April 20th, 2012 • 05:04
Friday chemical safety round-up
Chemical health and safety news from the past week:
- Chemjobber discussed electrostatics and glass-lined reactors
- It’s the Rheo Thing posted about rubber glove safety and the general role of safety officers
- The Chemical Safety Board released its report and video on a 2010 explosion at a DuPont plant in New York that killed one worker and injured another; CSB found that welding on the roof of an empty polyvinylfluoride slurry storage tank ignited vapor that DuPont workers didn’t believe would be in there and didn’t test for; earlier in 2010, CSB had issued a safety bulletin on the dangers of “hot work” (pdf), or “activities with the potential to create a source of ignition”
- Destroying the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons will take an extra two years and $2 billion
- Massachusetts town eyes new requirements for General Chemical as hazardous waste facility prepares to close
- Neighborhoods near former lead factories show hazardous levels of lead in soil
- EPA issued fracking emissions rules
- Chemists discovered a new colorful detector for phosgene
Fires and explosions:
- A fire at 3F Fluorochemical, in China’s Inner Mongolia region, started when tanks of “VDF” (vinylidene fluoride?) gas caught fire and exploded; three worders were injured
- A fire at India’s Physical Research Laboratory started in an waste storage area
Leaks, spills, and other exposures:
- Boron trifluoride leaked from a cylinder being shipped from Idaho National Laboratory to a nuclear reactor
- Formalin spilled when a worker dropped a container at a medical center in Massachusetts, a Canadian hospital had a formaldehyde spill, and hydrochloric acid spilled at a dental lab in North Dakota
- Two students passed out in a lab involving ethanol and food coloring at Baylor University
- Radioactivity detected in a University of Memphis scrap metal dumpster turned out to be from an old “metal door apparatus” that contained naturally radioactive materials
Not covered: meth labs; ammonia leaks; incidents involving floor sealants, cleaning solutions, or pool chemicals; transportation spills; and fires from oil, natural gas, or other fuels.
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