Being retired from outside work, my wife has time to follow
some peculiar news feeds, and last night she told me of a bizarre accident that
killed three and injured several others.
Ekaterina Didenko is a 29-year-old mother of two and
internet influencer. According to news
reports she is a "qualified pharmacist" and has attracted over a
million followers of her comments about medicines and related issues.
For her 29th birthday, her husband Valentin, an IT
specialist, had what he probably thought was a great idea: he would rent a sauna room in a sports
complex in Moscow, where they lived, and throw some dry ice in the pool to make
cool-looking vapors. The couple and
their friends being internet-savvy and addicted to constant self-documentation,
there are plenty of pictures online showing Ekaterina holding "2" and
"9" balloons, shots with her husband Valentin against romantic
backgrounds, and a video of someone, possibly Valentin, in full haz-mat gear
throwing 25 kg (about 60 pounds) of dry ice into the small enclosed pool (we're
talking Moscow in the winter here, so the only swimming most people do this
time of year is in indoor pools).
As Valentin hoped, the pool started to boil with clouds of
water vapor, and Valentin and a few friends jumped in. Then things started to go horribly wrong.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an inert, colorless gas, and is
produced by the human body during respiration.
But it will not support life, and if you try to breathe pure CO2 for
more than a few seconds, you will pass out through lack of oxygen.
It's a fairly easy matter to calculate how much CO2 gas 25
kg of dry ice will produce. The result
is about 14 cubic meters, which is enough to fill a 5 by 5 meter room (about 17
feet square) up to a depth of 50 cm, or almost two feet. And it would be at the lowest level in the
room, because CO2 gas is heavier than air.
I don't know exactly how large the room was, but the photos I have seen
indicate it was fairly small, and the pool would have probably been below the
level of the floor in any case.
Even if all the dry ice didn't vaporize at once, there would
soon be enough to cover the surface of the pool, which is where a swimmer's
nose and mouth are. Poor Valentin may
not have fully realized what he'd done before the lack of breathable air caused
him to pass out while still in the water.
He and two of his guests died of asphyxiation, and Ekaterina and several
more friends ended up in a hospital with severe breathing problems.
My sympathies are with Ekaterina, her children, the
relatives and friends of the others who died, and everyone affected by this
tragedy. It's especially ironic given
that it arose from a desire to please a loved one who was evidently known and
admired by many people.
That being said, it's nevertheless remarkable that no one apparently
realized the dangers involved in what they were doing. One hopes that degrees in IT and pharmacy include
some training in basic chemistry and physics.
It's possible that somebody at the party at least had doubts that
dumping 25 kg of dry ice into a warm pool of water in a small enclosed room was
a good idea. But something took place that
day which is at the root of many technological and engineering mishaps: a reluctance to be a party-pooper.
Imagine that you were at the party and had at least grounds
to suspect that this much dry ice could cause dangerous concentrations of
CO2. What would you have
done? Jumped in front of Valentin and cried,
"Don't do that! It's dangerous!"?
In the midst of a celebratory atmosphere and where alcohol
was involved, such an action would not only be psychologically difficult. Unless you're the perennial wet-blanket type
who enjoys spoiling other peoples' fun (in which case you probably wouldn't be
invited to the party in the first place), it would be hard to let the calm,
rational part of your mind overrule the fun-loving, go-with-the-flow part and
spoil the treat that Valentin had obviously invested a lot of time and money
in. Even if you'd managed to voice
concerns, it's quite possible you'd be shouted down by the others and the
accident would have happened anyway.
Your only consolation then would have been to be able to say, "I told
you so."
One term for this effect is "groupthink": the tendency of a group of people bonded by
emotional or other ties to seek consensus even in the face of rational
arguments to the contrary. It's responsible
for many engineering tragedies that could have been averted if someone knowing
the facts had been able to persuade others that the course the group was taking
was wrong.
From photos of the incident reproduced in the news reports
about it, Valentin and his friends were aware that dry ice was dangerous, but
seemed to think that the main danger was in contacting it (hence the haz-mat
outfits). While it can cause painful
burns, and apparently some guests were injured that way, extreme cold is not
the only hazard dry ice can produce, as everyone involved in this incident now
knows to their regret.
It is a tragedy that three people died and more were injured
in an entirely preventable accident. But
the wide publicity it is attracting can serve a good purpose. If it ever occurs to anybody else to dump a
lot of dry ice into an indoor pool, anyone who has heard of this accident can
now recall it to mind and say, "Gee, didn't some Russians die after somebody
tried this very thing? I don't think we
ought to do that." And next time,
there's a good chance that other people will listen to the party-pooper.
Sources: One
media outlet (www.news.com.au) points to the U. S. Sun as the source of
the English-language report on this tragedy, but no report I was able to locate
mentions the date on which it occurred, which was presumably late February,
possibly Feb. 28 or 29. I referred to
the Sun's report at https://www.the-sun.com/news/470891/three-killed-and-seven-fighting-for-life-after-being-poisoned-at-instagram-stars-pool-party-steam-show/
as well as reports from https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/russian-mummy-blogger-ekaterina-didenko-distraught-after-three-die-at-her-birthday-party/news-story/edc5e34edd7d7701fb1586925c4952e2
and
https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/29/three-dead-dry-ice-stunt-bloggers-party-goes-tragically-wrong-12323759/. I thank my wife for drawing my attention to
this report.
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