Okay, my bad. I take safety as meaning overall health outcomes not just acute sickness.

I do think it’s useful to consider that fecal contamination of produce is often associated with poor management of waste from the industrial slaughter industry.

Eating less meat is good for the planet and your health, even if the meat is not contaminated.

The recall is about a specific company that falsified inspection labels.

I wish 167,000 lbs was a significant quantity of meat.

The US creates almost 300 million lbs of dead animal per day.

(Calculated from this: https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/outlooks/113594/LDP-M-378.pdf?v=55361)

Excellent self care, comrade!

Right?

The original meme didn’t tell the reader what to do with this information. Why is not voting or voting for the “lesser evil” of the two the only options? Why are people so eager to defend a system they admit is broken?

I checked a German SDS for this salt and it also only said that it is offgassing with acids. Seems everybody copies everybody there…

I want to check that I was clear here: the salt itself is relatively stable and doesn’t offgas. The product is sold as the safe alternative to handling SO2 cylinders and vaporizers/injection equipment, and it certainly is.

The product being purchased is a 35% w/v solution of the salt in water.

Dissolution:

NaHSO3 (s) → Na+ (aq) + HSO3− (aq)

Acid-base equilibrium:

HSO3− (aq) ⇌ H+ (aq) + SO3^2− (aq)

How the SO2 gets formed:

HSO3− (aq) + H+ (aq) ⇌ H2SO3 (aq) ⇌ SO2 (aq) + H2O

The vapour pressure I gave was for the dissolved SO2 in the solution under the conditions described. It is an application of Henry’s Law. I sometimes forget what in my brain is the chemical engineer stuff vs the chemistry stuff so I don’t always communicate effectively.

The SDS would be correct if it was for the salt, but the hazards do not reflect the hazards that are present when the SBS salts are dissolved in water because of the reactions that are occurring in the water.

Facilities people? What do you think we are, Buckingham palace?

But yeah we made a PM to run the sink lol.

The copper pipes was actually my house. There was a tiny, tiny leak downstream the trap for the bathroom sink. The pipe was never full so there was no water leak. I called a plumber and got it fixed.

I deleted a much longer text in the reply because I thought it would be a nuisance but now I regret it because it touched on all of this.

The reason is probably a legal issue: they have to name exactly the ingredients as used. And one did use the hydrated form and the other one didn’t.

I wrote SDS for commercial products in the late 2000s and that sure was a rude awakening to the “there are no grownups” realization I think people go through when they realize the people in charge aren’t there for their knowledge and oversight 😅

Anyways, I can tell you that is not the requirement in Canada at least.

So while it doesnt really matter for the end user, the workers used different versions, need to check different SDS and adhere to them. And then these differences were printed on the label.

I don’t understand. Are the workers in this situation the manufacturer? Or the people packaging the product? The SDS is the same for the two products apart from the CAS in terms of hazards. Iron Out Liquid and Iron Out Outdoors . The form used to make the product has no impact on the hazards of the finished product. The exposure limits are the same. The toxicology and eco tox are different but neither of those are for worker safety instructions. They are based on the powdered ingredient data and are not intended to be used directly. Technically mixtures are to be assessed as the mixture and not the separate components but the language is full of holes so no one does it. Item 11 is toxicology…

in the case of a mixture, the information provided under the heading for item 11 of Schedule 1 must be information that is available on the mixture as a whole, and if information is not available on the mixture as a whole, it must be information that is available on the hazardous ingredients in the mixture, together with a clear indication of the chemical name of the hazardous ingredient to which the information pertains; and

There are no CAS # for solutions but in this case I would have gone with oxalic acid and not the hydrate. If someone handed this to me I would assume they had someone incompetent writing their SDS.

But there are edge cases where things like these can make a difference and where pedantry protects from harm.

This… is not such a case ;)

I gave this example in another comment but the reason this is upsetting to me is it strongly suggests they are just mashing the SDS for the ingredients together rather than thinking of the mixture. It means I can’t trust their SDS.

This is an SDS for sodium bisulfite. All of the hazards are from the powder.

Back of napkin, but a 35% solution of SBS at 25C and ph of 3 has a vapour pressure of 0.17 atm of Sulfur Dioxide. So it’s always offhassing. The SDS implies that it may offgas and that it will offgas when mixed with acids but I can tell you after working with it for 15 years it is always offgassing lol. The tank vents have scrubbers and when the scrubber gasket fails the SO2 alarms go off. Tanks need to be rinsed for days and workers need to wear SCBA to safely open the hatch after cleaning and let the room air out for a few hours before they can work on the tanks.

