VIDEO: Police said 31-year-old Garret Robertson and 51-year-old Herber Rivas are the men who fell unconscious while working on a sewer line in Mobile. Two miles down the service road in the Princeton Wood subdivision in Mobile is the sewer line that’s now become the focus of a work-related death investigation.
Mobile Police said the men appeared to have been overcome by some type of gas, but the exact cause of death is still under investigation. “We discovered three people down in a manhole there,” Public Information Officer with Mobile Fire Rescue Department, Steven Millhouse, said. Two of those workers died, and a third was hospitalized. Millhouse said a few things stuck out to the firefighters who responded on Monday.
“In a confined space environment, one of the first things that you think about in confined space is oxygen deprivation and then the site itself where we were was a sewage bypass,” Millhouse said. “There could be oxygen-deprived environment, or there could be other gases in that environment.” Before firefighters began recovery efforts, they used an air monitor, which determines the safety of the air quality. When the air is safe, the reading will be in the green. If you put it in unsafe conditions, the monitor goes into the red and sounds an alarm.
Millhouse said when firefighters used the monitor, the test indicated the air quality was safe. “We want to be able to test the air quality there to make sure again it’s safe for our crews to go in and access these patients,” Millhouse said. “So we can’t help you if we’re victims ourselves in any situation.” So what remains unclear is exactly what conditions those workers found themselves in before firefighters arrived. Firefighters train regularly throughout the year for rescue operations like this. The interim chief said this was the first time in 10 years they had to put that training into action.
