CCSuttons

Amid the stories in our local paper and on our local TV news yesterday about the 35, 000 spring breakers who have descended on Corpus Christi for the coming week is a story that hit us a little closer to home and (ok, I'll admit it now) scared the pants off me.

Yesterday afternoon around 3 o'clock, as they were working on moving golf cars, office furniture and equipment, etc. into their new building, the crew at CC Golf Cars heard a loud WHUMP. Out in the warehouse repair stalls, Tommy, JJ, and Cruz looked around at each other wondering whether an 18-wheeler had just turned over out on SPID or if one of the nearby refineries had just begun burning off excess natural gas. As they turned back to work ,a cloud of green gas wafted in the open doors. Suddenly, they could neither breathe nor see let alone shout a warning to one another. Their eyes and throats began to burn. Tommy grabbed his hankerchief out of his pocket to cover his nose and mouth and all three men ran for the air-conditioned office.

As they entered the office from the back, Mike and Ron the contractor ran in from the front. After a few seconds when the worst of the eye-tearing and throat burning had passed, Mike called 911. Within in seconds they hear sirens approaching. Within minutes the fire trucks, police, ambulences, and haz-mat teams appeared. Tommy and his crew stayed inside their offices until the green gas began to cycle through the air-conditioning system. They made their way to the far corner of their lot, upwind of the cloud of green gas and watched as rescue workers swarmed over their new neighbor to the north, Acetylene Oxygen Company Welding Supply, AOC for short.

They learned that the valve on a tank full of liquid chlorine over at AOC had blown, releasing the liquid in the form of a highly toxic gas into the air. The haz-mat crews closed off access to the street for about a block in all directions and asked people in the surrounding businesses to stay inside. Chlorine gas is heavier than the air around us and would tend to sink to the lowest available spot and slowly dissipate. I learned this during a somewhat frantic search of the internet for information about chlorine gas poisoning right after Tommy called me to reassure me that everything was alright.

Slowly, after about an hour and a half, things at Corpus Christi Golf Cars returned to normal. Tommy and his crew and the contractors were interviewed by rescue personnel as to their health and asked to sign a form indicating that they did not require medical treatment. The police re-opened their street to through traffic and they went back to the business of moving into their new location.

For more prosaic accounts see the story printed on the local TV stations' web sites, http://www.kristv.com/global/story.asp?s=8022645 or http://www.kiiitv.com/home/16717811.html or watch the video:




It wasn't really a 500 MILE radius, more like 500 feet!

All's well today. We slept in because Tommy and his crew didn't finish moving golf cars from the old building to the new until about 10 pm and he didn't get home until almost midnight. He feels fine today, no after effects of the chlorine exposure that I can tell.