First, folks, if you’re interested in the chemistry job market and haven’t already seen the blog roundtable discussion this week, head on over to Chemjobber’s recap today (note that Leigh at C&ENtral Science’s Just Another Electron Pusher contributed to the discussion with a post on Too many PhDs?).
Now, chemical health and safety news from the past week:
- From the Blogosphere: OSHA should undertake an educational campaign on finding and fixing chemical exposures at The Pump Handle
and Another biodiesel fire at Risk and Safety Blog - The Vision Council and the American Society of Safety Engineers released a brief on Eye Safety At-a-Glance: Protecting Your Vision At Work (pdf)
- Another bombhouse, this time in Connecticut? Nah, “just” fireworks
- South
ernCarolina fines Tanner Industries $91,000 “for a string of emergency preparedness failures they say occurred before a fatal [ammonia] leak near its Swansea plant last year” - OSHA fined WRR Environmental Services nearly $800,000 for health and safety violations identified in a fire investigation; “the fire was likely caused when an ignition source within a solvent sludge feed tank ignited vapors, blowing the roof off the tank and igniting its contents”
- Federal regulators report progress at Southern California nuclear plant
Fires and explosions:
- A third person has died from that Dec. 9 explosion at AL Solutions in West Virginia; the workers were handling titanium and zirconium, but the cause of the incident is still unknown
- Furfuryl alcohol exploded at a Dow Chemical site in Massachusetts
- Something caught fire at a state chemical examiner’s laboratory in India; “the samples that were destroyed were mostly of abkari cases, including illicit liquor cases, unauthorised possession of liquor and consumption of liquor in public places and other chemicals”
- Something in exhaust ductwork caught fire at Sun Chemical in Michigan
- Magnesium caught fire in a kiln in the arts center at the Universioty of Wisconsin, La Crosse
- Improperly stored household chemicals at an apartment complex in South Carolina, displacing 34 people
Leaks and spills:
- Something when a drum ruptured at Hawker Beechcraft–”a woman was in a room of the building where cabinets are installed into aircrafts when she heard a popping and crackling sound coming from a fire-proof cabinet. As she was trying to leave the room, one of the 55-gallon drums ruptured.” (A good example of why you shouldn’t wear earphones in the lab!)
- Ethanol at Tilbury Docks in the U.K.
- Ammonia at a factory in Johannesburg, South Africa
- Potassium cyanide at Tyco Electronics in the U.K.
- Sulfuric acid in a courthouse in Massachusetts
- On roads and railways–chemicals related to painting, muriatic acid, isophthaloyl chloride, and xylene
December 20, 2010
“Southern Carolina” – is that Georgia?
December 20, 2010
Good guess, CR, but in this case it’s merely a typo.
December 21, 2010
Hah, you never know. I like to think of Canada as Northern Dakota, so why not Georgia as Southern Carolina.
December 22, 2010
“I like to think of Canada as Northern Dakota” Careful, CR. We’ve got a few Canadians on staff and them’s fightin’ words!
I was trying to figure out why I wrote “Southern Carolina”–it’s rather unusual, as typos go–and realized that it’s probably because I write Southern California so often.