It’s not. Sorry for the thought it could be. Really no disrespect and only wanted to take your metaphor and make it more accurate. I should have said the truck was on fire or the road.
I used to work with pyrophoric materials and used to make catalysts at large scale when I first got hired out of college
I had two exit doors on both side of my hood and 5 more in the room itself. The most solvent that was present in that building was in gallon jugs - and the r&d lab was a football field away from production and storage
Also had fume hoods and several fire extinguishers (the appropriate ones) mounted everywhere. Everything was purged of oxygen and done in a closed system under nitrogen.
I still didn’t feel safe and had a reaction run on me just like every other chemist I worked with.
This shit is like lighting a pilot light to a bomb
Please be careful. Reach out if you don’t feel safe. …and if you feel safe you should rethink that
Thanks for the support above. I care about everyone and would be devastated to see this this kind of loss of life happen again.
Sending love out again to David’s family and friends and the others lost in this accident
There was a small scale incident when I was in school. They were cleaning out a vapor film metal deposition chamber with nitric acid. The kid threw nitrile gloves into a mostly empty bottle of nitric acid, and capped it tight. Generated enough vapor pressure to explode the bottle and send glass shards into some kids eye 20 feet away.
It doesn’t take exotic chemicals or extreme conditions to create a clusterfuck with chemistry.
Yeah this type of thing is why I used to literally get mad when people would suggest triisobutylaluminum openly on here. Some tech shouldn’t be publicized because there’s no knowing how many people will blindly chase after it thinking it’s “the next Delta 8.” There’s no telling how many people browse on here without posting so you never really know who is taking your advice and how badly they may misinterpret it.
I think this forum needs an upper level open source subsection. Still open source but not waving dangerous SOP’s in the eyes of people just looking to make a quick buck in their garage. It’s bad enough seeing all the randos going and buying cans of butane and open blasting in their kitchen thinking they can just DIY everything in life. Personally I think an upper level subsection would keep some threads more on-topic and I can say I’d feel a lot more comfortable putting info out there if I knew the audience was not going to misuse it. Just my 0.02.
Yeah but making it easier for those people just means everyone else has to jump through more hoops to do things right.
That doesn’t even get into the safety concerns of the product they are going to end up making if they don’t blow up their neighborhood.
I couldn’t tell you the number of people I’ve encountered over the years trying to make consumable products but can’t even figure out how to calculate basic percentages.
I’m just in a weird mood today, not really as flippant as I seemed. I understand the urge, but I just don’t think gatekeeping is as effective as being open about the magnitude of the risk.
I’ve extinguished several lab fires. A lot of adrenaline involved, for sure.
In grad school there was always someone defending their thesis every or every other month. Always on a Friday and there was always a big party the same night. Tradition was that the most of the Friday was spent on cleaning the labs and and getting rid of whatever had accumulated and starting to take up precious shelf and hood space.
The department was a 600 ft long corridor with labs and desks for the grad students on one side, professors and admin on the other side.
I was in suit and tie, walking in the corridor towards where the party was to be held to help with setting up tables, etc.
As I am passing a lab I hear the whooshing sound of a solvent fire starting and immediately after, a lone girl by her hood screaming at the top of her lungs. She was in the process of getting rid of smaller volumes of dry solvent in bottles also containing metallic sodium.
The whole inside of the hood is just a raging fire. I grab the first extinguisher while I am screaming for support. I know where number two is. Before I have emptied number two there’s already a line behind me ready to pass extinguishers number three, four, five.
The whole episode was over in a minute after the fire kept kicking back in a few times. I was the big hero that night.
Moral of the story is to always know where the extinguishers are. You need several of them, not only what placates the local Fire Marshal.
And they cannot be restricted in terms of access. When a fire breaks out, you need to act within seconds.
Dam dude it really took 5 fire extinguisher to put that out? I’m gonna keep 5 by me at all times then since I work alone most of the time you brought up a point I never thought about
1 fire extinguisher might not be enough. I have 8 in my 1000 square foot building but only 1 in reach while doing a reaction
My high school chemistry teacher told us her first day in grad school she was assigned the task of cleaning out a lab. There were (as there always are) assorted unlabeled beakers and one with a moldy green substance in the bottom. She picked it up and carried it across the room. It was metallic sodium, and the oil that it normally sits under had evaporated after who knows how long in storage. It picked up enough water vapor as she walked across the room to blow all the cabinets off the wall 10 seconds after she set it down and walked away. Sodium and potassium metal are no joke.
I’ve had a radical reaction “blow up” twice in my hood, no fire but took a full day to clean the hood after the first incident. The very next day my hood is spotless and I try again.
Same result but this time cleaning the hood only takes a few hours. Third time the reaction worked for some reason and I never revisited it.
All other incidents have been with sodium metal and someone inadvertently leaving traces of solvent in the wash sink. It only takes the tiniest speck of sodium and water/solvent to kick things off.
When I first got a key to the chem library I went on a tour of the basement. Found a 6" thick book on designing gunpowder factories and half of it was designing blast berms.
