Why Scary Lab Accidents Happen

By Enrico Uva | September 10th 2012 02:00 AM

If a chemist has never been in a lab accident, he has been lucky. Of course luck is more likely to come to those whose mentors have learned from bad experiences and to those who have taken preventive measures seriously, despite their anal nature. Chemical reactions create products with behaviors that differ from those of the ingredients. That's what makes them intriguing, and it's also what makes them potentially dangerous. No matter how simple and controllable a reaction seems on paper, when it's carried out in real life, the exact conditions determine its rate. And when gases or acids acquire too much kinetic energy, no one wants eyes, lungs and flesh in their way.

As an adolescent I played with my chemicals more than my instructors did. Rarely did they carry out demonstrations while lecturing. Seldom did they deviate from the tight parameters of cookbook labs. So I unconsciously associated accidents with amateurs or with large scale industrial processes. But after a freshman year of chemistry, I got my first summer job in the lab after a metallurgical company did not rehire a chemistry student previously involved in a serious analytical lab accident.   (More.....)

Report finds fault with college labs over poor safety record

From USA Today:

An explosion that severely burned a Texas Tech graduate student last year suggests safety problems plague college labs nationwide, a federal watchdog agency warned.

A report released Wednesday by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), an independent safety agency, examines the Jan. 7, 2010, detonation at Texas Tech University in Lubbock that cost the student, Preston Brown, three fingers and caused severe burns and eye damage. Brown had set out to produce 10 grams of an explosive compound — 100 times more than an informal lab limit — for research sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security.

"The report serves as a cautionary tale for universities across the country," CSB's Daniel Horowitz says. (More....)