Lab Accidents

[mississippichem]

I thought it might be entertaining to start a thread where members can share stories of lab or industry experiments gone wrong. I'm posting this in the lounge because I didn't want to limit the discussion to chemistry (physicists, engineers, and biologists causes havoc too sometimes). Feel free to share something from personal experience or any interesting stories you find on the internet. Garage science stories are welcome as well, in which case we won't tell your mother.

 

It's only fair that I start

 

1) I once tried to pressurize an activated alumina column that I was using to purify a simple mixture. Everything was going fine until suddenly the gas adaptor shot away from the column with an impressive velocity, eventually finding itself in a somewhat elastic collision with a wall (it didn't break, don't ask, I don't know).

 

2)I was leaning out a frit that had been used to purify a mixture of various azo-dyes. I was running a vacuum and slowly letting nitric acid slip through the frit. At one point a lot of brown NO₂ gas started to emanate from the frit. I slammed the fume hood shut and had to wait that one out. In retrospect nitric acid was an incredibly poor choice of cleaning reagent for cleaning a frit soiled with those particular chemicals.

 

3) A labmate of mine once conjured a pretty epic fireball during a catalyzed hydrogenation reaction (you're not an organic chemist until you've seen this ).

[insane_alien]

I was doing some experiments for an investigation at work and was using dry ice pellets for cooling and sample storage.

 

Accidentally got a dry ice pellet into on of the sample tubes and it got sealed. took a good few minutes to blow up but blow up it did. thank god for safety specs.

 

Also, not really lab but it fits, i was emptying out ~500L of a solution i was using for a trial. This solution was in a wheeled tank and there is a slight rise to the washing area where there is a suitable drain. as all in all it was about 750kg (it was a denser than just water and the tank adds a bit too) i was having difficulty getting it over the rise. so i took a bit of a run up to see if i could shift it. nope. I took a second, nothing, a third and rediscovered the miracle of resonance. the tank fell over and emptied itself all over the floor. saved me having to wait until it all drained out of the valve though.

[ajb]

I quite often snap my pencils... oh the hazards of doing maths.

Edited May 5, 2012 by ajb

[swansont]

I had a hypothesis in grad school that if the damage caused in the lab wasn't a converging series, you would be booted out of the program.

 

We had a vacuum feed-through hooked up to a rather beefy power supply because we needed 10 amps or so for the magnetic field for our magneto-optic trap. The feedthrough is insulated from the rest of the flange with ceramic. The power supply sat on a stool, because we couldn't find cables long & flexible enough to put it on the floor, out of the way. I nudged the stool one times too many and the power supply fell off the stool, and the feedthrough couldn't support the weight.

 

However, I had built an interlock system which shut all the pneumatic valves and killed the power to the diffusion pump if the pressure got too high, which limited the damage to the feedthrough.

 

——

 

One time we were cleaning out the oven that provided the Rubidium beam. The postdoc that had "helped" when we loaded it had crushed the ampoule rather than cracking the top, so (unbeknownst to us) there was still some Rb trapped under some glass in the bottom. It was routing to wash it out with a water/alcohol mixture after it had been exposed to air — the alcohol broke down the oxide layer that forms when the Rb grabs water and releases hydrogen. (That reaction is quite violent when there is no oxide layer). But it was never meant to encounter a macroscopic amount of unoxidized Rb. When it did, it went "boom". Luckily it was pointed at the side of the fume hood. My lab partner got hit with a spec of shrapnel in the cheek, which was lucky because she wasn't wearing any safety.

[Xittenn]

I only have trades related accidents, like where I set the shop floor on fire while welding a leaking hydraulic pinion inlet, after which I accidentally painted the shop floor green that same night . . . There has been a lot of flying debris in my life, most of which has traveled at speeds in excess of 100km/h. I have very funny scars all over me--ok maybe not so funny! I hope to be allowed to continue to blow stuff up randomly through my role as a mathematician . . . . random pencil debacles

 

I asked the boss how much water to a bucket of coolant, he said one cup, but he meant one cup of coolant to a bucket of water. I thought it was weird but I was young and didn't ask. I kept working and after half an hour you could see the green of the coolant as it seeped into my veins and crawled up my arm.

[Joatmon]

Work related - not lab related but I once stood looking at the back of a mainframe computer watching a great deal of sparking and arcing taking place causing balls of molten metal to run down to the floor where they were singeing the carpet. My boss just said to me "Show me a man who never made a mistake and I'll show you a man who never did anything!"

Edited May 5, 2012 by Joatmon

[mississippichem]

I quite often snap my pencils... oh the hazards of doing maths.

 

 

Well you have to deal with the hazards imposed on you by physicists. Every time a theoretical physicist evaluates a non-existent path integral a mathematician loses his soul. You do mathematical physics, so you probably have very little soul left at this point .

