Chemical accidents or sensitivities?

[jdurg]

I was just wondering what the worst chemical accidents people here have experienced, and what chemicals they are particularly sensitive to. Here are mine.

 

1): In a high school chem lab I needed to make a sodium silicate solution, but decided to do it outside of a fume hood. As I was weighing out the powder, a fine breeze moved by the area I was working in causing the powder to puff out into the air. I inhaled a pretty big breathful of it and started coughing uncontrollably. They had to pull me out of the lab and into the hallway until I could stop coughing. It was horrible. I had to visit a doctor later that day to get my lungs checked out. Thankfully, there was no permanent damage. Just a big scare.

 

2): Another time in high school we were bending glass tubing, and the tube I was bending was previously used to carry bromine vapor. As I heated the tube, bromine leached out of the glass and into the air. I, sadly, was standing in between where the vapor was coming from and the air vent overhead. I got a pretty big whiff of bromine and was quite ill for a good hour or so.

 

3): In high school, a stupid lab partner decided that he wanted to chuck a huge piece of sodium into a beaker of water. I didn't have gloves on at the time, but knew that if the sodium hit the water, a major incident would occur. I moved my hand above the beaker and caught the sodium bare-handed and wound up with a minor chemical burn on my palm.

 

4): College analytical lab: We were working with some concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids for various experiments, and I forgot to label my beaker of H2SO4. When it was time to clean up I thought the beaker was water and picked it up haphazardly and put my thumb in the liquid. That REALLY hurt as my thumnail dissolved and my thumb burnt. As I was moving towards the sink with the beaker in my hand, my forearm grazed the top of an open nitric acid bottle. So on my forearm I received a vicious HNO3 burn which left my skin yellow for a good two weeks.

 

5): College organic lab: I spilt diethyl ether on my jacket and let it evaporate during lab. After lab I went outside and lit a cigarette, but some ether vapor was still present. A bright flash went off and my eyebrows were gone. lol.

 

6): Freshman year of college: I was doing the inventory of our vast chemical supply and had to spend a few hours in front of the cyanides and various other cyanide containing compounds. For hours I was sitting there writing down what we had and inhaling the faint odor of bitter almonds. For the next two weeks, I was dead tired and barely able to wake up in the morning. Apparently I had a sub-lethal case of cyanide poisoning. I still can't believe how exhausted that made me.

 

7): Sophomore year of high school: In my biology lab we were dissecting giant clams. My teacher was old fogey who was still using formaldehyde to preserve specimens instead of formalin. As my lab partner and I were dissecting the clam, he accidentally pressed on the stomach causing a jet of formaldehyde to spray onto my goggles and onto my face. My skin immediately began to slough off leaving me red and raw for a good few days. Thank god I was wearing goggles.

 

I think I have more stories, but since I'm at work right now I really can't think of any more. I'll add to this as I come up with them.

 

For chemical sensitivities, I am very sensitive to ethyl acetate. The slightest odor of it gives me vicious headaches. That's probably from all the esters that I worked with during my internship at a forensic chemistry lab. (GC/MS stuff).

 

My nose is very sensitive to smells, and I can detect odors in astonishingly low concentrations. I guess that's a good thing because I can smell halogens, thioesters, sulfur gasses, nitrogen oxides, ozones, cyanides, and virtually any compound far before anyone else can and before they become toxic. This came in handy once during a toxicology lab when an arsenous oxide source was accidentally put outside of a fume hood. I was able to smell the VERY faint garlic odor far sooner than anybody else and we were able to hurridly put the beaker back in the hood before it became really dangerous. Wow. I've had a lot of "incidents" in my life.

[Lance]

A while ago I was cleaning out my lab and glassware and set the glassware on the ground to dry. I was dissolving Sodium Hydroxide in water and I got a big whiff of it which made me stumble backwards tripping over the glassware. Lucky only one my graduated cylinders broke. Oh yeah, my lungs turned out ok too.

 

Other than that I can’t think of any other mishaps besides various shocks, burns and loads of ozone induced headaches. Didn’t blike just make a thread with the same subject?

 

I can’t think of any sensitivities considerING I’m immortal and all.

[Gilded]

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7158 <- blike's thread-o-accidents

[jdurg]

Hmmm. The search function didn't work for me here at work. Perhaps a moderator could merge the threads together.

 

 

Ahhhhh. I see now. The other thread was in a different part of the forum that I didn't check out. That explains that.

[Gilded]

Yeah, it's probably in General Science since funny (and not so funny) accidents can happen with all sorts of things, not necessarily chemicals. Chems are the most usual case though.