the mri accident burns the hospital down: urban legend?
Published by stephan February 16th, 2006 in found on the net, scienceI was discussing MRI’s today with a physician, and told him this story that I had recently read at simplyphysics.com:
Here’s one I heard from an Oxford Magnets engineer which was later independently verified by a technologist who had been hired to work at this site.
A brand new [MRI] magnet had just finished being installed into a brand new building. All of the acceptance testing had been completed and the magnet was to be turned over to the customer the very next day. There was only one minor problem to be dealt with first. One of the sprinklers in the scan room had a tiny leak. A welder was brought in to fix the leak but somebody forgot to tell him that the magnet was at field. So….. in walks this welder with his acetylene torch system. His tank flies into the magnet, the valve breaks off, sparks and catches fire. Since he was in there to fix a leak in the sprinkler system, it had been turned off first. The brand new building burned to the ground!
Sorry, I don’t have any pictures.
If anyone knows if I have any of the details wrong, I’d appreciate them letting me know.
While the dangers of powerful MRI magnets are quite real, he dismissed this specific tale as ‘too good to be true,’ and thought it might be an urban legend. I have to agree - it’s got the perfect blend of tragedy and comedy, no one gets hurt, and there are no direct witnesses, photos, dates, or places.
The story is retold in a New York Times article that has been republished at ratboy’s anvil and elsewhere online, but the reference is brief, vague, and in a passage that seems full of hyperbole:
The sprinkler repairman whose acetylene tank was yanked inside, breaking its valve and starting a fire that razed the building
The Times seems like a reliable source, but I still question the truth of this story. A quick check of Snopes.com and the Straight Dope archive yields a big goose egg. There is, in fact, a striking lack of articles in general about MRI scans - this surprises me, I should think there would be dozens of ghost stories floating around about a big scary high tech medical machine.
The trail here runs cold. There are almost no identifying facts to search from. There used to be an Oxford Magnets, partly owned by Oxford Instruments, now fully owned by Siemens. Does anyone out on the interwebs know if this is for real?
2 Responses to “the mri accident burns the hospital down: urban legend?”
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I, too, have heard this story, again from a number of sources, each with a reasonable explanation as to how they learned of the incident. My personal opinion is that it is genuine, as are most MRI urban legends, allowing for the natural tendency for oral stories to grow in the retellings.
From what I’ve been told, the story as recounted in the New York Times is very accurate and the MRI magnet and the suite built to accommodate it were totalled. The facility was a hospital in Arkansas. I did a quick Google search of ‘arkansas hospital mri fire’ which, unfortunately, turned up nothing on the first page of results, but I suspect that the story is out there.
Another piece of perfect irony for the whole story, one of my sources had been an employee of the contractor who told me that one of the first responders to the fire was the fire marshal who had been on his way to the hospital to do the final inspection of the new MRI facility.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Tobias Gilk
http://www.MRI-Planning.com
Hi there, that is no big surprise that most MRI incidents go unreported.
I too , had an MRI with incident. I found out that when things go wrong and things do go wrong..there is no place to report it.
In my case the doctor did not want to get involved, the facility was unresponsive, the health department could not help as the private facilities are self regulated and out of their jurisdiction. You can make a complaint against the doctor with the board of medicine, but not the facility itself.FDA will only take your report of the incidents on the web only, and it is pretty complicated.
Please read this petition “all MRI incidents must be reported”
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/report-mri-issues