Originally Posted by
emalvick
I work alongside OSHA on similar situations: construction workers losing items in toilets, inadequately ventilated manholes, vaults, etc. It isn't that you can't hold your breath, it's that you are breathing in carbon-monoxide and sulfurous gases that will kill you before you know it. I'm not saying it's a guarantee you'll die, but most people who die didn't think it was going to happen to them.
Of course you might be able to do it with your arm, but my feeling is that most of the times those things are too deep to just reach down into.
The likelihood of encountering carbon monoxide in a Port-a-potty is almost nonexistent. There is no combustion going on inside the toilet vault. You
might encounter some carbon monoxide if someone set the Port-a-Potty on fire but there are other concerns in that event.
Yes, there are some sulfur compounds present...hydrogen sulfide being the most prevelent and the most dangerous...but those are in very low concentrations. Animals can detect sulfur compounds at extremely low concentrations...0.47 parts per billion is the human detection threshold. Toxicity occurs at about 350 parts per
million or about 350,000 ppb. A ppb, by the way, is a pinch of salt in 10 tons of potato chips or one second in about 32 years (32 years is about a billion seconds). I've been in some rank PortaJohns but nothing that rank.
Porta-a-Pottys are also ventilated so that cuts down on the gas build up. You don't want to have people using them falling over dead...it's bad for business.
As for reaching down into the vault, I'm not going to test this but I reasonably certain that an average adult could reach each corner of the vault from the toilet seat with just a bit of stretch. A dropped item like a phone isn't going to migrate to the outer corners quickly either. There's a lot of,um,stuff...the one place where it would be appropriate to use the proper word and the filters won't allow it
...in the way.