But the SDS is based on the powder, not the solution. It’s not just this one company fucked up. I picked it at random. I’ve never seen one that was useful. I have to fight with project managers all the time because they hire contractors to do work on the system and give them the SDS and then I roll up and ask them where their gas monitors and SCBA is and of course they don’t have it and did not price the work properly because they didn’t know about the hazard. (Our safety procedures are available to the project managers they ought to know better).

I’m agreeing with you! I was trying to reinforce that a building should not smell like farts and it should be investigated. Same with copper pipes turning black.

It’s the drains, it’s normal,

This is not your point I am stuck on it lol. It’s not normal for odour to come up the drains 😭

I worked at a sewage treatment plant where people were complaining about the odour in a control room. The trap on a disused sink next door had gone dry (former lab, awaiting repurposing). They had a pipe bringing in air right from the head house to their control room and no one thought to check the traps for weeks. I don’t think they understood where the pipe drained. The head works have way more H2S than a typical lateral and are required to have explosion proof electrical etc. Strictly speaking the sink should have been disconnected once the lab was abandoned, but that rule is in the building code and why would these people know that?.

I think you missed where both products were solutions of oxalic acid.

Hydration number has no meaning in a solution.

ETA: this was not a really a helpful reply because it’s very vague. I’ll try again.

This product, which is a liquid sold in retail stores, lists Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate as the active ingredient on the SDS .

Oh my god, I’ve not heard this one.

One of the reasons I complained about the powders being in the SDS rather than the solution is that I’ve happened upon people standing in a room coughing, with gas detectors going off and they are just confused because they didn’t know they had released SO2 or done anything hazardous so they don’t know what to do. It’s not a risk with solid sodium bisulfite except in a fire but it’s the regular offgas for the product in solution. Guess what the SDS for the 30% solution product we buy was based on 🙃

It sounds super simple but even I catch myself doing dumb shit with assumptions so I think it bears repeating. After working in hazardous environments with super specific warning labels I come home and see vague shit on household cleaners and think “it can’t be that dangerous if they are so vague and don’t list ingredients?” But that’s super inaccurate and dangerous.

Not that I know chemistry.

But that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? I know enough chemistry to realize I need to think very seriously about any chemistry I think I am doing in the real world and check if I’m working off assumptions and simplifications. Lots of people know a lot less than me and are really smug about much chemistry they know. I didn’t want to derail but as I was double checking some details before posting Gemini gave me very wrong AI search results. Combine smug people with incorrect AI? Let’s just not mix chemicals no matter how much we think we know lol.

I worked in chemical manufacturing before infrastructure and there is no way in hell I’m going back to anything that isn’t strictly regulated lol.

Not that we don’t get our fair share of nonsense, but manufacturing is a whole other world of crazy.

I think we are agreeing.

When I said

The secondary sticker is basically saying there is no safe way to work live, regardless of shock protection, because the arcflash incident energy is too high.

I meant

there is no working condition where you could be safe while working on the primary side and NOT exposed to the secondary side.

It sounds like you all don’t have task specific job safety plans? I’m not blaming you, it’s a systemic problem at the management level. Elec is basically the only team that does this well tbh and I think it’s because the supervisor does not fuck around and will not take a management no for an answer. It helps that we are unionized.

We have plans for routine work come out with work orders for PMs and we will do them for correctives as correctives come up and keep them on file.

Let’s say we get a new equipment. We require the arc flash study before it’s delivered. We make sure it matches up with our expectations and then it will be used to create PMs. Like you said, there is no reason to work on this live so no PMs or correctives would have the team working on it live and they would all include switching orders and how to verify it has been deenergized. Anyone opening a panel without all that is getting sacked, and we make sure they know it.

I should also be clear this isn’t my plant and we don’t label like this. It’s not a great label but I can see why someone did it (to show it was calculated for both sides) we especially if they are some fresh out of school engineer 😅

No formal training, just good at finding the guy who likes to yap and following him around so I can learn all I can.