[John Cuthber]

Obviously, I never did anything wrong in the lab, but I wonder if other labs have the same sort of gremlin: the sort that opens the stopcock on the separating funnel, just before you pour something into it.

Is this particular sort of poltergeist activity common in labs?

Is the same gremlin also responsible for waiting until you have finished cleaning a piece of kit before knocking it out of your hands and thus breaking it?

[studiot]

I can remember a few incidents in the university lab, back in the late 60's with bromine and hydrogen cyanide and old fashioned fume cupboards and also catching my sleeve on fire by leaning over a bunsen burner and not paying proper attention.

 

Those were the days.

 

I must also admit in a later life to being the surveyor who left a theodolite set up in the Strand in London over a weekend - yes I did get it back.

[zapatos]

My brother worked at a university research reactor. As one of the employees was leaving one day an alarm went off indicating he had some radioactive material on him. He had somehow picked up some material on his hand, so a team went all over the reactor looking for contamination. Unfortunately for the contaminated employee they found traces of the radioactive material all over his secretary's bottom. The employee survived but his marriage did not.

 

In the late 80's I worked at mid-sized company whose main source if IT power was a large IBM mainframe. One day a person on a cleaning crew had to do some work in the data center. He found that a plug in the wall was in his way so he unplugged it. Yep, you guessed it, he unplugged the mainframe. Not a major problem but he did knock about 300 people offline until recovery.

[Joatmon]

Although I never experienced it, when I worked with computers there were many tales of short sighted women with ample breasts reporting extra spaces appearing for no reason at all. These spaces resulting from the space bar being nudged accidentally.

Here is another similar tale I found:-

"We had a complaint from a user about blancs suddenly appearing in her typing. She told us that whenever she types and looks at her monitor nothing happens. But when she looks away over her right shoulder,blancs suddenly appear on the screen. It took us quite a while to find out what the problem was. Then we realized that her heavy breasts hit the space bar." http://www.ucs.cam.a...isc/techsupport

Edited May 6, 2012 by Joatmon

[CharonY]

Just some random memories from student's labs: a student set himself on fire while sterilizing equipment with ethanol and heat (hooray to cotton labcoats). The only time I was legally allowed to tackle a student and throw him to the floor. I could not convince everyone that the best to put it out is to kick him once wrapped in the fire blanket.

 

Another dropped over two liters of KMNO4 while trying to refill a tiny bottle from a considerable height. No white labcoats to be found in a largish diameter.

Dropping a large bottle of mercaptoethanol. The lab smelled for weeks afterwards.

 

 

Another one filled a mix of H2O2 and H2SO4 into the waste bottle but used the non-vented cap and closed it shot. I saw it boiling up and slammed down the hood before the bottle exploded.

 

 

[ajb]

You do mathematical physics, so you probably have very little soul left at this point .

 

Not even enough to do a deal with the Devil himself...

[ewmon]

Not having ever caused any serious EH&S incidents in the lab, I nonetheless had to validate the robustness of an anthrone-sulfuric acid assay, where the anthrone-sulfuric acid reagent is injected into an aqueous polysaccharide solution, while holding the test tubes high up so as not to burn fingers from the heat of reaction, and then incubating the test tubes in a hot water bath (90°C/194°F ± 10°C/18°F) to sustain and complete the reactions.

 

As you can see, the high end of the reaction temperature range was 100°C/212°F, and having checked with my boss, he assured me (complete with a big friendly smile) that the water must be boiling. Those of you not familiar with chemistry, sulfuric acid and water react in a highly exothermic (heat-producing) — and perhaps violent — manner, and I had visions of test tubes cracking and boiling water being thrown all around —— perhaps even a chain reaction.

 

In chemistry, the general rule is to add the more dangerous chemical to the less dangerous chemical, thus if a reaction becomes violent and/or the vessel ruptures, the less dangerous chemical would be the one to be splashed around (maybe on people, equipment, etc). Room temp water is tame, but boiling water probably ranks up there with sulfuric acid, so there wasn't much difference between the two in my mind. However, I trusted my boss and the equipment, and it all went off without a hitch, although it was interesting to monitor test tubes of sulfuric acid and water sitting in a boiling water bath for ten minutes.

 

the same sort of gremlin ... that opens the stopcock

Like the one that quietly opened the spigot of a carboy in the walk-in frig when my boss (dressed in her lab coat) was in there ... discovered by me five minutes later. Glug glug glug, all over the floor.

 

when she looks away over her right shoulder, blancs suddenly appear on the screen.

Only while looking over her right shoulder, of course, due to the typical left-is-larger asymmetry. (I extend women's apparent insensitivity of protruding body parts to their high success rate for demolishing car fenders.)

