More times than I care to remember.
I was watching some of the boys finish up some pot hauler hydraulic repairs in our shop in Bethlehem Steel at Gary one night. I was standing maybe 6-8 feet away beside the right front tire when, boom, a high-pressure hose let go on the draft arm and the machine's fire resistant hydraulic fluid hit me square in the face!
I was completely blinded for a few minutes as the fluid had forced it's way all around in back of both eyeballs. After some initial cleaning, there was nothing for it but a swift ride to the mill's infirmary and the tender care of the nurse on duty, she being a former Gestopo agent. She went swiftly to work, using a fire hose to wash out my eyes and cleaning the rest of my face with steel wool and coarse grit sandpaper. She then forced a rapid succession of foot long cotton swabs in and around my eye sockets. Her last bit of torture -- er -- treatment, was to tie me down to an ice cold steel examination table and arrange two drip tubes over each eye. These ran for what seemed several days, but actually was only about thirty minutes. The above was what it felt like I assure you. This nurse actually was none too gentle and was hell bent on getting every last bit of that pinkish fluid out of my eyes.
She wasn't happy when I insisted that I could see just fine and had to get back to work, but I was much younger and faster than she was and escaped outside, where I walked in cold darkness about three miles back to the shop. I was still dripping from the fire resistant fluid and it had by then crept into and completely soaked every bit of my clothing, so one could say I was well lubricated.
I actually couldn't see all that well and my eyes were sore as hell. I managed to find my company pickup, and after telling the shift foreman to carry on, I headed for home, which was about a thirty minute drive normally. It took me two hours as I dared not drive too fast cause I could hardly see a damn thing, just some blurry lights and larger objects. I even missed the turnoff to the street I lived on, and recognizing the fact that I'd passed it from the familiar and hideous smell coming from a waste oil recovery facility about three miles past the turn off, I made a U-turn and went back.
Arriving home finally, I showered for a couple of hours till I ran out of hot water. That fire resistant hydraulic fluid just felt like it was right in the pores of my skin and my hair felt like a bucket of grease. I didn't think I'd ever get clean. After drying off, I had the wife put some eye drops into both eyes, which felt like they were on fire and full of grit, and tried to drop off to sleep.
The next morning, early of course, the phone calls started coming in from various people at the plant. Was I all right? Had I gone to hospital? Was I able to see, and so on? My shift didn't start till 3 in the afternoon and I usually slept till noon. So, I didn't get a lot of sleep that night and upon looking at my eyes in a mirror that next morning, I wasn't convinced that I ought to go in for the next shift either. Some of today's sci-fi movie creatures looks didn't have a thing on me.
But I could see well and the pain was mostly gone, still felt a bit gravelly when I looked to left or right. I did go in the day after and upon a visit at the mill infirmary was pronounced OK. Then I had to fill out a bunch of reports on what happened and why.
I was lucky that time. The fluid was not hot, only luke-warm, and being a fire resistant hydraulic fluid, was more water and glycol than anything else. Had it been hot, or a straight mineral based hydraulic oil, it might have been the worse for me.
About two years later in Colorado, I was crawling around in the belly of a Cat D9L dozer, trying to diagnose a hydraulic problem. I had probes and tubes going every which way and the machine was idling as I checked pressures on various circuits. I needed one more tap and had gently started to remove the plug when it popped out and I got showered with very hot 10 weight hydraulic oil.
So there I was, wedged in a very small and tight space. I had all eyelids firmly closed. Everything was drenched with hot slippery oil and I couldn't get a foot or hand-hold on a derned thing to get out. The tractor was running and the plug had dropped into the belly pan. I finally found a plug by feel, either the same one or another one that was out of a different tap and stuffed it into the hole, thus at least shutting off the oil bath. Then I had to flop around and get out of the hole and out of the cab. I fell off the tractor when my feet and hands, all covered in oil, slipped, landing on my back in the mud.
I was a mess for sure, but managed to find my stash of clean rags and began to clean up. It was colder than hell and snowing lightly with a pretty stiff breeze and I was about 8600 feet up the side of a mountain. Fortunately, I also had a stash of clean uniforms and coveralls in behind the seat of the cab, so stripping off the oil-soaked clothing I continued to clean up and was soon standing alongside my service truck in nothing but my skivvies and socks. Of course, this was just when a bus load of about fifty Gilbert-Western workers drove by. I heard about this for weeks you know.
I continued with my work and didn't squeak for a month after. The hydraulic problem turned out to be a defective pressure relief valve which I was able to repair with some sandpaper. Of course, my spare coveralls and uniform was oil soaked again when I finished, as oil was dripping all over the inside of that Cat and I had to get back down in the crawl space to finish up. So I sort of acted like a giant towel, soaking up oil everywhere I reached. I barrowed a clean pair of coveralls from one of the other fellas that night for the drive back into town and also had to relate what had happened to me, which elicited howls of laughter from all 9 of my co-workers. But at least I wasn't badly hurt, only slightly scalded a couple of places.
These weren't the first or last of my adventures with oils and fluids soaking me to the skin, but they were a couple of the more memorable.
