Lab Caution

Many accidents happen in science labs in school and out of school. Most lab accidents happen in school because most students are not educated enough in the matter, some accident in labs can also be caused by a teacher not just students. On About.com a student wrote about a lab accident that happened with her teacher. She wrote, My teacher was in charge of chemical disposal for our whole district. He'd received sodium that was supposed to be all oxidized. He was disposing of it in the proper way, which involved combining it with water. As it turned out, there was a pocket of unoxidized sodium. There was a small boom, which singed his shirt. At this point, he left the chemistry storage. The next explosion sent the drain of the sink into the ceiling. He's alright and retired the next year with all his limbs. Lab accidents are caused by many things misuse of acids, too much of the wrong chemical, etc. Some accidents can even be cause by knives, blades, forceps, and dissecting scissors. Although all the stories I found online were about chemistry accidents, Ive heard few about dissecting. Another example of a lab accident is this story I read online was about chemistry teacher in high school, who gave his mystery acids and bases, to identify them as either acids or bases. The only thing he told the students about the acids and bases was if they got on their skin to flush them with water. The teacher had not given the students gloves to use, during the class a large amount of Sodium Hydroxide (as I later identified) got on one of the students. The student freaked out, and ran to the sink but before he did anything he asked his teacher, "What am I supposed to do?" The teacher just asked what it was, and the student said he didn't know, his teacher scoffed and it the student got a base burn.

(One type of a base burn) In chemistry labs you have to be sure of the percentages your using for example, in one of a student mixed up bottles of water and hydrochloric, but he accidentally put water into the acid which caused a great explosion and burnt his whole face. Another story was about a girl who was in a hurry to finish an exam, so she thought that she could speed things up by evaporating ether solution on the burner. There was a terrible blast and she was terribly hurt. A student was working and he decided he would stick a pipette full of benzene up his rectum to determine whether or not - "Benzene is harmful" now he is lying in hospital with half his butt burnt off. Most of these accidents are caused because people dont think things through or dont have enough time to finish so they skip a step to hurry things up. In this story a student was in the lab using dry ice to cool isopropanol to dip a rotary evaporator into. It was almost 5 Oclock and there was no real rush on this experiment. She figured she might as well just clean up and go home. So she washed the glass, put away all reagents, scrubbed up, but didnt want to waste the 10lbs of good dry ice. She figured it wouldnt melt away in the fridge! Better yet, there was a really cold one with a locking door. Sometime during the night, the pressure built, and the door was blown 30 feet away in the lab next door

- through the cinder block wall, leaving a 3 foot wide, 8 foot tall hole. There was a standard set in this students lab was a sintered funnel eir connected to a large 1L round bottomed flask via a three way tap to allowing bubbling with nitrogen to wash compounds and subsequently drying the compound using vacuum. One day one PhD student turned the tap the wrong way so as opposed to the nitrogen going up through the funnel it filled the round bottomed flask which subsequently exploded, causing a mixture of various solvents such as DCM, DMF and diethyl ether to go flying along with shards of glass! This was in the fume hood but the sliding door was only partially closed. Luckily he was wearing safety glasses, as he did get solvent in the face and a few minor cuts from flying glass. The student was nicknamed 'Sean the bomb' after that. Once a student and his friend were doing an experiment and she knocked some acid on him. It went all over him arm now he has a big scar. Though most accidents are caused by students some are caused by teacher too. A syidents chemistry teacher once did an experiment but he did it wrong and the windows and skylight flew out but thankfully, the students had been outside before it happened. All lab accidents are exactly that accidents but both students and professors/teachers should be care full during experiments, and teachers should hang a list of precautions students should take.