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Asked by anon-259758 on 30 Sep 2020.
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James Smallcombe answered on 30 Sep 2020:
I’ve blown up a varying size things with electricity by mistake. Expensive electronics and once a high powered magnet. But never in a dangerous way, we tend to take a lot of precautions.
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Pam Harrison answered on 30 Sep 2020:
Whilst I was preparing some solutions in volumetric flask, I dropped one. Then was rather silly and tried to catch it after it had fallen into the bench top and smashed. I cut my finger and had to be sorted out by a first aider. It was fine I now just gave s tiny scar. I learnt my lesson though, never try and catch something you’ve dropped!
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Sonia Rodriguez answered on 1 Oct 2020:
Work in the lab is closely supervised by the health and safety department to minimise the risks as much as possible. They make sure we have risk assessments in place and all the safety measures and equipment needed for each of the experiments. I’ve been working in a lab for six years now and I’ve never had any accident.
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Gaby Mayorga Adame answered on 1 Oct 2020:
On research cruises, sometimes we lost expensive instruments when cables snap. Once in uni we lost a plankton net because it wasn’t tied to the boat 0.o
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Tim Knapp answered on 2 Oct 2020:
In NHS Blood and Transplant we are very risk averse (meaning we don’t like taking risks).
Sometimes things don’t go as planned though. We had a flood at our centre in Filton (a 60 million Pound facility) when a tunnel behind us that drained a steam partially collapsed, blocked up then there was nowhere for the water to go so it was a foot deep in al the labs and offices on the ground floor. We were operational a week later and won an award for It. -
Helen Playford answered on 8 Oct 2020:
One day I was sitting at my desk when I heard a loud bang from the direction of our lab. Moments later the smoke alarm went off and I thought “oh dear”. I was the fire warden so I went along to the lab to make sure people were evacuating, and saw that the smoke was coming from one of our furnaces. I turned off the power to the lab to make it safe and went outside to talk to the fire brigade. When everything had cooled down I went to investigate and it turned out that one of my reactions had exploded the steel vessel it was put in. Now, it’s important to understand that this had never happened before, so I had to investigate. It turned out that two of the chemicals in the mixture were so good at reacting together, this had happened before the intended reaction had a chance to happen, and it happened very, very fast which was why it exploded! I only found one mention of this unintended reaction in the literature, and that was in a paper from nearly 50 years ago! Nobody had any idea that it was even a possibility before this happened…
Luckily no-one was hurt and the furnace was fixable! But sometimes even with the best intentions, chemistry can surprise you, which is why we wear safety equipment and keep detailed notes of what we’re doing!
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