Boston warehouse fire protection system corrosion

Tom's forensic call-back: he diagnosed the open-system corrosion from a sample alone, by inferring the chronic leak. Used to illustrate the principle "no free oxygen, no corrosion" inverted — a small chronic leak destroys the closed-system condition.

Before I get to the next point, let me show you an example. [Tom shows a section of scaled pipe.] A few years ago — years ago, a few years ago when I was 20 — someone brought me a pipe and they said it came from their fire protection system. It looked similar to this, except it was all rusty inside. This piece actually has limestone scaling on the inside — this is from a boiler system, and they didn't treat their water or they over-treated it, and they basically started precipitating out limestone on the inside of their pipes. If you do it long enough you can get hardening of the arteries. It doesn't flow through well.