do, Ryan began to push the liquid into a drain that leads to the outside but instead of the situation to get better, it became worse. While he was pushing the liquid, the gas emanating from kitchen filled the restaurant's dinning and covered the entire place where customers were.

The smell of Ammonia and Chlorine filled the house causing people to cough. The smell got stronger and stronger, and Ryan was losing it. When fire-fighters arrived at the venue, they evacuated everyone and when they got to the kitchen they met Ryan laying unconscious and they rushed him who was unconscious along with 13 others who were in critical condition such as difficulty breathing, to a nearby hospital where the race to save his life began.

At the restaurant, investigation revealed that the spill was a combination of cleaning supplies, a combination of super 8 and Scale Kleen which looked like they were added by accident to the floor. Super 8 is a low temp sodium hypochlorite solution for sanitization and scale Kleen is a concentrated, highly acidic detergent. The two substances reacted together forming toxic fumes but before you start to think too much, Sodium Hypochlorite is still the same thing as the common bleach that we know.

The combination of these substance create Chlorine Gas with green bubbles from the liquid. Chlorine gas is very deadly and when I was reading, I saw that it was first used by Germany in 1915 during the first world war. The gas has been seen to cause severe respiratory distress and eye irritation. In his lungs, the gas had led to the forming of hypochlorous and hydrochloric acid causing the lungs to swell up becoming inflamed.

In all I read, I didn't see a documentation of what happened to Ryan Baldera after he arrived at the hospital, but hopefully he was taken care off by the doctors with all their skill but then it is important to state that cases of oxygen deprivation can be very fatal as it can lead to irreversible brain damage and death. It was said that Ryan died so it is possible that he might have died from deprivation and complications.