Three people were killed and six are in intensive care after dry ice thrown in a swimming pool caused acute poisoning at well-known Russian Instagrammer Ekaterina Didenko’s 29th birthday party.
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Her husband Valentin Didenko, 32, and guests Natalia Monakova and Yuri Alferov, both 25, were all killed by carbon dioxide poisoning when the dry ice was mixed with pool water, while others suffered chemical burns.
There’s a video on Reddit of Valentin emptying 55kg of dry ice into the swimming pool. It’s obviously pretty dark considering these are the final moments of 3 people in the video, so don’t watch if it’s going to upset you too much:
Last video taken before Valentin Didenko, husband of Russian Instagram blogger Katya Didenko, and two others died from the reaction caused by adding dry ice to an indoor pool at Katya’s birthday party. February 28th, 2020 from r/lastimages
What’s especially chilling is right at the end the girl goes “he’s dead, that’s it, he’s gone” after he jumps in the pool. Obviously intended as a joke but little did she know how tragically things would turn out.
Towards the end of the video you can also see someone in the water flailing about (the 3 who died all got in the pool) – I wonder if he was already gasping for oxygen as the video shut off?
Another dark twist of irony is that Ekaterina is a highly-qualified pharmacist who racked up one million followers on Instagram by blogging about medicine and giving out health tips, as well as documenting her personal life.
More on the cause(s) of death via the BBC:
Most likely, the huge block of dry ice (frozen CO2) they dumped released enough carbon dioxide gas to completely replace the layer of oxygen above the pool. So anyone swimming, who mistakenly thought they were getting oxygen when taking a breath, was just getting additional CO2.
There is a safe way of giving that dry ice visual effect to a swimming pool but clearly they were using some dodgy instructions (or just hadn’t researched properly) at this party. For one thing that pool’s too small for such a massive chunk of dry ice. What makes this worse is that it was all probably done for the ‘Gram too.
An awful tragedy but just imagine how much worse it could have been if they had all decided to jump inside that pool. RIP to the victims and a reminder to everyone else to always science responsibly.
To watch a man smash his hip into a million pieces doing a running jump into his mate’s swimming pool, click HERE.
