Today’s award goes to a construction worker in New York City. A tip o’ the hat to reader Snoggeramus for sending me the link.
A worker who lit a match to check if gas was coming out of a fuel line in a science classroom sparked the blast that destroyed part of a Bronx school Thursday night, officials suspect.
Construction workers were remodeling a science laboratory on the sixth floor of Marble Hill’s John F. Kennedy High School at about 8 p.m. when a powerful explosion destroyed parts of the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the building, sending three workers to the hospital, one in serious condition.
Sources say the workers were supposed to shut off the gas to the lab at a source and then pump another less volatile but noxious fuel into the line, pushing the dangerous and odorless gas out the other end.
When the line is completely free of the odorless fuel, workers would normally smell the secondary fuel, which signals that the line is safe to work around.
But sources say a worker allegedly decided to test the line by striking a match near its tip — and it exploded with such force that a wall facing Terrace View Ave. was blown out onto the street.
There’s more at the link.
Well, at least his test worked – it showed there was, indeed, still gas in the pipe (and the entire area, come to that!). What’s more, after his test . . . there wasn’t.
Peter
We were just talking about using a match to check for a gas leak (and how dumb that is) yesterday. I'm sitting here shaking my head – dude with the match has to be the one in serious condition and really lucky he's not dead.
**HE** was lucky to survive.
The Human Race was not as lucky: the dangerous-to-others idiot survived.
That's not a "test", successful or otherwise: That's a field-expedient solution to an environmental contamination problem with expendable resources (1 match, 1 book thereof with striking surface, 1 construction worker, 1 science lab).