ABSTRACT
THE following article appeared in the Daily Press (Newport News-Hampton, Virginia) on Monday July 14, 1997.
This article graphically illustrates the dangers involved with making a confined space entry. Those three shipyard workers died because highly toxic methane and hydrogen sulfide leaked from a sewage pipe and filled the confined space they were working in. In the U.S. in 1996, 63 people died in confined spaces, and several thousand more were in jured. The most tragic element in those deaths and injuries was that a full 60% of the fatalities were rescuers-brave people, who followed the most noble human impulse, to save the life of someone else. More than half of those 63 deaths in volved people who rushed into a confined space they knew deadly, with total disregard for their own safety. But only in the movies does the hero have any guarantee that his heroic attempt won’t kill him. That’s why I call this suicidal plunge into immortality the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Are the per sons who attempt such a foolhardy rescue trying to emulate a movie hero? Are they actively seeking death themselves? No, of course not. But they are doing one of the most danger ous-and preventable-unsafe moves a person can do; they are not thinking.
