Glue used to make bellow.

[Drew Wiley]

I don't know about the cloth, Greg. The only time I needed a new bellows that wasn't available right off the shelf somewhere, I had Custom Bellows in the UK make if for me. Toluene I do know about it. It's why I never allowed a colorant machine on the premises related to hot solvent industrial or automotive coatings. Had all the hot stuff bulk tinted at the factory itself and shipped directly to the overseas military contractors, like Raytheon. Illegal to use most such coatings here without a special exemption. Where toluene did come into play domestically were in auto paint colorants, prior to the current trend toward automotive acrylics. We liked to hire people from that trade for our own architectural color matching work because they did it best. But two of them went nutty - ordinarily meek as a lamb, but one right out of nowhere assaulted the company manager without even knowing why, or remembering he did it, and another stabbed his own brother at the dinner table after work and didn't know why. A couple others were goofy as could be. No more of those!

But the really crazy incidents.... Some guy was pumping lacquer thinner out of a RR tank car six blocks away when a massive explosion rocked our own whole giant building and generally made a mess. The darn steel tank car was literally vaporized to a considerable extent, along with every trace of the individual involved. But his cigarette lighter was found intact on the ground beside the tracks.

Weirder still, someone near the oil refinery set off a spark at the giant toluene tank owned by a different corporation (not Chevron - they don't allow toluene there). The hot air cloud peripheral to the chemical explosion itself buoyed the guy way way up into the air and slowly let him back down unhurt on someone's hedges several blocks away! That must have been an incredible theme park ride.

The replacement tank had some fool sneak in and remove its big brass valve at the bottom to sell to recycling, and polluted the Bay with about 5,000 gallons of the nasty stuff. Surprised he survived, but maybe not in the long haul.

Also in the vicinity was a furniture dipping/stripping service which used almost straight toluene. They also sold it to retailers in gallons. The last time I saw the owner of that chemical company, he had a permanent huge grin on him, walked in slow high goose steps, and said to me, "Ishe been wurkin wish it fer shirty yearsh, and it hashn't hurt me a bit."

In terms of epoxies, we sold more marine epoxy than the factory outlet itself down the freeway. It worked wonders for structural repairs, albeit expensively. The big problem with that was sensitization. Their counter worker had to quit due to it, and couldn't even touch a baked enamel desk coated decades before without breaking out into hives. The owner himself got caught up in a particular religious cult that fleeced him of 40% of his income, bankrupted, and had to sell his shares to a competitor, who has kept both their own brand and his in parallel production. I try not to use penetrating epoxies any more unless as a last resort, or for something like a waterproof darkroom application. But 2-part epoxies due the trick far better than penetrating polyester solutions, which are equally nasty to work with, probably worse, in fact.

[r_a_feldman]

But the really crazy incidents.... Some guy was pumping lacquer thinner out of a RR tank car six blocks away when a massive explosion rocked our own whole giant building and generally made a mess. The darn steel tank car was literally vaporized to a considerable extent, along with every trace of the individual involved. But his cigarette lighter was found intact on the ground beside the tracks.

There is a famous (at least within the academic field) example in Linguistics of a worker blowing himself up by dropping a cigarette into an “empty” 55 gallon drum that had held a flammable solvent. On year when I was in Peru, several people were killed welding the tank of an oil tank truck without sufficiently ventilating the tank beforehand. My grandfather survived an explosion in Chicago in 1917 when he was a building janitor. He smelled gas in the basement and called the gas company. The two workers who came were a little tipsy from their lunch beer and one lit up a cigar. Fortunately, my grandfather was not in the basement with them, as the whole tenament building was destroyed.

[Drew Wiley]

There is such a huge quantity of urban and industrial fires around here it is hard to keep up with the causes. Something like 94 occurred just last year alone due to homeless encampments in industrial areas. Before I retired a few years ago, there was a big one that shut down the Freeway most of the day and nearly got one of our warehouses. The City Public Works Dept had the stupidity to store used 55 gal oil drums right under the freeway; yet the City ignored the homeless encampment right beside that. One cold night, they discovered how easy it was to start a warming fire in one of those drums. But most of these people have mental or drug issues. Our own employees along with the Fire Dept were attempting to cut through a chain link fence to forcibly rescue an individual who refused to leave behind his "stuff" or junk collection. They succeeded in the nick of time. I was on the opposite side of the fire tying to keep any pedestrians or gawkers a safe distance away since there were some outright oil drum explosions going on too, and saw the whole thing.

Art colonies and their carelessness with flammable products caused some really infamous fires the next year, one killing 34 persons, followed by huge criminal negligence trials, plus lawsuits. Illegal dope smoking on the job yet more, and a spontaneous combustion fire right across the street from one of our warehouses decimated half a block in very short order. That started in an import furniture company where they did their own wood finishing using linseed-oil-based products and rags, an infamously dangerous combination. I warned the owner about it in person just two days prior, but he shrugged his shoulders and said he couldn't afford to pay for more competent employees. But two other businesses other than his were destroyed due to it. The only silver lining is that it happened after hours, so no people were injured of killed. But the same kind of thing happens multiple times a week in this overall metropolitan area. The two biggest fires this past month were due to residential meth labs uncharacteristically in upscale neighborhoods, and there was a horrific death.