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Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:55:05 -0400
Reply-To: DCHAS-L Discussion List <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**LIST.UVM.EDU>
Sender: DCHAS-L Discussion List <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**LIST.UVM.EDU>
From: ILPI <info**At_Symbol_Here**ILPI.COM>
Subject: Re: Boston College incident follow up
In-Reply-To: <A6BDD774-2882-4C55-AF1D-9AA1A32F5A08**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org>
I am not surprised at the
student reaction. As I have said many times before, there are
generally two classes of people in emergencies: those who automatically
respond the way they need to for the situation at hand and those whose
brains vapor lock regardless of the amount of training they've had.
I've seen many cases of each, but here are two cases of the
latter in situations where the student was working alone; the first is
rather similar to the BC incident:
1. This one
is a second or thirdhand story. When a former colleague of mine
was in grad school in Germany, he was working alone in the lab late at
night when he cut himself rather severely. He thought it would
reflect poorly on him working alone and being injured, so he stepped out
the building. To the right, some distance away, was the emergency
room. To the left, an approximately equal distance away, was his
coworker's apartment. He figured that he would go left (the
direction opposite to the ER), get the labmate to say they were working
together, and then go to the ER. So he *walks* some distance (I
was told about a mile) to his coworker's apartment. When he got
there, the coworker was not home. So he sat down on the stoop
(still bleeding) and waited around for more than an hour for the guy to
come home. I don't know much more, but apparently, by the time he
did get to the hospital he had lost a good pint or two of blood.
Why phoning anyone did not occur to him is anyone's
guess.
I hate to speculate, but I suspect we
may see something along these lines in the BC case; perhaps she was not
thinking clearly and decided to go home and get cleaned up and then
return?
2. I arrived at this one a few minutes
after it happened. I've told this one before on the list
previously (yes, the technique he used is improper). A former
colleague was working alone in the lab one afternoon (people were in and
out, he just happened to be alone at that moment). He needed to
deprotonate something and he went to the fridge in search of
n-butyllithium. He did spy a bottle of t-butyllithium and thought
to himself "n-butyl, t-butyl, basically the same thing....". As
he dispensed the t-butyllithium from the bottle using a syringe, he
inverted the bottle, pumped in nitrogen, withdrew his aliquot and then,
with the leaky-septum/overpressured bottled, withdrew the syringe.
A stream of t-BuLi immediately shot out onto the benchtop.
His first thought was "Fire! Working alone! Pull fire
alarm!" Not a bad idea. Except that he put the bottle
down....on the flaming benchtop while he went to summon help.
Right idea, wrong execution. The bottle then went up, and the fire
almost got out of control before another worker came along and put the
fire out.
When I think back through my
undergrad, grad, postdoc, and professor days of countless late night and
overnight lab experiments alone or in otherwise sparsely populated
buildings, I can see two sides here. At the time, I would have
been outraged if someone told me that I couldn't work alone (our
instrument and glovebox time was always at a premium and we had to work
in shifts; some experiments could *only* be done at night). In
retrospect, the folly of not having and *enforcing* a defined protocol
for late night/alone work is quite clear. The institutions
I was at did not enforce any such policies if they even had them.
Hopefully, things have changed some in the past 10-15 years, but
if not, this BC incident should be a wake up
call.
Rob Toreki
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On Jun 28, 2011, at 7:57 AM, Secretary, ACS
Division of Chemical Health and Safety wrote:
Gail
asked me to pass this along to the list as background for some of the
discussion occurring here. I would also note that there is a lot of
speculation about the event in the media and blog-world; a summary can
be found at
http://cenblog.org/the-safety-zone/2011/06/bost
on-college-student-injured-in-lab-explosion/- Ralph
From: Gail Hall <gail.hall**At_Symbol_Here**bc.edu>
Date: Jun 27
2011
The Chemistry Department and EHS at Boston College train
every graduate student initially and annually to call Campus Safety in
the event of an emergency. There are signs at every phone. There is even
a question on the quiz that they have to take to get their keys.
At the moment we are still collecting information and don't have
a cause for the explosion or a reason that the student acted as she did.
We seem to have had our share of learning opportunities in the
past 18 months, and I will share our hypotheses and/or conclusions on
this one when we have been able to fully research the matter. I
hate to think I have enough material for an article in JCHAS, but it's
beginning to look that way.
In the meantime, if anyone has any
ideas about sources of pictograms to help communicate certain things to
students for whom English is the second language, we'd appreciate the
information.
Gail
Gail Hall
Director,
EH&S
Boston
College
gail.hall**At_Symbol_Here**bc.edu
617-552-0300
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