CENtral Science

Friday chemical safety round-up

Chemical health and safety news from the past week:

• Celebrate lab personal protective equipment on June 4! “If you wear your PPE and you consider it a smart, effective way to stay safe in the lab, would you send me a picture?” Chemjobber asks. Send photos to LabPPEDay@gmail.com and they’ll appear on Tumblr on the 4th. Anonymous contributions are welcome.
• For all the contributions for this week’s #ToxicCarnival (aka chemistry bloggers’ favorite toxic chemicals), go visit Sciencegeist: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
• Via @Canageek, an Organic Synthesis prep for hydrogen cyanide with this safety note: “Gattermann recommends that the operator smoke during the preparation, for he found that a trace of hydrogen cyanide is sufficient to give the tobacco smoke a highly characteristic flavor. This preliminary warning is useful in case of leaky apparatus or a faulty hood.”
• John at It’s the Rheo Thing discusses a monomer he won’t work with: Urishiols
• Dow is expanding its pilot program on university lab safety to Penn State
• Mere weeks after issuing its report on a fatal explosion from spark-producing “hot work” at a DuPont facility in New York, they’re now heading to Arkansas to investigate another hot work incident at a Long Brothers Oil Company tank site
• Ohio legislation will give doctors information on the chemicals used by oil and gas drillers, but will prevent them from sharing that information with the public–including public health and regulatory agencies

Fires and explosions:

• A fire involving (possibly empty) acetylene tanks at an Air Liquide plant in Louisiana may have started with a faulty valve
• A reactor overpressurized and exploded, blowing a hole in the roof at MFG Chemical in Georgia; the facility was making Coagulant 129, which is used for water treatment
• Queen’s University Belfast, in Ireland, had a chemical storeroom fire, no word yet on the cause

Leaks, spills, and other exposures:

• A chlorine release at a Georgia Gulf chemical and vinyls plant in Louisiana sent four workers to hospital
• Fumaric acid spilled at a Con-way Freight building in Massachusetts
• An employee at Schott North America in Massachusetts mistakenly mixed three gal of sodium hypochlorite with 100 gal of hydrochloric acid, producing chlorine gas
• Also in Massachusetts, a forklift punctured a 250-gal container of 50% sulfuric acid at Pan-Glo New England
• Workers at Macklanburg-Duncan in Oklahoma were mixing a sodium hydroxide solution about 3 p.m. when the solution started smoking and three workers became nauseous, supposedly because whatever chemicals were involved were mislabeled (NaOH and water? or were they mixing the NaOH with something else?). The company “manufactures building products such as weather stripping, flooring and decorative moldings.”
• A Princeton University postdoc was treated for chemical burns to her face when a (waste?) bottle containing nitric acid and an organic solvent blew up. It was in a cabinet, but the force of the explosion forced open the door. (Yet another example of why you should always wear PPE in lab, even if you personally are not doing anything dangerous.)

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.