Chemical Forums
General Forums => Generic Discussion => Topic started by: mike on May 18, 2006, 10:21:12 PM
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Some of these will make you cringe...
http://www.cheminfonet.org/accid1.htm
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nasty, the kid who slipped was pretty bad, lost the use of some limbs. :o
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did anyone hear about the chemistry teacher a few months back that something went wrong and he was blown through the ceiling of his classroom?
kinda scary to think that this does happen :(
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It was gas explosion.
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It was gas explosion.
oh, i only heard about it happening i didn't hear all the details.
do you know where an article about it may be by chance? if not, i can find one
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I have seen some more detailed info but I can't locate it. It happened in France in the university lab researching some dangerous industrial procedures. IIRC explosion had nothing to do with the specific procedure checked at the time, it was some gas leak from the aparature which ended with kaboom.
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do you remember the month or the date it happened cuz i'm sure the Times had something and i can get it from there?
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March 24th or something
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ok thank you very much :)
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Ouch... just reading those makes me a little paranoid going into lab.
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Heh. I kind of chuckle reading all those mercury stories. When I was in 6th grade (back in 1992), my teacher brought in a big vial of mercury during our chemistry lesson and let us all play with it. She only said "Don't eat it and don't spill it on your clothes. Wash your hands when you are done". The stuff felt really weird. It was liquid, but unlike water it didn't feel wet. It felt "unique". The thing is, we didn't have OSHA coming in and spraying down the classroom. My bran wasn't daimaged. ;) ;D
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My bran wasn't daimaged. ;) ;D
You say so ;)
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The chernobyl tragedy. It spreads million of Cs137 around Europe
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The chernobyl tragedy. It spreads million of Cs137 around Europe
Chernobyl is overrated and number of casualties is much smaller than it is constantly reported. That's one of the prime examples of how ecowhinners can fool half a world.
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Having read that I am much more scared of my 98% H2SO4! The teacher who substituted murcuric oxide for silver oxide was just stupid.
I heard someone was filling a burette with 1M(I think) NaOH and spilt it on her own head! Luckily there was an emergency shower thing in the lab and it was quickly washed off.
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1M would be strong enough to truely hurt her unless she really let it sit there tho
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wait do you mean that it wouldn't really hurt her ???
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wait do you mean that it wouldn't really hurt her ???
we've used 1M NaOH, did that ever hurt you? the answer would be no, unless you let it sit for days
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i was just confused with what you meant
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I remember reading about the HF-in-the-trash fatality when it happened.
Somebody just tossed some unwanted HF into the trash, and the garbageman unlucky to toss that in the compactor died from the fumes.
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I remember reading about the HF-in-the-trash fatality when it happened.
Somebody just tossed some unwanted HF into the trash, and the garbageman unlucky to toss that in the compactor died from the fumes.
A friend of mine is a PhD chemist at a battery company and he said that during his graduate work there was an accident at the lab and a chemist had a beaker of anhydrous HF splashed onto her face. He said it was the scariest thing he had ever seen and that the poor girl was in an INTENSE amount of pain. Thankfully she survived the incident thanks to the "insta-wash" stations they had in the lab, but he said he'll never forget that day.
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The best advice is to not have them.
There is a zero-tolerance for accidents or even "near-misses" in industrial settings. Universities are quite relaxed compared to industry when it comes to safety.
If someone has an accident that causes lost time at an industrial site, the worker will basically go through an intense inquisition covering pretty much everything about the situation. In the vast majority of cases, the companies ultimate objective will be to get rid of the accident-prone liability called the worker, regardless of the fault level of the worker. It is better to be inefficient and take three times as long to do something than have an accident and be a stellar performer.
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Accidents in the lab seem to be a common occurance in my school...
The most notable accident that I can recall is that when we were doing volumeteric analysis and preparing solutions with some quite nasty chemicals. I was using Potassium Dichromate and other people were using other various chemicals. So, about three-quarters into the lesson an arrogant and stupid guy approached my female friend, let's call her Sarah and said something along the lines of:
"Oh, mine's better than yours!"
He then proceded to swing his volumetric flask full of solution into her 1 liter flask. Of course hers shattered covering her in a green liquid. Everyone was shocked as we heard the smash and turned toward the back of the class to see green solution dripping out of her mouth and off her goggles. She quickly rushed into the prep room to clean up.
