another story, my"lab" was in my garage. I got a new deep freezer and had my wook who Im living with clean the garage to place the freezer. he was using a shop vac and i heard it shut off!!! Uh oh!
So I ride carbureted motorcycle and have a mercury gauge to balance the carbs. Wook walks in my house carrying the vac gauge upside down asking what is this?
He just vacuumed mercury into the air!!! He denied vaccing it and i used a damn syringe to suck up the mercury i could find. that was right before i started posting on here- i blame the mercury. Keep messed up people FAR away, and dont even try and interact with them while running oil.
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Lab tech running an MEP30 in cryo temps.
Too high nitro assist pressure, we just trained these techs to run live resin they had been running crude in the mep’s previous so high nitro assist meant faster transfers, no leak risks.
-65c solvent is way different than room temp 
All 3 columns leaking propane on the ground while the techs dumbass runs out to the office yelling at me and the manager that there is a big leak lol. He bumped the assist up to above 70 PSI and thats a no no for cold cold temps with the PTFE sandwich gaskets they were running back in 2019.
I get in there with a puddle on the ground (least 10lbs of propane) and well within the disastrous stoichiometric ratios.
Never felt as much adrenaline in my life lol.
Columns bottom clamps were spewing propane.
Popped the nitro assist off and released head pressure, stopped the leaks.
We had some clients on site checking out product we ran for them the past weeks, that day too…
One improperly gounded item or static charge that day, and it would have been a news scene, with our clients in the building too.
Needless to say that tech never got to run that machine again.
Think we left him running the rotovaps and decarb after that…
This was at a public MSO FYI.
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I was once trying to snip the end off a hose that had nutrient salts flowing through it and caught a fan cord in the clippers. This was when the movie The Sixth Sense was popular. It shocked me so bad I thought I was the walking dead. I was convinced that dead people can’t use cel phones, so I had to call a friend to ask if I was still alive.
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In my early lab days we were working on trying to crash CBDa from crude using water and super acids, we had a 50 gallon ss vat we had just finished mixing our water and crude and testing the ph (which was below 0) when our overhead agitation bar went out, thats when the CEO walked in got mad nothing was happening and decided to PUT HIS ARM into the vat to try and mix it, he got about half way up is arm befor any of us could even say anything and as He started screaming and pulled it out we could see the flesh melting off his arm 
, I thought he was dead, luckily my mentor was there and was able to get his his arm neutralized with PH up, dude spent next 3 months in the ER and lost a majority of his arm, the most fucked up part of the story is his arm caused such a PH swing that the CBDa actually crashed out of the water
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Holy shit. What acid?
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One of those basic, hands in, kind of bosses…
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Lol he still brags to this day that out of a room of educated chemists he was the one who was able to crack the code
@Neutral I’m pretty sure it was 2Mol of trifluoromethanesulfonic acid
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well…he did provide a hand in solving it…
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He’s lucky to be alive holy shit. I wouldn’t even expose that to air let alone touch it.
Thanks for sharing, I think you win the most graphic award; I’ll give a hand to that 
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I’ve had a few of those! Yeah super cold is no joke, but you don’t always think about it in the moment the same way you do hot things or fire hazard items. I’ve donated some skin to the cryofreezer more than a few times.
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Everyone else is asking the wrong questions…
What I want to know is who smoked that dude’s arm CBDa?
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…I still haven’t gotten an answer to the real questions…
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Don’t forget to message me.
Had someone running the x10 that wasn’t too experienced or bright. He took the soaked tubes out of the machine after the run was done and just let them sit there in the room with the door open next to the x10. He went away and grabbed more tubes to load and put everything in place for his next run. At this point the butane that had been warming on the used tubes had already seeped into the hallway. He didn’t shut the door and turned on the vac pump that was right outside of the room. The spark from the pump ignited the gas which ignited the tubes in a 10 x 10 room. He ran out like a cartoon character thinking he was on fire, would have killed everyone if he was. It just took a few squirts of the fire extinguisher to put out the fire. Be careful who you let in your lab.
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Okay this next one is extremely foolish didn’t turn out to be an “accident” but could have ended up extremely badly.
So it’s the early nineties, my buddy and I hear about this pretty cool psychedelic that we want to try to crack the code in manufacturing it (no internet back then so you actually had to put in the work and research as much as you could). So we set up a small lab in his apartment and decided to work later at night so we can keep some windows open to circulate fresh air in and out of our little lab. It is very hot and humid over there so everyone always keeps their windows closed and the AC on all day. We were worried that in daytime someone could walk by and smell what we were doing and so late night it was. After a few nights of working I noticed that there was a car pulling in and parking right by our window, so we had to try to be ultra quiet for a few minutes and also turn off the air circulations going through the house. And then the next night I noticed around the same time at night a car pulls in and park right by his window again. Not wanting to attract attention i didn’t want to peek through the curtains and see who it was. After a few nights of the car pulling in right next to his window almost at the same time every night we rigged up something to where we can see who it is without being noticed. And so that night we seen who it is. As usual it’s about the same time the car pulls in. Unfortunately it’s a sheriff deputy police car. The sheriff deputy Parks it right by our window gets out and gets on the stairs going into the apartment directly above us. And so we had a lab going for a little while with a sheriff’s deputy living right above it. Needless to say the lab was promptly shut down and moved to a more “intelligent” location that was vetted a little bit better before moving in. Not so much of an accident but more than make up for it by entertaining you guys by the amount of stupid contributed by me at the time. So I thought some of you may get chuckle out of it. Fortunately nowadays because of the legality of what we are doing we don’t have to worry about making mistakes that will send us on an all expense paid extended vacation into a gated extremely well secured community.
Yes I was young and stupid.
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what was your procedure vs what he did? he left the door open, or didnt put the spent tubes in the proper space or turning on a pump or all 3
In a similar vain not an accident but definitely not great.
I used to do research in the material science department at my university; we were making thin film solar cells, my group made the devices, I synthesized compounds for the active layers of organic solar cells. Since the compounds I was making were aromatic, you need reactive reagents and really dry solvents.
Being in the physics department, I had barely any glassware or equipment; I had a 3 round bottom flasks, a schlenk line, a few plugs, an addition funnel and a condenser to my name. I had to dry my solvents myself; one day, I had to dry tetrahydrofuran (THF, a very carcinogenic solvent) and my condenser broke. I wasn’t able to get a new one and this would have set me back a few weeks, so I hooked up my addition funnel to the top of a rbf full of MgSO4, vacuumed it out, filled it with N2, and just held a bag of ice to the addition funnel as the condenser. Not the most fun or safe thing to do.
I guess I get to say I was the condenser, with a possible increased risk of liver cancer.
I also had some fun times with TiCl4, using THF as a solvent, I saw that it wasn’t that dry because upon adding the acid to the solvent it angrily fumed and sputtered spitting out HCl and Cl2 gas. I hid around the corner of the fume hood during the addition because I thought it was going to explode. Fortunatly it did not explode but my god.
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SOP was to take spent tubes immediately to the off-gas room and to have the door shut at all times.