[3D30497420]

From the article:

> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.

That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.

[Seattle3503]

Indeed I agree chemical burns would suggest a real environmental hazard in this case.

[guywithahat]

Technically the term chemical burn doesn't indicate severity, just that you got in contact with a corrosive material which had an effect on your skin. My guess would be someone got lime/cement powder on themselves and reported it as a chemical burn. They could have also been dissolved alive in an acid bath, but the size of the fine and the fact propublica doesn't say what happened suggests it was minor.

[idiotsecant]

as was posted elsewhere, it was an industrial curing accelerant chemical used to make grout cure faster. It was not a cement burn.

It's interesting, though, that your first impulse is to defend the robber barons that made this happen.

[guywithahat]

I derived my opinion by reading the article, noticing there was no description of the burn, and then noticing the incredibly small fine and relatively relaxed attitude by regulators. If you'd read my comment again I didn't say it was a cement burn, just that that is an example of a mild burn. The real irony is if it was just a curing accelerant, then it was an incredibly mild burn, and you're still wrong.

[pas]

they are not defending Elon

their guess was pretty good

cement or curing agents are hardly the environmental apocalyptic scenario for the beautiful and pristine environment of downtown Vegas, hm?

[astroflection]

I wonder what chemicals were involved. Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery. Fuel? Grease?

[DrewADesign]

> I wonder what chemicals were involved. Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery. Fuel? Grease?

It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was necessary. And have you ever gotten any significant amount of gasoline on your skin? It burns and it is not safe. Here’s a list of chemicals in common gasoline mixtures: Gasoline, Toluene, Hexane, Xylene, Octane, Ethanol, Trimethylbenzene, n-Heptane, Pentane, Cumene, Ethylbenzene, Benzene, n-Hexane, Cyclohexane.

Even if it was just the water in the tunnel — how about you try 8+ hours of heavy work in steel toed boots with damp feet, let alone standing in ankle deep water filled with corrosive chemicals. Even standing still in clean water, your skin basically turns to paste after not too long.

With the way the job market is trending in tech, you might have the opportunity to find out one day while someone sitting in a Herman miller chair in a climate controlled office building dismisses your pain as petty griping.

[simonsarris]

Parent comment was correct to say "Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery." Actually they're extremely common anywhere any kind of finish construction is involved, including DIY.

Those kind of chemicals (including gasoline!) are in all the most common products like Watco Danish Oil floor finish that you can buy from home depot and use inside your home (and burn in your car for everyone to enjoy). They speed up curing. I don't recommend them! But they're very, very ordinary. If you want a product without them, you have to go out of your way to get it, unfortunately. (I recommend Tried and True Danish oil, which you'll find is significantly more expensive, and takes far longer to cure, but has no ill health effects)

https://www.rustoleum.com/MSDS/ENGLISH/65151H.pdf

[DrewADesign]

Well, the chemicals listed in the original comment— fuel and grease— do not have the same acute health impact as the ones they were cited for, and if we’re going to be pedantic about it, I wouldn’t say grout curing accelerator is so common we could assume it would be at most construction sites with heavy equipment. You also don’t need to go any further than your convenience store to buy a bottle of drano, which can cause a lot more damage, a lot more quickly than many of the listed chemicals. It doesn’t matter. The precautions required for production workflows are completely different from home use or small projects. For example: I work in manufacturing. This past Wednesday two of our most experienced workers were applying a caustic glue from a squeeze tube onto a number of parts laid out in a table. One of the workers just happened to be turning his head when there was a small blowout in the crimped end of the other workers tube and it sprayed all over the side of the guy’s head and goggles. It hardened before he could wash it out of his hair, which he had to cut off, revealing a bunch of blisters on his skin where the glue touched. That’s a glue you can buy at Home Depot, but if he wasn’t wearing goggles, he’d have probably had serious eye damage. Two people quickly glueing dozens of things on a table is so much riskier than using that glue yourself for a home project.

These chemicals are being sprayed at high enough pressure to splash them, all day long, in enclosed spaces, in the presence of lots of other people. Even if it was bleach, that would require significant effort to protect the people in that environment from injury. They didn’t do that, the workers are human beings that deserved that, and that shouldn’t be minimized.

[sebmellen]

Yes this sounds quite serious. In line with Elon’s “at all cost” mindset, which is very powerful but also dangerous.

[jordanb]

"At all costs" to the workers and community, not to Elon.

[idiotsecant]

move fast and break people, communities, and governments. The motto of the post-tech boom new american robber barons

[alienthrowaway]

Hard-core tunnel engineering

[93po]

How much of this is coverage is because this a true outlier situation versus Elon ragebait? Let's look at one of the larger construction companies in the US:

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=acs-sa&or...

Since the year 2000, they've had 45 fines (and many violations per fine) by the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and nearly $8 million in fines. And over $200k in fines just last year. There's separately 34 global violations totalling is over $50 million in fines.

This doesn't make Elon's company's violations excusable - it is however clearly the course of business in construction that these sorts of things happen. I think this is a good criticism of capitalist pressures in general rather than Elon being uniquely shitty in how he operates his companies.

obligatory Elon sucks, i'm just allergic to bullshit and ragebait