Quote:
Originally Posted by astralis
i seriously hope you played that local celebrity status out for all it was worth...holy crap (pun intended).  |
It was good for a few pints at the pub for sure!
Actually it wasn't that kind of spill, here's how it played out. I rushed out to the scene with a fire truck and some fitters (mechanics). There were about a hundred men under a Leftenant already there keeping everyone away and evacuating the nearby houses. I had the locomotive engineers pull the train down track to where I had spied a low spot. I then set the fire truck to spray the fogger nozzle over the leaking tanker car to keep the chlorine gas cloud from drifting over the town.
The place I stopped the train had a conduit (aqueduct?) leading to the other side of the railway embankment and away from the stream parallelling the tracks which ran into the towns water source. I had the men dig a trench for the now diluted chlorine and water mixture to run under the embankment and into the previously reconnoitered depression. I then had the men build a sandbag dam at one end about a meter high and ten meters long to hold the runoff. This gave me a holding area about eighty meters long and almost two meters deep.
Once successfully accomplishing containment the fitters and I went to work attacking the broken valve on the tanker car. I had one MOPP suit, two gas masks and one DR-40 from the fire truck. It was high summer in Africa and unbelievably hot. We rotated men in the suit as no one could last more than a few minutes until collapsing.
It was not until we finally got the valve shut off did I discover I am allergic to chlorine. Having difficulty breathing they got me to the hospital just as I went into anaphylactic shock. I swelled up like the Michelin man. I couldn't button the sleeves on my uniform blouse my arms were so swollen. I was in hospital for a week. That's where I met my future wife.
I received a commendation in my file and an invitation to Sapper school due to "meritorious service". Sappers were usually required to serve a year with the troops before attending, in my case they made an exception.