As many of you know by now, my mission today is to transfer as much of my 50 years of gas industry learnings to this generation and the future as possible. I have been fortunate to have learned from the first generation of Specialty Gas Engineers and Chemists, it was amazing how much we didn’t know but we survived to retire. We also are not missing any appendages.! Went though many close calls that I hope others don’t have to. I lived through 50 years of this in operations, safety, emergency response, sales training, analytical, engineering and learned a lot! Today I am no longer anxious to make money on anything I do. What a relief
I grew up making the highly toxic and reactive gases like arsine, phosphine and silane. Fortunately the arsine poisonings I was involved in were not fatal but were acute. In the early 1970’s gas detection systems were primitive. In addition, I was 21 and clueless as an emergency responder, I took a operator that had an arm swelled 2X and the doctors in the ER told me they knew nothing about arsine poisoning so take him home so I did. The next day I rushed him to a Poison Control Hospital and they saved him with whole blood transfusions and ICU. I also led the investigation of the largest arsine release in history, 65 lbs. Over 100 people went to the hospital for treatment. It was chaos and an interesting time. Just prior to that I led the investigation into a 160 lb hydrogen selenide cylinder rupture that severely injured 8 victims with both respiratory and dermal affects. Decon was a severe problem.
Spent 35 years testing silane and still train many today on its safety. Almost severely injured a number of people in a demo in 2016 as well as killed my self despite 40+ years of experience.
I am excited on working on this blog which I hope will be of value. Topics such as
I would welcome any input on this effort which I believe is critical to the safety of this and future generations.
The blog will contain articles on many diverse topics such as compressibility, adiabatic compression heat, leak rates, etc . Let me know if there is an area of interest you would like addressed.
Eugene Ngai
Chemically Speaking LLC
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