Luckily the solution she was preparing was copper carbonate and it's not that bad if I recall. :)
Another slightly humorous accident involved me and sodium metal. It went a little something like this; teacher showing us the classic sodium in water experiment, the teacher asked me to carefully move the sodium from the side of the container because it had stuck there. So, I grabbed a metal stirring rod, I think, and went to nudge the metal but just before I did I announced to the class in a mock tone
"I can sooo see this exploding just as I touch it"
...And it did.
My burns weren't that severe but they stung for a day or two. :)
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Yeah, I had a rather painful accident with Na metal, during electrolysis of NaOH to prepare it, a piece went off, and flew RIGHT up my nose.
That one, really kinda hurt, left a hole in my septum for a while, until it healed up, a couple of weeks or so.
I recently gassed out my room with chromyl chloride, and with H2S, both those times I grabbed my mask, and ran out of the room, although I had to return, mask on, during the H2S incident.
Burnt my hand once boiling conc. H2SO4.
Did the above with molten NaOH.
Once corroded my leather gloves completely with liquified SO2, the spikes on them rusted in minutes.
Burnt myself nicely as a kid, setting off improvised flashpowder in a pair of old pants, it went up rather quicker than I expected at the time (moral of the story? don't pack underpants full of flashpowder and light it close up ;D)
I have had a close, but not really dangerous (in the end) encounter with H2Se, the fact I could smell it, was enough to alarm me quite a bit.
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One of the chemistry teacher at my school told my class about an accident that happened a long time ago. They use to have a 1 gallon container of acetone in the store room that they kept under a granite sink. Well one day there was a spark by the sink when a teacher was leaving the store room and all of the acetone exploded. The thing was, they had a whole collection of other chemicals. A bunch of other things exploded too. The granite sink also was destroyed.
There had only been 2 people that knew exactly what was in the store room. One had been injured in the explosion. The other teacher had to direct the hazmat team. He wasn't given a respirator or any protective clothing either.
Also speaking about burning ourselves....
Early in the year (around March) my cousin, some of his friends, and I were all lighting tennis balls on fire and playing flaming tennis. Then we found a nerf football and proceded to saturate it with lighter fluid. I picked it up out of the bucket we used to saturate it, and my stupid cousins friend lit the football on fire while I was holding it!
The thing was dripping lighter fluid, and my hand up to my wrist were covered with lighter fluid. I had told him to wait, but he didn't. It was only minor burns though, but all the hair on my lower arm was gone, and my lower arm was itchy and dry for awhile.
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I was doing a hydrogenation with Pd catalyst and H2. The reaction was not going so I decided to add more Pd. I forgot to flush out the hydrogen from the flask before adding more catalyst. It made a pretty big bang and a fire ball shot out of the flask.
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I had a little accident in my first year at uni.
I was trying to dissolve something in methanol in a 50ml volumetric flask. So I would put the stopper on and shake it about - but it wouldn't dissolve. So I took off the lid and put it over a steam bath, then take it off, stopper on and shake. I repeated this several times, but once forgot to remove the stopper... and forgot about it for 5 minutes.
So I return to the fume hood and see it there, and realised that it was probably going to blow it's top very soon. But for some reason, I did the stupidest thing possible, I removed it from the fume hood :o and took out the stopper. Unfortunately, this coincided perfectly with my lab partner turning round to say something to me, and she ended up with hot methanol all over her face and in her mouth. She was fine though - it wasn't hot enough to burn, and she never suffered any ill effects - and she still did labs with me for another 2 years.
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Unfortunately, this coincided perfectly with my lab partner turning round to say something to me, and she ended up with hot methanol all over her face and in her mouth. She was fine though - it wasn't hot enough to burn, and she never suffered any ill effects - and she still did labs with me for another 2 years.
Sounds like the beginning of a romantic love story... ;)
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Haha, there was certainly some chemistry
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Dan:
awww.. so sweet..
the spirits of the lab has spoken. They pick you a mating candidate through their divine wisdom.
perhaps the next time you give her something alcoholic, try red wine. Boiling methanol isn't the best choice. LOL.
I wish my lab partner is female. Too bad Imperial is a monastery!
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I was doing a palladium catalyzed hydrosilation with TMS protected allyl alcohol and upon heating to reflux, the reaction mixture began vigorously boiling, and blew the reflux condenser off the flask, filling the hood with a wonderful mixture of the protected alcohol and my silane. My story would be much more impressive if the mixture had ignited, but thankfully it didn't. Also to great fortune, I was the only one working in the hood at the time, and the sash was down. The room still quickly filled with the vapors, and again, fortunately, there were not many people in the room at the time. I am told that the look on my face as I bolted toward the fire extinguisher was a priceless ghost-white. I am very glad i didn't have to use it!
