10 thoughts on “Space Casualties”

1. About thirty minutes ago I helped pack my geologist house mate with caving gear because he’s been called in to consult on an 8,000 gallon gasoline spill from an overturned tanker truck, which dumped straight into one of Kentucky’s longest cave systems (Sloan’s Valley). Hopefully he won’t get blown up while he’s miles underground trying to figure out where the spill went, what kind of damage it caused, and how best to clean it up, He asked me if I had any advice and I said, “Well no, other than the stupid ‘don’t hurt yourself’, but take some snacks and lots of spare batteries”. In a phone conference earlier today the head of the Kentucky Geological Survey (Who mentioned me as a good caver) also gave him some safety advice, which was “Don’t smoke while you’re down there.”

   Such are the risks people willingly take on venturing into a wild, alien, dangerous environment to get something done. Yet NASA would probably argue that the cave is now completely unsafe and that the best course of action is simply to close off the entrance for several months and not let anyone go in, since no one really needs to go into a cave. That would of course accomplish nothing, except perhaps for improving their safety record. Though a perfect safety record might seem like an accomplishment to some manager, achieving it at the expense of action doesn’t amount to anything.

   See Matthew 25:14-30 about the parable of the talents, which ends with “And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

   1. Caver? I thought it was spelunking…spelunker

   2. Nah. That term really only shows up on Jeopardy. Everybody who does it just calls themselves “cavers” and the activity is “caving.”

      Oddly enough, a couple of the people I cave with were once in a Western Kentucky cave when it blew up. It was a two-entrance cave, and commonly people would go in through the higher entrance, work their way about a mile back where there was a connection to the lower passages, and then work their way though the lower passages and back out to the lower entrance.

      So they got all the way to the back where there is a low room with a hole connecting the upper and lower passages and they paused to eat a snack. Then one on of my friends dropped down into the connecting hole, cracked a joke, and my other friend noticed he had sort of a halo around his carbide lamp. She thought “carbide explosion” and dove for cover, thinking some water must’ve gotten into the carbide in his pack, which would vent acetylene. Just as she dove, he was surrounded in a fireball and blown up out of the hole and across the ceiling in a big whoosh. He was unhurt, though he lost his eyebrows and got a bowl haircut, and so they scrambled like they’ve never scrambled before. The explosions and rumblings continued during the entire mad trip back to the entrance, which was roughly a mile, with flames shooting out of cracks in the walls like something out of a cheap movie.

      So they made it out, badly rattled, and then the huge fire, mining, and environmental response teams arrived. They described what had happened, thinking it must’ve been a methane explosion, and the fire and rescue teams said “Well, it wasn’t a methane explosion or you’d all be dead.” It turns out that there was a really big and old propane tank above the cave system. The propane had leaked in, and since it’s heavier than air it had settled into the lower passages, while the upper passages were clear. When my friend dropped through the hole with his carbide lamp he entered the mixing zone, and kaboom.

      But other than that, caves generally don’t blow up. Last year, however, my house mate had to work a monstrous gasoline leak into a cave in Danville, Kentucky, from a gas station that happened to sit right on top of a cave system and spring. My company had to rewire a very large explosion-proof exhaust fan for 110 VAC so it could run off the gas station’s power feed and vent the underground fumes.

      I knew another caver (and hydrologist) whose party abandoned a long trip through a Western Kentucky cave when they hit powerful chlorine fumes (which is really, really odd). Retracing their route along the surface to figure out what was above the area, they found a guy who’d just drained his swimming pool.

      Given all that, if NASA ran cave trips, people really might have to wear space suits the whole time, and stay tethered.

2. Never do anything that might harm someone, even a volunteer that knows the risks.

   Because who cares about ever getting anything done?

   (Who needed to explore the antarctic? Or, well, anywhere?)

3. ” …Sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”

   –Ronald Reagan, 1/28/86

4. Any updates from Sloan valley cave? And your friend? Any more details as where it spilled? Around which entrance? Was it north/south of post office.
   We were planning a trip next weekend…
   Thank you.

   Cave wife

   1. Yes, he got back a few hours ago, completely not dead. I was going over all his maps with him. 🙂

      The spill occurred just above the main valley, in between the two easternmost main branches of the cave. They didn’t detect any traces of gas fumes at any of the Sloan’s cave entrances (my house mate hiked 10 miles today with Bill Walden), but some of the unmapped caves on a ridge to southeast of the valley were reeking. These possibly connect into the main system, so they’ll keep monitoring. I think my house mate will be going back down Monday or Tuesday to set up some samplers at all the entrances.

      He did help put up signs at all the entrances warning of dangerous fumes, which go along with the White Nose warnings.

      Here’s a short Courier Journal article on the spill.

5. I think that excessive fear of people dying in space is most often deployed when NASA and members of Congress with NASA centers in their districts want a superficially plausible reason why NASA needs to continue to own and operate its own space launch system. Of course, they would want that, for institutional and political reasons, but the argument doesn’t bear close examination.

   http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2014/02/we-need-to-get-more-comfortable-with.html

6. George,
   who is you geologist housemate?

   cave wife

   1. Mark Cross, who works for Shield Environmental Services, and who has done some caving with Bluegrass Grotto and a variety of his geologist friends. For years I caved with Bluegrass Grotto and frequently went with various folks from Cincinnati Grotto.

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