Word to the wise

Don’t break a fire extinguisher inside a small bar. White crap over everything!  Is going to take ages to clean it up.
‘Tis better than a fire though．The whole place was filled with gas from the extinguisher explosion plus the white dust settled on EVERYTHING.  The photo shows how “smokey” the bar was.

EDIT:  Just got home and jumped in the shower to wash all this chalky crap off.  It permeates EVERYTHING.  Fortunately it was just the old, out of date fire extinguisher that we had in the closet ready to throw away that was broken.  We had already bought a new one that it in handy access for the bar staff.  (Just learned tonight where it lives so it wasn’t a total waste of time).  But it took an age to clean up and I suspect there will be dust settling for a few days yet. 

Is exposure to this stuff bad for one’s health?  We were totally gassed out. 

Note - comments closed due to spammers - go die you parasites!!!

Decreed by the goddess on 06/06 at 10:37 AM
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Tags: accident • araku • ash • fire • golden gai

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• Dave (Paris) offered on 07/06/06 at 06:03 PM.....

  Beside a slightly achy throat, I don’t think one-time exposure warrants any particular worry at all…

  And otherwise: yea, I can’t even imagine how smoked up a small space like your bar would get. I once attended some impromptu rave party in some recently emptied office space: it took only one messed up guy emptying one of those while running around the main room to make the entire place look like Vietnam trenches… :D

  What happened, by the way?

• Taro at news3yen.com (Tokyo) offered on 07/06/06 at 07:57 PM.....

  Nasty stuff! That Ammonium phosphate makes me itchy the chemical is corrosive and will screw up electronics.

  http://doiop.com/extinguisher_agents
  http://www.h3r.com/halon/fire_safety.htm

  Here’s a bad example for you:
  Abstract A young man was multitraumatized by a car accident. During the stay in the intensive care unit he had persistent hypoxemia. Various reasons were sought and different treatments were tried, but his severe hypoxemia did not ameliorate. The cause of the hypoxemia remained unclear until his clinical condition improved and we dared to perform a second bronchoscopy which revealed fire extinguisher powder in his airways….
  http://doiop.com/extinguisher_bad

• the goddess offered on 07/06/06 at 10:35 PM.....

  One of the staff was putting a box back into the storage room and knocked over the old extinguisher.  Ash quickly realised what it was and grabbed it and ran outside with it. It was only a few seconds that it was gassing inside but still managed to cover absolutely everything in the bar, us and the street in white chalky powder. We took our customers outside immediately as the fumes were fairly instense.

  A heap of people also ran onto the street wondering what the problem was..  also worried as there was a fire a month ago in a nearby bar. 

  Clean up was a bit of a nightmare but the 5 of us we got it back to kinda normal in an hour or so. We then reopened the bar and Ash and I went home.

• Sigsy (Tokyo) offered on 07/06/07 at 09:19 AM.....

  Woh T, that looks intense.  Hope you are OK.  Quite scary.  Fire in Golen Gai would be a mare, right?

• the goddess offered on 07/06/07 at 11:16 AM.....

  It was kinda funny actually.  Like a smoke machine gone mad.  It was just a pain to clean up. 

  But we have all recently had fire inspections and we were given the all clear.