> "Manuel Salazar, janitor. With three friends (also janitors), got extremely drunk on muscatel wine mixed with ethylene glycol (antifreeze). Died from ethylene glycol poisoning on January 29, 1945. Because deaths were not result of duty, descendants received no benefits of compensation."
Possible suicide-pact? Who in the world would mix wine with anti-freeze? Accidentally mixing such a cocktail seems fairly unlikely. Was this some sort of concoction mixed up by a researcher who was in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" stage, which was tragically mistaken for unadulterated wine?
Lots of people would mix antifreeze with wine. Adding antifreeze to food is legal in the US at up to 50 g per kilogram. It's legal in Europe at up to 3 g per kilogram [1]. Note that there are different kinds of antifreeze alcohols, and not all of them are legal.
That doesn't always stop manufacturers. There was a big scandal in the '80s with a small Austrian wine maker using the bad kind. This was the basis for The Simpsons episode where Bart went to France as an exchange student and ended up being forced to work at a winery that was putting antifreeze in and making Bart drink it to see if they had put too much in.
>This was the basis for The Simpsons episode where Bart went to France as an exchange student and ended up being forced to work at a winery that was putting antifreeze in and making Bart drink it to see if they had put too much in.
And to go full circle with the topic of discussion (Los Alamos), the exchange student visiting Springfield in this episode was really a spy agent visiting to steal nuclear secrets.
The difference here is that propylene glycol (mentioned as the food additive in the BBC article) is comparatively nontoxic. The 3 janitors drank ethylene glycol, which is quite poisonous.
Confusion between the two has been the cause of several mass poisonings involving medicine manufactured with poor quality controls.
A relative worked for an alcohol post-rehab center (Patients would get the severage in the hospital first for a fortnight, then go to rehab for several months). She says former drinkers almost never come here on their own choice. They're brought in rehab by a judge requirement, generally after car accidents involving death. Their average of wine drinking could be 5 to 12 liters... a day. The center was in a forest so they couldn't procure alcohol, but they're so much addicts than anything will do, and the center had to ban alcoholic liquid window cleansers because patients would drink them. And there were cases where patients drank them anyway, just in case...
So yes, anti-freeze isn't a surprising drink if better alcohol wasn't available.
According to my father, who served in the Army in WW II, a number of GIs poisoned themselves celebrating VE day with antifreeze. These were young men, not particularly educated.
I've heard similar versions of this story, with the added anecdote being that the use of diluted alcohol as antifreeze wasn't unheard of prior to the use of ethylene glycol becoming commonplace.
That ties into the anecdotes of Parisians shouting "Viva Le Prestone!"[1] as troops moved through their city - each Jeep had "Prestone" stenciled on the hood, partially to mark that it'd been treated with antifreeze, and partially to warn GIs against attempting to drink it.
Austrian wine makers? "The 1985 diethylene glycol wine scandal involved a limited number of Austrian wineries that had illegally adulterated their wines using the toxic substance diethylene glycol (a primary ingredient in some brands of antifreeze) to make the wines appear sweeter and more full-bodied in the style of late harvest wine" [1]
> Who in the world would mix wine with anti-freeze?
Greed makes people forget limits. Ever heard about Jin Ling cigarettes? These originate in Kaliningrad and are smuggled throughout Europe. Funny enough, they have been faked - and authorities have found anything from dust to rat sh.t in the faked contraband cigarettes.
And that's harmless. If you want real gross stuff, look at what heroin is stretched with, or what "Krokodil" is.
In communist Poland, during the time of Martial Law, when alcohol was really scarce, people used to "filter" anti-freeze and perfumes to drink alcohol from them. Obviously janitors at Los Alamo were not in such dramatic situation,but it's not entirely inconceivable to me that someone might do it to get drunk.
Possible suicide-pact? Who in the world would mix wine with anti-freeze? Accidentally mixing such a cocktail seems fairly unlikely. Was this some sort of concoction mixed up by a researcher who was in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" stage, which was tragically mistaken for unadulterated wine?