MUNITION PLANTS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 865, 17 November 1916, Page 6

MUNITION PLANTS.

DEADLY ORANGE FUMES. "MAD LITTLE CONTRACT FACTORIES." HOW THE WORKERS SUFFER. lln the following article I)r Alice Hamilton, U.S.A. Government Expert, speaks of "Mad Little Contract Fac tories" which are in too much of a hurry to take necessary precautions to protect employees, and gases which kill workers as quickly as bullets.] It has not been without grave concern and anxiety that chemists and manufacturers of munitions have let a woman inspector into their factories during the past year or two. I)r Alice Hamilton is the woman inspector, and she has always said to them that if anyone must be blown up it were far better it were she than some married man inspector with children depending on him (comments an American exchange). But

manufacturers did not see it that way. "The public wouldn't think so," they said. Dr Hamilton's comment on this was that they were labouring under a "false chivalry." Dr Hamilton, who has since 1905) been investigator of occupational tliseases for the Federal Bureau of Labour Statistics, was in New York recently for a few days, where she came from her investigations into New England munition plants, and to tell chemists themselves, at the Convention of the American Chemical Society of the dangers to which the workers are exposed and of the precautions which may be taken.

These precautions, Dr Hamilton says in talking about her work, can never entirely do away with danger. And as she describes her work and the things which she has seen and discovered in the factories, the new industry which has grown up in this country since August, 1914, seems but one tense scene in the drama of the European war. Not very much is said about it when men die overnight because of dark orange fumes which they have breathed, but the fact remains that they do die in this way. The way in which what Dr Hamilton calls "mad little contract plants" spring up in the twinkling of an eye and cannot even shut down for one day for the plumber to put in better exhausts to lessen the sickness which overtakes the workmen, sounds, as she tells it, like a feverish dream, or the unnatural setting for a moving picture. In the great hurry to make munitions and get them off to the scene of war and thus fulfill our contracts we have not been careful enough about these ominous and mysterious dark orange fumes, which kill men as quickly and almost as painlessly as if the men had been shot through the heart. A Baffling Disease.

The deuths of the men seem mysterious even to some unaccustomed physicians; they have been diagnosed as due. to heat prostration, alcoholism, and other things. And it is strange, of course, to have a man go to bed seemingly well and then wake up with dyspnoea, or difficult breathing, have a kind of bloody froth come from his mouth, and then, quite suddenly, stop breathing altogether. "You see, it is pretty new here," says Dr Hamilton, "although it has been common enough in Europe." And it is not so spectacular as'when the shrapnel meant for European explosion went off in New York harbour. * The orange fumes are not mysterious to Dr Hamilton or to any one who knows. They are simply the fumes of the oxides of nitrogen, and these fumes may come from every high explosive except fulminate of mercury, since all the others are nitrated compounds. These fumes do not choke a man at once, as do the fumes of a chloride. It would be much better if they did, so that he could realise his danger and escape it. As it is, he keeps on breathing them in, and six or eight hours later the trouble begins. This is the most common danger in the factories, according to Dr Hamilton, although this is not really common, few deaths having occurred.

In Munition Factories. Before the war Dr Hamilton had been investigating all occupations in which poisons of any kind were used in manufacture, taking up one trade at a time. When the war came, she gave up all other trades for the investigation of munition factories. "It is the most fascinating work I have ever done," she says. "And it is a work which is necessary to be done. If England could, in the middle of her war, appoint a Royal Commission on the health of munition workers, surely we can, in time of peace and prosperity, look after the men who are making munitions. It is not the making of gunpowder or weapons which we are concerned with—only the work in which poisons are used. It is an entirely new thing for this country. The dangers which I am studying are new dangers which the European war has sent to this country.

"The old plants have worked out a system of precautions as complete as any which can be worked outit is the new plants, the war plants, which are careless, too much in a hurry, and with whom I am concerned. The three most dangerous manufactures are piric acid made for the French; T.N.T., made for the British and the Russians, and the gun-cotton, which is made, I believe, for all of them. All that T can do is to report conditions to the Federal Government, which has little power lo act in the mailer. Practically all thai can be done is by the individual Slates, working along their own lines on the Federal report. The chemists, whom 1 am telling about my work this week, have a great deal lo do with the system of protection in the plants, where they often

act as consultants. They are usually the only men who know the characteristics of the poisons which are handled. "A group of enthusiastic young men gel together and get a big contract for making these things, and begin their work often before their factory is roofed over. As soon as il is roofed over and the fumes cannot escaue, the workmen begin to suf-

fer. They can't wait until all the precautions are taken. "The cause of this death of the plumber who was putting in new exhausts to make things better was one of the most ironical. It was a factory which went up in a little agricultural village. The workmen were foreigners who lived in little shacks nearby. They began to be knocked out by the fumes, and so a plumber was gotten to put in better exhausts. He was almost overcome by fumes and they told him not to finish the work—for those manufacturers are all a good sort; they are simply too much in a hurry, but he went on with it, seeing that it was necessary. He was dead by morn-

She admits that just once has she been afraid, when, for a few minutes, it seemed as if she must choose between the static electricity caused by smokeless powder (which looks, ineidentalhvshe says, like little pieces of brown spaghetti falling around), and the emergency chutes which go from the windows to the ground like large rain-gutters, and into which a man is supposed to hurl himself in time of danger. New Jersey and New England are the only territories which l)r Hamilton has yet investigated. New Jersey is the worst of all, she says. Before lliis work she investigated chiefly the lead trades, and those which deal witli enamelling and glazing. l)r Hamilton is chairman of the committee on industrial hygiene of the American Public Health Association. She was graduated from the Medical College of the University of Michigan, did graduate work in bacteriology in German, ;\ni\ at the Johns Hopkins University, and was bacteriologist in the Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases at Chicago until she began her work for the Federal Bureau of Labour Statistics.