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Subject: [DCHAS-L] Remembering Ralph

Date: Feb 29, 2024 22:37 UTC

Author: Robin M. Izzo <rmizzo**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>

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Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] School Incident with Dry Ice

Date: Feb 29, 2024 22:50 UTC

Author: David EldrEdge <Dave.EldrEdge**At_Symbol_Here**NALTIC.COM>

From: Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ILPI.COM>

Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] School Incident with Dry Ice

Date: Feb 29, 2024 22:43 UTC

Reply-To: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>

Message-ID: <A1E658C7-C9C5-464B-A69B-684B560087D8**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com>

In-Reply-To: <CAGtjs7G4U3DkSXs4nH3UWYh1KCqwZBga9YamR9Q6qA6kk=VPOg**At_Symbol_Here**mail.gmail.com>

Demystify: 
I don’t disagree with anyone’s calculations, but I have never seen any size block of dry ice sublime instantly or even over a half hour even when using as part of a demo. It’s the kinetics that give me pause.

It takes a massive amount of heat input to do that.  I’ve done demos where you hollow out a small hole in a block of dry ice and burn magnesium inside the block - crazy heat and light is generated but afterwards the size of that original hole is only a tiny bit larger.   Of course, we can increase the rate of heat transfer by putting the material in water, but the water quickly chills in those demos and even modest size chunks last quite some time.

Unless they were crazily bringing in garbage pails of hot water to do something epic.  Or maybe ground the dry ice to dust to increase the surface area. But it doesn’t fit the vibe of a third grade outreach.

I’m not denying the possibility of this being legit face value CO2 toxicity if all the bad things came together (room where ventilation was basically nil, closed door, overcrowded etc.) but the rate of any normal demo I still find it difficult to believe. 

While I don’t normally like to speculate - this has been a wonderful thought exercise for What If demo planning, which is I have chimed into the discussion, something that I normally avoid doing when there is complete lack of evidence and the only info we have is news reports that are typically inaccurate.  It’s given us all something to think about and has no doubt inspired better demo risk assessment!

Rob Toreki

On Feb 29, 2024, at 5:05 PM, Amber Wise <amber.wise**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM> wrote:

Seeing as how dry ice is more dense than air and small children breathe closer to the floor, I could envision a closed room "filling up" with CO2 gas and pushing out adequate oxygen for them. 
some back of the envelope calculations (I hope I got all my unit conversions?.....it's been awhile since I've taught undergrads chemistry) for a 10x10x3.5 meter room, the lower half of the room's volume is 170,000 Liters. 

If half of a 10 pound block of dry ice sublimates (5lbs) = 51.6 moles = 1240 Liters of CO2 (using ideal gas law and room temp).  That looks to me like 0.7% by volume.  According to some quick googling, those levels are dangerous and can lead to dizziness, nausea and worse.


On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 8:35 AM Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com> wrote:
I can’t think of any scenario with dry ice in this situation that would have caused this. You’d have to a significantly elevated level to feel something, at least 2,000 to 5,000 ppm, and the amount of CO2 you can bring into a classroom is what, a couple of pounds? The room would have to be hermetically sealed or you’d have to be huffing the stuff.

There’s either something massively left out of this story or it’s a case of chemophobic mass hysteria (guess that’s called mass psychogenic illness these days given the misogynistic origin/premise of the word hysteria). See, for example, https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2000/1215/p2655.html and  https://www.verywellmind.com/understanding-groupthink-2671595 

Similar reports have been seen in the literature, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10631279/ and there have been cases of MPI reported at vaccination centers as well https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12814329/ 

Rob Toreki

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On Feb 24, 2024, at 7:30 PM, Monique Wilhelm <biocmst**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM> wrote:


I do not have any additional details.  Although I do suggest anyone working with hazardous materials with groups (or otherwise) to do a risk assessment and have appropriate controls in place as well as plans for any incidents that could occur.
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