Cleanliness – really next to Godliness

Story by Warrigal Mirriyuula

For reasons which one day may yet be explained in greater detail, it came to pass that some time toward the end of my eleventh year I found myself attending a new school for the third term of the year. I fell in with a group of new friends who befriended me on the basis that we all lived within a few hundred metres of one another. This demographic cluster centred on an unprepossessing little byway called Dora Street and I was the most recent addition to, (ominous minor chords played under!), The Dora Street Gang.

Mine was an associate membership because I lived in William Street at the western terminal of Dora Street.

Next to that house in William Street was a laneway that accessed the rear of a number of commercial properties on the main highway through town. One of these premises housed a dry cleaner and they used the rear yard of the property to store 44 gal. drums of dry cleaning waste. This waste was composed of the lint and fibre left over from the cleaning process. It was saturated with residual Carbon Tetra-chloride which was commonly used as a dry cleaning fluid in those days.

To cut to the chase; one day it occurred to one of our number that this waste may provide a suitable plaything for a group of idle youths to mess about with. He called the stuff “Burning Dirt”. He’d obviously done a little discovery and experimentation before he introduced us to the material. In pretty quick order we discovered that you could hold a burning ball of the stuff and, soon after that we discovered that we could throw it at one another and when the burning handful of CCl 4 saturated lint hit the target it would explode in a ball of cold fire with an odd blue to green tinge to it.

I knew nothing of organic chemistry then; not that I know a lot now; but I do now know that the Carbon Tet acted as an inhibitor on the propagation of the flame through the lint and when the ball burst on impact, the instantaneous availability of all that extra oxygen overcame this inhibition and the lint literally exploded in flame. Theoretically the burning dirt was a kind of low energy, low temperature thermobaric bomb.

I suggested that we might rename ourselves as “The Brotherhood Of The Burning Dirt”, thereby obviating any confusion as to members’ addresses by sticking with the Dora Street appellation. The idea didn’t stick. Maybe it was a little too wordy.

Later at high school I studied a little organic chemistry and was surprised to learn that burning Carbon Tet at low temperatures is reasonably safe, but if the temp gets up, burning CCl 4 produces COCl 2 which goes by the name of Phosgene. Another molecule produced in a similar way is called Dioxin. Need I say more.

When I had finished with high school and was looking forward to joining the sodality of scholars at university, I took a job in the local Email plant. I was what used to be called a process worker; I had no particular experience or skill at the job they put me to. I was just another employee on the refrigeration line.

The job with which I was tasked revolved around a big gas fired oven. My job was to inject a two part foam solution into a mold and then send the mold through the oven. When it came out “cooked” I pried the finished foam from its mold, dipped the front edge in an industrial wax solution and stacked it for later removal and inclusion in the Westinghouse brand refrigerators that rolled down the line. I can to this day remember all the design designations of all the cabinets and doors.

After cleaning the mold, wiping the interior with a non stick solution, akin to baking spray, and then purging the injection tubes and gun with Methylene Chloride, the whole thing started again. The waste from the gun purge was stored in an open 44 gal. drum immediately adjacent to the foam booth. There were three of us worked in that booth and it was considered a cushy number because our rate of production wasn’t set by the speed of the line. We could produce as many foam molds as were required on the line, and then go on to produce “stock” for later line assembly. We worked with the engineers and apprentices on new mold designs and foam formulations, and most importantly, we got lots of over time.

I worked at Email for three months, finishing just before university started. I managed to save around a thousand dollars against my books and other costs not covered by my scholarship and felt pretty good about myself. I was being independent, looking after myself.

That was a long time ago and while I still fondly remember those earlier friends, I’d almost completely forgotten that job.

That was then. This is now.

I’ve had to have a second round of treatment for my cancer and this occasioned another visit to my oncologist who took no time getting down to tin tacks. He was a little discommoded at my having to have a second treatment and so he thought it prudent to grill me regarding any exposure I may have had to aniline dies, did I ever work in a tannery or paint making plant, in fact had I ever been exposed to any mutagenic or carcinogenic substance?

I wracked my memory. I couldn’t think of anything that fitted the exhaustive list he’d presented me with. The closest I got was having sat a saddle at various times in my life.  Leather being a tanned product, I thought, maybe.

No he said that’s not it. It must be something else. I reminded him I had been a smoker most of my life. He said he was becoming leery of smoking as a risk factor. Not that it wasn’t a risk for my kind of cancer but rather he said he was looking deeper these days because the association of smoking and this kind of cancer is highly statistically correlated in epidemiological studies but there is yet to be a demonstrated causative effect.

Bugger, I thought. Just like me to get a cancer with a mystery modality.

Then all that forgotten organic chemistry came back to me.  It occurred to me that the Carbon Tetra-Chloride in the burning dirt and the solvent Methylene Chloride are cousins in the chain of organochloride production.

Keen to get to the bottom of my disease, I blurted a quick history of my adventures with the Dora Street Gang and our discovery of the amusement value of burning dirt. I filled him in on my industrial experience at Email and the fun we had intentionally inhaling the methylene fumes for the buzz. This last confession seemed to horrify him, but it did ease his mind too. He now thinks that my cancer was probably caused all those years ago by my boyhood cavorting with chlorine compounds.

So now I have an answer. It was the burning dirt and the buzz that did it. My boyhood gave me cancer.

But my oncologist says I’m still not allowed to smoke.