Not that there are any good ways to die BUT Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) is a very bad way. The smell should have been sufficient warning but you never know. Hope the children have good relatives to raise them!
If you can smell it you are already dead.
Same reason a local farmer and his son are dead - father slid into a manure pit - his son went in after him.
God please rest their souls.
I’ve heard that the egg smell can saturate your senses so quickly that you won’t smell it for long, giving the false sense that there isn’t ongoing danger.
In pure form hydrogen sulfide is odorless. In nature, it is usually accompanied by the smell of rotting eggs from associated compounds. The apparent lack of odor suggests a refined form or an unusual natural source.
If you can smell it go upwind, if you cannot smell it you are dead.
H2s concentrated amounts kills you sense of smell.
On the Bakken you can drive by a location and get a distinct rotten egg smell
You only smell it in low concentrations.
Once the concentration is up a bit, the gas is so powerful it knocks out your sense of smell and you are overpowered very quickly. At 1/10 of a percent H2S loss of smell is immediate. There is knockdown, or immediate collapse and near instant death.
At .01 percent, loss of smell occurs, but takes a few minutes.
In high concentrations hydrogen sulfide will overwhelm the nasal system and you won't smell anything. Nasty stuff.
Anything over 20 ppm deadens the sense of smell almost immediately. This is also the threshold that will kill you depending on duration of exposure. More concentration means less exposure required to kill you.
H2S training is one of the first things we were sent to when I started working in the Permian Basin.
One field near Crain, Texas was sour but not enough to kill you but enough to smell in the air all over the area. Nothing electrical or metallic lasted very long in that town.
After all the environmentalism became rampant we called areas like Crain EFAs. Environmentally ___ Areas. Wink and Notrees, Texas had oiled sand greens on the golf course.
Mentone, Maljamar, Andrews, Seminole, Caprock, Pecos, Artesia, Hobbs etc. All garden spots of the Permian Basin Desert. That is just the north area.