I used to work for Wacker Siltronic in Portland, OR and although I worked in the Primary inspection department, I also doubled as one of the Emergency Response Team members.

I came into work one night as I always do at 8:45pm to get ready for the night shift. I was immediately told to get take the pager and head to Growing for an in progress emergency.

I grabed my radio and pager and was radio'd to get a respirator because I was going to need it. On my way down to that area of the facility, I saw one of our Maintainence guys holding a bandages are and pretty burt looking, dazed.

In the growing area, you have furnaces that melt silicon for growing the wafers you and I use in our computers. In this process, these grow in mult diameter crystals and get very hot to 1000-2000 degrees as I understand it.

It seams that our Maintainence guy in question, we'll call him Jim for this story, was getting close to going home for the night but still had to clean the last furnace out before going home. He was in a hurry and wanted to leave quickly. So instead of waiting the appropriate time period to let it cool and then clean it correctly... he decided to speed up the process using acitone, one of the main components in Nail Polish remover.

If you saw the area that he was in, he was standing on a mini ladder, the kind that is about 2-3 foot tall in a corridore of furnaces about 2-3 feet wide if that.

You guessed it, the heat applied with that oxidizer meshed quite well exploding rapidly and creating a nice fire in a matter of seconds. It also knocked him off of his ladder and into the next furnace.

He then realized his mistake and tried to get the can of chemical fire extinguishing material. I forget what extinguisher type was, but it was a nice fine powder that had not been used in ages inside the large canister, so when he used it, instead of the fire suppresent coming out of the hose in a directed spray, the top blew off sending the chemical everywhere and created the mess that I came into and got to help clean up. You could not breath in it as it was very dense and a lot of it, and as I remember he barely got out before losing air and blacking out.

This was quite a few years ago, so details might be slightly skewed, but the clean up I helped out with, was not.

This was and probably still is a safe facility to work in, but with the nature of the chemicals and equiptment you work with there every day, the safety procedures should not be ignored and I really feel that technician got off pretty light that day.

This was all reported in house, the fire department might have a report on it somewhere... I'm not even sure of the exact date that this happened, but I thought the story itself was good. I can see my part in it as if it were yesterday.

Submitted on 11/03/2008

Submitted by: Anonymous
Reference: 1989 or 1990 Portland, OR

Copyright © 2008 DarwinAwards.com

Bruce said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
I don't know about you but if I had to clean out a furnace that got upwards of 2000 degrees I'd make darned sure that it's sufficiently cooled off before putting ANYTHING in it. Thanks for the story.

James said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
This sounds like an egregious enough safety violation to merit inclusion! Thanks for submitting it!

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