@Phoenixlabs710 Glad nobody was hurt.
Was your team-mate appropriately beaten for their idiocy?
Placed in the stockade until they could define “source of ignition”?
Has the vac in question been renamed Phoenix and made the lab mascot? 
Explicitly stating that you were asking about hydrocarbons when OP stated CO2 would have been appropriate. “…we had an Incident…” was certainly a clue…but it’s much more helpful if we don’t have to guess what you’re asking.
Especially as you already had experimental verification that using a vac to empty hydrocarbon columns was a bad idea™.
(or my new favourite; GRAUS!)
link to the explosion proof vac @Phoenixlabs710 mentions below…