It was a hypothetical situation, don’t worry. Not really outside of the realm of things I’ve seen 🫠

I think it depends a lot on how critical the system is and what the risk of failure is. I work in critical infrastructure and we aren’t going to rely on a code minimum PM schedule. We don’t want to run our transformers to failure, even if we have redundancy, because lead times are fucking crazy right now. Like, more than a year. You are limited in terms of shelf spares due to space and storage/exercise requirements.

I’m not an electrical person but our electrical maintenance department seems to be on board with condition based maintenance so there must be some benefit to them. We do require IR windows and other features on equipment that allow the tests to be done safely. Apparently the IR windows are easy to retrofit.

The other benefit is tracking trends over time. Some of the offline analysis (like the winding ratio) you mentioned will give you data, but you can check more things and more frequently with the windows. You can see when a particular bus connection is slightly warmer than the others, for example, and decide to take it down sooner than required to have a look and correct.

It’s a different situation than what we are describing but we recently had a motor failure and one of the three phases was getting slowly hotter over time (we had online trends) until it shorted and kablamo! No one was monitoring those temps but we sure are now lol.

Shock and arc flash are different hazards that have different causes and risk analysis. They are independent of each other, but you must meet the PPE requirements for both when working within the respective boundaries.

Transformers take one voltage and make it a different voltage in the same box. The code doesn’t have a standard way of labelling the arc flash hazards, which means you get stupid things like the original picture.

The primary and secondary can be in different enclosures. I agree the sticker config does not make sense for something with two enclosures.

I do think your explanation is a little off, even if it is in one enclosure. Shock hazard and arcflash hazard analysis is independent, as are the PPE requirements. You need to account for both when planning work. The Shock hazard PPE only looks at the voltage of the system (see table 130.7©(7)(a)) whereas arcflash PPE needs to be suitable for the incident energy at the distance they will be performing their task. There is no overlap in the assessment.

The pictured stickers are kind of shitty because they do not clearly show that Arcflash and Shock hazards are different types of hazards and different types of incidents.

I’m more used to stickers like the one shown on this handy guide: https://www.70econsultants.com/Downloads/RozelLabelPosterv8.pdf

Here we have the primary side saying if you are more than 26" away you aren’t required to wear shock protection PPE (restricted approach) but that you are still at risk of 2nd degree burns from an arc flash within 30" . You can still get shocked up to the limited approach (60") but you aren’t required to wear PPE. Approach boundaries are from table 130.4(E)(a). This distance is consistent with an exposed circuit at the given voltage (rather than a moving contactor).

Additionally, incident energy is calculated at the distance the worker would be from the arc source when performing a task. That is why the primary side has the incident energy at 36" which is outside of the boundary, and why the 0 class (no protection) is indicated. And why you need to read the report and not just rely on the stickers! It would list the tasks and how everything is calculated.

On the secondary side the restricted approach is 12", again consistent with the table in NFPA70E. In terms of arc flash it is saying the worker would be 18" from the source when doing the work, and that it is impossible to do safely. We don’t know the particulars of the design of this transformer so we can’t say why it’s 36" on one side and 18" on the other. The secondary sticker is basically saying there is no safe way to work live, regardless of shock protection, because the arcflash incident energy is too high.

The code books don’t standardize how to communicate the required PPE which makes people do stupid things like in this picture: show conflicting requirements for safety. Shitty labeling like this can kill someone, but its not necessarily wrong labeling because the code leaves it up to interpretation.

I also disagree with this. The code specifies that you must meet both the Arcflash and the Shock hazard PPE requirements if you are within the specified distances (130.7©(1) a and b). If it’s in one enclosure you are subject to the Arcflash PPE within the boundary radius of the arcflash source, and there is no way you are outside of the radius for the secondary side when working on the primary side. Discussion of gloves is moot because we are not taking the cover off this thing, but they are required to do the analysis anyways.

Workers are not meant to rely only on the stickers. It’s the last line of defense and meant to be a sanity check on site. The workers in charge are required (by the code) to complete a job safety plan for each work task. If you come to site and your work plan has different boundaries than on the stickers, you know something is wrong.

But, its also a transformer, there is no reason why one should ever be opened live, except to verify absence of voltage.

Maintenance consultant who has not set foot on site writes a report recommending condition based maintenance including thermal imaging on all electrical equipment and didn’t bother to see if it comes with an IR window… Hopefully this sticker convinces the boss to give up that plan.