Before you Enter, What to Remember – The Dangers of Confined Spaces
We have touched on crawl spaces and airspace and now we will go into confined spaces as these are quite common in a lot of homes and buildings. This is an area other than an underground working that
a) is enclosed or partially enclosed
b) is not designed or intended for continuous human occupancy
c) has limited or restricted means of entry or exit that may complicate the provision of first aid, evacuation, resue or other emergency response….
Next question – how does that affect us as Paranormal Investigators? If you are crazy enough to go into an aforementioned environment without looking at the dangers first, than your time on this planet will be short lived.
Let me explain.
I have investigated many of these places over the years and one thing that always sticks out in my mind is how am I going to get out, as I will never go into a place that has not or never had any sort of ventilation and these are the reasons why.
| Type of Event | Number of Events | Number of Injuries Only | Number of Fatalities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atmospheric Conditions (lack of oxygen) | 80 | 72 | 78 |
| Explosion or Fire | 15 | 49 | 15 |
| Explosion or Fire at Point of Entry | 23 | 20 | 32 |
| Electric Shock | 11 | 2 | 9 |
| Trapped in Unstable Material (cave in) | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| Struck by Falling Objects | 15 | 1 | 14 |
These numbers should tell you something:
· 54% of the people exposed to oxygen deficient conditions died.
· For every fire within a confined space, one person died.
· Fire at the point of entry caused multiple fatalities in a single event.
· Cave-ins left 100 % of the victims dead.
These statistics are from the US Confined Spaces Commission gathered over the last 5 years. Most of the dangers are invisible like poison gases, that have no smell or taste, this can be in anything from a Well to a Pipeline. If you are unsure of an area of investigation, don’t do it or get someone in to check it first, whom has the training and equipment to test it. So at the end of the day you want to be investigating not investigated.