I used to make cheese. Our cheese cave was a large underground brick structure. It was mostly for tourists, the whole thing was supposed to look "rustic" and "traditional," and it did look really nice, but it was shit at controlling humidity, sort of important when making cheese. My boss always wanted to get a walk in fridge where we could more efficiently control temperature and humidity, but he was never allowed because the tourist aspect was as important (maybe more) than the farming/cheesemaking, and tourists wanted rustic.
Anyway, that's not the point. The winter was extremely wet. As winter comes to a close, the snow started melting and everything started thawing. Well, brick is porous and the ground is extremely wet. Because the builder (who was incompetent and I have more horrible safety stories from this farm) had not built a dome around our cave, water ended up saturating the brick and was now dripping down onto the cheese, bringing with it, of course, listeria. We had to test every now and then for the health inspector, and one day we tested and literally every square inch of that cave had listeria. Listeria, we realized, was dripping down from the roof of the cave onto the cheese that we were selling to tourists.
So, instead of stopping the sale of certain cheese, improving the cave or (what we should have done) getting a walk-in freezer, what we ended up doing was taking some really half assed measures to protect the cheese (like putting paper over it) and occasionally spraying a solution to kill the listeria in the areas we could reach (so, not the roof, which was the main danger), especially before the health inspector came - of course the listeria would shortly just start leaking through the walls again. And so we ended up hiding our massive listeria outbreak from the health inspector and kept selling the cheese. I managed to leave that same spring.
Anyway, the elon musk toxic tunnel sludge story reminded me of this and I wanted to get this story off my chest. Feel free to drop your own work safety stories in the comments.
Holy fucking shit, how did you kot get sick breathing listeria all day?
afaik listeria is not airborne? I don't think it is at least. The real risk was that with cheese you're creating a very hospitable environment for bacteria, of course to allow "good" bacteria to propagate which gives the cheese color and flavor. Listeria being introduced is bad enough, but in an environment like that listeria can really take over if they gain a foothold.
Listeria is pretty common though. It's often in soil and water (why it's important to wash vegetables and drink filtered clean water). I think it really has to be ingested though to cause issues. Nonetheless I always showered and washed my hair after coming home since I had that shit dripping on me.
Nevermind I was thibking about leptospirosis