[Arete]

1) Teaching a student cloning PCR products. We were plating out or colonies in the laminar flow hood. You dip the spreader in ethanol, flame it off spread media, repeat. If you get the order mixed up, you'll dip the lit spreader in your ethanol container and set it on fire. No big deal, cover the beaker, no more fire. Except the student, rather than covering the vessel, threw the contents of her water bottle into the beaker. Different outcome than anticipated, sideburns on fire.

 

2) Different student, learning how to make acrylamide gels. I just looked in to see how they were doing, lent over to make sure the gel was well up against the comb. They lent down too, putting a hand on the top plate as they did. Unset acrylamide shoots out of the plates and up my nose. To the emergency shower. "Is it really that bad?" they ask. Yes, yes it is...

 

3) Same student, learning electrophoresis. Puts Schott bottle of agarose in microwave. Screws lid down tight. BOOOOM. Blew the door of the microwave across the room. Fire alarm goes off. Lucky no one was in front of it.

[CharonY]

Another fun accident: grad student imbalanced the ultracentrifuge. For some reasons the centrifuge did not shut down (maybe something happened to the vials during spinning and caused the imbalance only after a high speed was reached). Result: the rotor (a heavy metal thing with roughly 30 cm diameter), punched through the centrifuge, though the plaster wall of the room and embedded itself in the concrete wall in the next room.

 

Lab course: after telling the students that acetonitrile is toxic one girl decided to drop the bottle of acetonitrile that she was toying around with. Cause, you know, she did not want to poison herself. Of course the bottle shattered.

[Orundellico]

I wanted to distill acetaldehyde (bp. 20.6 °C), but did not consider that first I had to cleave the cyclic trimer. So, I heated the flask on an oil bath (too much) and wondered why the distillation went so slow. When I was taking a look, the whole apparatus exploded and I got it all in my face. The residue was a bakelite-like black solid. Fortunately, the bath temperature had not yet been really high and I had been wearing protection glasses, which were now entirely brown. The floor of the lab was brown, too, except for my "shadow".

 

----

 

An accident of a student fellow : He wanted to epoxydize styrene with benzoyl peroxide, PhCOOOH. Unfortunately, he grabbed some dibenzoyl peroxide (PhCOO)2 instead. So, he initiated a radical polymerisatin reaction, which was exothermic. Very exothermic.

 

-----

 

Another one : A student fellow used a bar of sodium, which was stored under a paraffin oil. When he wanted to put back the bar into the storage flask, he grabbed another one with bars of yellow phosphorus under water. The sodium reacted with the water giving a nice explosion.

[DJBruce]

Not as exciting as some of the chemistry accidents, but the commons in the math department recently got a glass wall with fancy frosted glass intended to be used as a dry erase board. Well, one side of the glass was a dry erase board if you wrote on the frosted side it is apparently permanent. So now the commons has a fancy glass mural depicting the struggle of students working with Mayer-Vietoris and the Snake Lemma.

[Bioc]

Well, it's not really an accident, but one day I was doing a precipitation titration (fajans method). Thing is I was titrating and my buret needed more titrant solution, and the instructor thought it was a good idea to watch me refill it (made me nervous), so I grabbed the flask and carefully added it into the buret, only to find it was the flask containing the analyte solution. Result: buret full of beautiful precipitate. Instructor facepalms. Try to wash buret to re-use (derp) "why are you going to wash it NOW? why don't you use another one instead?". She hated me.

[Joatmon]

Ok - I'll admit this one.

As a lecturer I divided my students into pairs and decided we would use breadboards (simple devices for making temporary circuits) to construct and examine the gain of a basic transistor amplifier. Being completely confident as it was something I'd done many times before, I sketched the circuit on the chalkboard and the class followed my diagram and instructions faithfully. Each group switched on the required power supply to their circuit and every group blew their transistors! Somehow I had omitted the base bias resistor and so everyone had connected the transistor base directly to Vcc (the supply).

I suppose you could say that on that day I made the same mistake not only six times but six times in the same instant!

Edited May 13, 2012 by Joatmon

[chilled_fluorine]

Molten rocket fuel... 'Nuff said.

[LaurieAG]

Over 30 years ago I worked as a technical officer in a Geotechnical and Materials Testing Laboratory that was in the process of developing Australia's triaxial core testing standards. The setup used 4 mercury pots on pulleys to regulate the pressure of water surrounding the core sample being compressed. The testing was used to determine the best size for in situ pillars in underground mining.

 

Just before the core sample was about to fail (and the mercury pots popped) the old Malaysian engineer who was in charge of the testing would say to me 'Laurie, you go outside now, I will clean up, I have had children and you have not'.