In October 2017, Brett Morrow, a 22-year-old rugby player known as “String Bean” to his teammates, died while helping to install a plastic liner inside a Chicago-area sewer pipe. He had descended a 20-foot-deep manhole and then crawled 30 feet into the newly lined pipe, measuring 2 feet in diameter. At some point, the plastic liner crumpled and started to harden around him. A dangerous concentration of an ingredient in the liner, styrene, seeped out as gas and likely crippled him. Morrow drowned in liquid generated by the installation process, according to a medical examiner’s report. The drowning caused his death, but the styrene incapacitation was a “significant contributing factor,” the report stated. It took nearly four hours for firefighters to free his body.
