Compressed Gas Safety Video Excerpt: There’s a whole lot of room squeezed into a gas cylinder. Take these two, full of acetylene, and oxygen, enough fuel to work for hours. Of course, that’s why these cylinders exist, to squeeze down the space needed to efficiently store the gases we work with. We need to be careful though, compressing the gas puts it under a lot of pressure, and that can lead to dangerous situations. Say a cylinder is full of a flammable gas, and a small leak develops at the valve. The high pressure forces out the gas, spreading it over great distances, it flows over work benches, passes over electrical equipment, and maybe finds a source of ignition, a spark, or an open flame. The results can be devastating. There are three things going on here, we have a leak in the system, we have the spread of the gas, and finally the specific hazard of the substance itself, in this case, it’s flammability. This makes it easy to see why we should pay attention to the safe use of gas cylinders.