TIL people used to clean their clothes with gasoline as a form of 'dry cleaning.' And yes, lots of people died.

It might with the small stuff. Acetone can penetrate your skin while diesel is more like a thin oil. Acetone is also much more expensive. There was a station setup at the plants just for containment of diesel and AC. It was like a small fuel pump at an old gas station with a giant tank. I actually worked for several different plants. The largest had a full one gas station pump but the rest were large tanks. The diesel was mostly when you had to work in the thick of it. The stuff sticks really well to rubber in the containment area with the hottest stuff. That would cake on your boots until they felt like bricks. There is a material inside a concrete half wall enclosure that prevents most spills from escaping that first containment zone. It is like stepping in hot sticky taffy that is everywhere inside kitty litter. Those globs are the main problem, but there are times where someone has to crawl around in that gunk. The only other time you'll get into the thick stuff is if a flight (large steel shelf like structure) inside the main drum comes loose and finds its way into the elevator (enormous square buckets on a the biggest double chain you've never seen that carry around half a pickup truck load of asphalt to the top of the silos). If the elevator gets taken out like that, someone has to go into that hot zone and remove the obstruction after it has barely cooled down to melt your boot soles levels. At those temps, the AC is getting close to taffy like consistency, is super sticky, but also has the aggregate mixed. If they let it cool longer, the mix in the elevator will set and it will take a week to dig the whole thing out. So it is highly desirable for someone to do the job as hot as possible, probably far too hot for any inspector's eyes to function properly while securing their job. I melted some boots too, but from replacing flights. I wasn't around when elevator jams happened, thankfully.