Thing I was most pissed about was that I wasted a couple hundred bucks in materials (I worked for a small time guy, and the materials nearly blew my entire research fund for the summer).
Things I learned:
1. Scale up scares me. Reaction worked fine on 50 mg scale, so it should be fine on all, right? Not necessarily.
2. The paper even said this could happen, and I didn't really take adequate precaution against it, because they only said it occurred when "adding additional Pd catalyst upon a failed reaction initiation". If someone says something exploded in a paper, they probably aren't pulling your leg.
3. Clear your hood of nasty stuff when running a reaction with extra danger, perhaps. A 4L jug of a flammable solvent in the hood + ignition could have been the end of me and my labmates.
The last thing I have to say is about a dumb mistake that I made, which I think led to this whole thing. The procedure which I based my reaction on did this on a huge scale (several liters) and used approximately 1g of Pd-C Catalyst. Stoichiometric scale-down for my reaction put me at sub-milligram amounts of catalyst. Since I didn't believe I could accurately weigh out this amount, I just plopped in a meg or 2. In retrospect I realize I used about 10 times too much catalyst, so perhaps upon reaching initiation into the catalytic cycle, it went very vigorously due the the massive catalytic availablilty. (i dunno, just an idea. For all I know, it could have nothing to do with this)
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The first one got my attention rather quickly:
An Aroostook County, Maine, teacher elects to dispose of one quarter pound of potassium metal by attaching the container to a long wooden stick and dumping it into a metal waste basket full of water in the school parking lot. The resulting explosion sends shrapnel flying and does minor damage to cars in the parking lot. Miraculously no one was injured. (Personal communication, July, 1988)
Wow that was just....stupid.
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how about forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, and ignorance of the presence of water? :)
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I nearly had another accident to add to my list this past weekend. I went to visit a friend of mine who is also pretty big into the elements and chemistry and we decided to do a reaction to reduce silicon dioxide into elemental amorphous silicon. We had everything we needed but the SiO2. Instead, we had silicic acid which is easily converted into SiO2 by simple heating. So we spent some time heating up the Silicic Acid and turning it into SiO2.
The SiO2 was then mixed very intimately with some fine magnesium powder. This reaction is sort of like a thermite reaction but MUCH less intense. In our test tube we heated the reaction up and it immediately started glowing a cherry red color and you could tell that the reaction was proceeding. The tube was set aside for a while to let the reaction proceed and the products were eventually dumped out of the tube. We wound up with this mixture of brown powder and deep blue/brown clumps. This is a mixture of elemental Si, Mg, MgO, and some MgSi. Each of the products will dissolve in HCl except for Si so we had a way to purify it.
We started out by taking the tube the reaction took place in and adding 12M HCl. It started to pop and fizz a bit as unreacted Mg dissolved and the MgSi formed SiH4 which immediately ignited. The brown amorphous Si that was left was filtered out. The test tube was then filled up again with 12M HCl and we added little bits of our reaction product. It would pop and fizz a bit as it reacted and the silicon again just settled to the bottom. We had a bunch left over so we decided to scale up the reaction. UH-OH. A relatively large amount of the blue/brown powder was put into the tube and it immediately went KA-BOOM like a shotgun going off as a massive amount of Silane formed and ignited as well as the hydrogen from the unreacted magnesium. My ears were ringing for a good four or five hours afterward. The odd thing was, there was almost no flame to be seen. It just made the loud boom and that was it. Really scared the crap out of me. ;D
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how about forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, and ignorance of the presence of water? :)
Considering he distanced himself from the site with a long wooden pole and the trash can was "full" of water, I'm pretty sure he knew the water was in the trash can when he dropped the potassium in.... he just wanted to have some ridiculous reckless fun.
It's amazing how ridiculous some people can be in their pranks and disregard for blatant labroom safety. Who would put sulphuric acid in a milk carton? potassium dichromate in a soda bottle!? Clean a toilet with sulphuric acid!?!?
Natural selection is our only hope ::)
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Some more interesting stories of accidents
http://www.users.on.net/~philipc/chem.html#jan97
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So maybe not specifically a chemistry accident but how is this guy?
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/bum-cracker-stunt-backfires/2006/11/10/1162661861817.html
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^ natural selection in action (well, almost).
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Hopefully he won't be able to reproduce. Although that's hilarious. It's unbelievably stupid. Good find mike. :)