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Lab safety violations

Re: Re: Lab safety violations

Mr. Skinny said:

Can I suggest that the person should be wearing a full face shield and possibly should be working behind a benchtop blast shield?
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You can suggest it, and everyone will ignore the good advice until there's a lawsuit, or a massive fine, or an Important Person is injured in that way.


AK-Dave said:

You work for God?!!
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I don't work at all! They pay me to look like I'm working. It's the same thing, you figure out pretty quickly. Bare minimum performance, and you get paid the same as someone with words like "superior" on their yearly review.
 
American said:

- Most safety goggles don't seem to slant down far enough, especially on school children. An exploding liquid could easily shoot up under the glasses straight into your eyes.

- Safety showers are often built without drains, making one reluctant to use it when they should at the price of flooding the building. Also, you're supposed to strip contaminated clothing off of you... although I am the sexiest scientist I've ever known and don't mind being naked in public, I knew one elder gentleman past his physical prime who was too modest to remove his shirt soaked with corrosive chromium-something. He got burned.

- I know professors who pick up ethidium bromide stained gels with their bare hands. They get huffy when I suggest they wear gloves.

- There are fanatical fans of mercury thermometers over alcohol-based. They rant that the EPA is out to get them, while the agency unfairly allows mercury-vapor headlights.

- Some tasks must be done under a fume hood. Unless it's slightly awkward, then they just don't bother.
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We had a situation in which a cleaner picked up a very old bottle of TCA. The plastic had perished and crumbled in her hands and she got covered in TCA. Quick thinking on behalf of some meant she was in the female showers within a minute and covered with burn-pads by the time the ambulance arrived. She was very lucky and there was no scarring, it could have been very bad indeed.

There are two reasons to wear gloves. 1 to keep stuff off you. 2 to keep you off stuff. I normally just wear gloves in the lab as a default.

I dont wear goggles which may be silly.

The problem with alcohol thermometers is that they easily get air bubbles in the alcohol column which means they are then effectively useless.

I keep my lunch in the fridge along with all the biochemica.
:p
 
I had a biochemistry technician who deliberately jemmied the safety catch of the centrifuge so she could reach in and stop the rotor with her hand. When I protested, she said "I don't have time to wait for it to stop by itself." We had to replace the whole damn machine.

Memory triggered by that last post. When I was doing my PhD I used to arrive half an hour early because of the way the train timetable ran. I had started an assay in the lab, with only myself and the cleaner present. The cleaner toppled a Winchester with her mop, and it broke on the floor. Clear watery liquid spread around the lino.

She was about to fetch a cloth to mop the mess up by hand when I stopped her and said, "What is that you've spilled?" Concentrated sulphuric acid, that's what it was. I screamed a bit and dragged her away from it, and we stood there slightly helplessly as the stuff began to eat into the leg of a table. Fortunately at that moment the senior technician arrived. She knew what to do , and did it. Nobody was hurt, but we had to evacuate the lab and it took all morning for the area to be made safe.

The really stupid thing was that the Winchester of conc. sulphuric had just been sitting on the floor, unprotected, while next to it was a wire cage containing two other Winchesters. The cage of course meant that the bottles in it couldn't be toppled by accident. What did they contain? Distilled water.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
What did they contain? Distilled water.
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Hey, don't forget that water causes far more deaths each year than sulphuric acid.
 
wayrad said:
edited to add: Chiral compounds? No kidding? Do the enantiomers smell different?:eek:
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The famous example is limonene, one form of which smells of lemon, and the other of orange. That's the commonly-repeated story, anyway. I'm sure I read somewhere that this was a bit of an urban legend. There are opposite forms in the peels of the respective fruits, but I wonder if one molecule is responsible for the smell of lemons and oranges. But then I've never actually sniffed the enantiomers of limonene. Geni?

Another one is carvone: one form smells of caraway, the other of spearmint. Not that I've tested this, either.
 
For your amusement......my most interesting safety incident of the last year:

I came to work one morning and an acquaintance asked me if I had talked to our security person recently. When I inquired why, I was told "Dr. (X) found a bullet in the tail light of their car when they got home yesterday". I'm thinking they were involved in some sort of drive-by shooting, and still didn't understand why I should be concerned.

I went to see Dr. (X) and discovered that the "bullet" was a 23mm? (forget the size at the moment) armor piercing incendiary Soviet round that had escaped from the gun range down the hill from our lab.

Scary........
 
Re: Re: Lab safety violations

Jon_in_london said:

(snip)
I dont wear goggles which may be silly.
(snip)
I keep my lunch in the fridge along with all the biochemica.
:p
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Gaak:hit:
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Lab safety violations

Jon_in_london said:


Hey, if it doesnt kill me it makes me stronger. (except polio, of course)
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I can understand it if your lab is like mine. If I kept my lunch in the communal food fridge in my building it probably would kill me.
 
Keeping your lunch with the samples is not a habit you pick up working in a bacteriology lab!
This thread reminds me too much of work, recent update of COSHH :(
 
Prester John said:
Keeping your lunch with the samples is not a habit you pick up working in a bacteriology lab!
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It is if you work in a biochemistry lab though. (Hangs head in shame....)

Real horror story warning. Once I'd been to the shop and bought some frozen food and there wasn't anywhere in a reasonable freezer to keep it till going-home time - so I sealed it in a few extra layers of plastic and shoved it in the freezer where they keep the post-mortemed bodies that might be required as evidence in legal cases (veterinary bodies, that is). I'm not proud of myself. (I'm not dead either, though.)

Rolfe.
 
All of our refrigerators have to be marked "Food Only", or "Chemical Storage - No Food", or something similar.

I haven't found mixed storage in over 10 years, luckily.
 
Prester John said:
Keeping your lunch with the samples is not a habit you pick up working in a bacteriology lab!
This thread reminds me too much of work, recent update of COSHH :(
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Oh, there will be hell to pay if anyone senior ever sees my lunch and can of coke in the fridge next to the ethidium bromide, E coli plates and P32. But since no-one senior ever does any lab work, Im pretty safe.
 
True enough!

People do get hurt and killed all the time doing things in an unsafe manner.

People drink, then drive cars.
People sky-dive without the proper equipment.
People ride motorcycles without helmets.
People work on live electrical lines without checking to see if the power is off or not.
etc.

Lab workers are no exception either!
 
One thing with Safety showers and eye washes. How often do you actually run them? Ours are constantly being filled with sand, dirt, and etc. To test the shower, just put a big garabage can under it.

Jon in London wrote:
The problem with alcohol thermometers is that they easily get air bubbles in the alcohol column which means they are then effectively useless.
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You can fix this! Carefully run the thermometer under a flame so that the alcohol goes all the way up. Allow to cool. All done!:D

We're being trained on Chemical Safety, disposal etc. after the first of the year.
 
cbish said:
You can fix this! Carefully run the thermometer under a flame so that the alcohol goes all the way up. Allow to cool. All done!:D
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You are heating a sealed tube in a flame. You clearly have stronger nerves than I do.
 
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