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Went draining today and had oxygen deprivation
entry by HillbillyHorus
9/29/2005 10:04 PM
| Me and my friend Alex went exploring in a small (5' 3") drain near my house. Everything was going fine. We'd passed the first crawly place (where the ceiling gets so low you have to crawl), the junction room, and were just entering the second crawling place when we noticed a nasty smell. "Not to worry," I told Alex, "it's probably just a dead rat in one of the PVCs," and indeed the smell got lesser as we went on. Then we found the orange/black striped dead cat, partly decomposed, lying right in the water we'd been crawling in for fifteen minutes. We pushed on only to stop and rest for air in a gutter box. Then we debated what to do next. First I thought we'd press on until the end of the drain, but I knew this drain was pretty long and we'd been under for a while. Then we thought to crawl through one of the side passages and pop out of an easy-to-open manhole in someone's back yard, but the side passage was full of spiders and I didn't want to be bitten by a Black Widow (they live in dark places i.e. drains), so we decided to go out the way we came in. On the way back I stopped to rest in a manhole chamber and noted a headache and fastened pulse. Alex confirmed that his pulse too was a little speedy. After that a feeling of panic desended on me, and I ran (as fast as you can run all hunched over) through the tunnel, doing a leap-frog crawl through the crawlspace, and then sprinting out into fresh air. We stopped for five minutes breathing heavily, and were pretty woozy on the way home though otherwise fine.
This has been by far the scariest thing that's ever happened while draining. Luckily we were fine (though I'm sure we lost a few of the ol' brain cells). I think this weekend I'll pop one of the manholes near the dead cat, then chuck the cat out of there so that this drain will be explorable after a few days.
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That sucks, glad you got out ok. I doubt that the dead cat could be causing the low oxygen environment though. Usually bad air is the result of car exhaust entering manholes and gutter slots, or methane from the ground, decomposing plant matter, or sanitary sewers. Dead cats just stink (although I'm sure some aerobic bacteria are involved in the decomposition process, I do not believe that there would be enough to deplete oxygen levels noticibly).
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I thought that the bacteria rotting the cat would produce gases which displaced the air. Oh well. In retrospect, it wasn't as bad as some of the other accounts of oxygen deprivation in here.
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