#paawatch

Sept 21 - Consider this one a PSA.  A PSA on PAA; what’s PAA you ask, well as the fine folks of Canton, Georgia just found out, its a chemical that somehow contributes to the creation of deboned chickens but apparently tends to go boom too.  That because the acidic compound is also an organic oxidizer which means it has a bubbly personality that when excited effervesces causing quite the scene.  Here, a shipping Truck popping in to the facility appeared to shake the cardboard box that had a frowny face on it rather than a smile (or was it just upside down… could have been the problem) a bit too hard before asking for a last name after the desk clerk scribbled on the electronic pad they carry for receipt purposes.  Four folks (assuming one of them is that poor FedEx driver) ended up in the hospital for breathing issues, which suggests to me this stuff got airborne which means there was probably a small boom.  So, this careless handling of a rather touchy substance that is used across a diverse range of industries subsequently caused a shut down of the dead-end interstate I-575 for over two miles, the same interstate that gets you about as far north of Atlanta as civilization can bear for all those preppers that also have to commute to their daily grind presumably not much further than Roswell cause any further down and you got to be asking yourself, Honey Boo, maybe we ought to just move on down to Buckhead and become yuppies like we always wanted.

At any rate, the purpose of all this was that just a little batch of some PAA, also known as peracetic acid, or more properly peroxyacetic acid, an organic peroxide which has two great tastes that sometimes appear to be a deadly combination, caused some almost inconceivable chaos for those daily commuters.  The substance is generally referred to as a biocide which is just a fancy way of saying it kills things that are alive but instead of just being bad for your health like some of the more common ones like glutaraldehyde, PAA also has the added benefit of being a hardcore oxidizer, so hardcore they put it in hydrogen peroxide just to make it chill!  The food grade stuff like at this chicken farm is usually not so hardcore to cause this kind of chaos unless getting the high grade stuff and making your own mix is your style.  

And frankly, I would have been more than happy to say hey Pilgrims Pride, at least you aren't in the news for contaminating my chicken with salmonella, listeria, and mad cow disease (also please let me know if I will get a peanut allergy from this product or not!) all in one shot; I am guessing this PAA has something to do with it.  I would have been more than happy to let this one go if it didn't appear to be somewhat of a trend these days, since just literally the day before the same thing happened this time at a mushroom farm, cause you know, fungus, in beautiful Kennet Square, Pennsylvania, which is probably just far enough away from Philly (and just close enough to Wilmington) to be considered that part of PA that isn't Philly or Pitts, and so is OK to just consider Alabama, causing a total of nine workers to go to the hospital in the area where they sanitize those cute little mushroom heads (and the only surprising thing to me here is that it takes more workers to sanitize mushrooms then it does to cut the head off a chicken).  And OK, that may just be an odd coincidence, but then how do you explain that ANOTHER chicken farm just three months before, this one just across the border in majestic Selbyville, DE, over 300 gallons of PAA spilled and this time oddly enough apparently it was just hanging out in the parking lot.  Weird, JUST like in Canton?!  And again only four workers got sick at this chicken plant (they say it happens in threes so that will be a total of 12 chicken employees sick when its all said and done, keep an eye out for the next one).

But oh, no, we are not done yet.  Because then, just two months before that in May, across the pond (no the other one on the western side) at a hospital in Melbourne, AU, a woman who had just been rushed in for an emergency C-section (as opposed to those planned ones), was apparently NOT exposed along with the hospital staff to a spill of just 200 mL of the stuff, which is along the lines of a thimble’s worth causing them to evacuate to another part of the hospital to keep on with that baby-birthing stuff.  See, not only does it make chicken and mushrooms yummy, but it ALSO kills the heck out of any microbes that might get stuck on all those medical scopes doctors like to stick inside people.  That makes sense, in that application you want the high-grade stuff, but I guess just preferably not near the people that you also want to make sure get born without any major hiccups.

And by the way, we aren’t done yet, because now across the other pond, the one you probably were thinking of properly the first time, back in December of 2017, PAA was spilled at a Eli Lily facility, and this is where things start to get super weird because all they do here is work on “Global Business Initiatives” and process time cards or something, so why they were getting a delivery (yes, this happened in the parking lot AGAIN!), this time 200 litres of the stuff, which is something like 100 gallons or so, again basically shut down all roadway commutes from Cork to anywhere but Cork heading east.  And if you thought those stiff upper lips on the other island werent going to have to worry about all this, they saw their OWN spill of another 200 litres of the stuff, this time appropriately enough at a crisps packaging plant in sunny Leicester (apparently they just clean the floors with the stuff there) the month before and nobody suffered even a lick which is probably what has been keeping everyone’s guard down since all these started happening one after the other.

Now just think, what will it take for us to start saying, hmmm, this PAA by FedEx thing doesnt seem to be working too well.  Also, having it sitting around just waiting to be poured out in bulk, doesnt seem to be working to well either.  Because again, like a canary in a coalmine, way back in July of 2017, we could have nipped this in the bud when a it was reported that a water treatment plant in Hoboken New Jersey and colocated with a NJ light rail station caused a shutdown of the whole system when apparently a blue-collar guy at the plant got a bad whiff of a spill that caused mass hysteria for two hours during morning commute.