Workers Feel Effects of Chlorine Gas

When chlorine bleach spread from a laboratory curiosity to a mass industrial process in the 1900s, its adoption was startling. The invention of the bleaching process ranks up there with the invention of the steam engine because of its economic, marketable success. It served as the early precedent for environmental toxins legal suits. And it ushered in more than 100 years of the toxic gassing and chorine gas effects for its workers.

Chlorine Gas Gassed its Workers

The original effects of chlorine gas bleaching was horrific for the workers because it produced oxygenated muriatic acid, a gas that was described as the, “most noxious to the lungs of all the gases . . .” per the Edinburgh Medical and Physical Dictionary. The chlorine gas exposure was given out so freely that no man could long endure to work with it or even supervise the chlorine gas operation.

One remedy to the use of chlorine gas came upon learning that chlorine gas dissolved in a potash alkali solution. This chlorine gas liquid method proved an easier-to-use solution and really took off when lime replaced potash. Chlorine gas could be given out gradually to the goods and less chlorine gas inhalation occurred. With this, the operation of bleaching was now not as injurious to workers. Transportation still posed a problem though, forcing large-scale textile bleaching establishments to erect a small chlorine gas manufacturing facility onsite.

Next Bleaching Invention Uses Soda Ash

The production of a dry chlorine gas bleaching powder was next invented, which helped solved the problem of transportation, but contributed huge problems of its own. Sodium-containing soda ash proved the most viable starting substance for the bleaching process, but its production released huge amounts of environmental toxins into the air.

The new procedure required common salt to be broken down by sulfuric acid, yielding sodium sulfate as one of the key products of the reaction. When the sodium sulfate was mixed with chalk and charcoal then heated, copious amounts of soda ash could be cheaply produced.

However, for every atom of sodium retrieved from common salt, an atom of chlorine gas was released as an environmental toxin. The soda ash manufacturers disposed of this environmental toxin by sending it up their smokestacks. The hydrochloric acid vapors released caused widespread destruction of vegetation, livestock and other property.

The chlorine dry powder process consisted of spreading lime on the floor of a large room into which chlorine was delivered. When the lime has taken up as much chlorine as it could, the doors of the room were opened and volumes of hydrochloric acid vapors escaped. Then bleach packers had to enter these rooms to shovel the powder immediately after the doors were opened that gave deadly exposure to chlorine gas. Those who packed chlorine bleach powder were exposed heavily and suffered greatly.

To protect workers from the hydrochloric acid, they would wear a flannel muffler tied over their face or bite a piece of flannel between their teeth and breathed through it. The fumes of acid would quickly cause their teeth to rot away.

Then it was learned that hydrochloric acid had a potential value that had been going up the smokestacks and was now being retrieved by the scrubber. This by-product of soda ash manufacturing provided cheap feedstock for chlorine bleach manufacturing.

Early Environmental Legal Suits

The early legal suits against soda ash environmental toxins have been cited as precedent-setting examples of economic accommodation with environmental protection, because manufacturers alleviated the environmental toxins problem by recapturing at least part of the hydrochloric acid and reusing it. But the smokestack provided only a modest reduction of the extreme levels of the industry’s first year, and environmental toxins contamination for soda ash remained rampant. Air contamination--as well as other routes of pollution took place--with voluminous sulfuric acid runoff at the plants. One chemist described the environmental toxin sulfuric acid as, “A product more unfit to go into an inland river would be difficult to conceive.”

Papermaking Spurs Next Growth for Bleaching with Gas

The chlorine industry might have stagnated, but got a huge growth spurt from papermaking in the 20th century. The papermaking industry has enabled a far more deadly application of chloride gas technology that once more has caused symptoms of chlorine gas exposure to thousands of workers. Even though chlorine gas had proved too potent and too unpredictable for textile fabric bleaching, it had the very strength needed to bleach cheap wood pulp.

Soon chlorine gas was once again bubbling through factory bleaching vats on a major scale. Reports describing new respiratory distress and asthma in paper workers surfaced. Pulp paper gassing became a routine part of operations.

If you are a victim of chlorine gas exposure from your work environment, you have rights. Contact Seeger Weiss to discuss your immediate options.

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