Thanks for sharing and this what I mean this tread to be all about…!!
Bet ya we can get a Darwin story award going on here with all the people and different settings…
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Most of my terrifying lab stories are of old bosses insisting “organic lead” is safe for epileptic kids to consume.
The only other really sketchy thing that’s happened is trying to make insta-isolate in my spd by pulling light vac and spinning like fuck. Obviously I got pentane fumes shooting out of my pump but alas nothing caught fire or exploded and that was the last time I tried fucking around like that. (Even though it kind of worked)
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One time i sucked a bunch of solvent into a vacuum pump by overflowing a buchner funnel, and i was looking at the outlet so it blasted me straight in the face. Not a great time.
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Oo yeah I’ve sent etOH straight out the other side of a pump as well while filtering. That’s a free shower right there fam 
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I definitely have a few more than id like to have, first lab i worked with decarbed on hot plates, in GLASS BEAKERS, so one day 2l of crude is finished on the hotplate so lab director decides he should grab it and set it on the stainless table for a second, the second it hits the room temp table the glass shatters putting 2 liters of 150C oil all over dudes legs and shoes, if he hadn’t had flame resistant coveralls on i think it would of been much worse, melted shoes/pants, he had blisters on his feet inbetween his toes and it looked awful. They changed to stainless after that but that’s only cause they had just switched to “good” glass after similar thing happened resulting in loss of a few liters of disty.
Last company in denver i worked for hired an ETS trainer/install tech to take over my job, despite installing hundreds of machines across the country, he still was cool with taking a cap off of pressurized crc vessels, antiquing himself, and the c1d1 room, thank god for ppe!
A group i worked for offgassed their post bho run biomass right next to there extremely hot, unserviced, overworked air compressor. I have no idea how it didnt catch fire.
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Heres mine, this one was the worst so far in my life …knocks on wood
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I think I have one…
Used to work at a place where ethanol tincture spills were cleaned up with wet vac. Nothing special, just a horribly old and beaten up wet vacuum missing wheels and attachments
How bad do you call that?
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Genius and insanity are often straddling the same line
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A smart mother fucker sounds like a crazy mother fucker to those people who can’t conceive conceptual concepts!
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I rarely post, but here I go.
Working for a public MSO as their lead executive/senior Process Engineer. Last time I do that for any company too lol.
I had multiple type 7 locations under my watch/supervision.
We were giving a tour of one of our labs one day, and were doing active runs in our ETS MEP30’s. After finishing touring the booth, my extractors went on to continue their days runs.
5 minutes after I leave the booth, the lead extractor finds me giving the tour a look at our distillation setups and whispers to me there is a BIG leak in the booth and he needs help lol.
I slip away, and open my booth door to find about 10-20lbs of soaked hydrocarbon all shimmering on the bottom of the floor of the booth lol.
I tell everyone to evacuate, immediately release all nitrogen head pressure (leak was from a faulty gasket), and the leak stopped.
The day was spend iso’ing crude off the floor, but at least no one died…
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I was sitting next to a pot full of butane back when I used to Büchner funnel…and my phone fell out of my pocket and bounced off the rim towards the outside. I didn’t know better atm so I put it back in my pocket. Then it happened again. After that I thought what would happen and put it on a shelf. The Trap Gods were looking over me that day
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Got hit by an exploding door?
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Did the people you were giving the tour to know this was all going on?
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Was using a hot water bath to purge solvent from a open blast run made with of those big jacketed 2.5lb closed column tubes from BVV (I really hope they don’t sell those anymore) don’t ever buy one please
My “grow partner” decided it wasn’t purging fast enough for his liking. We had an empty oven and more material that needed ran, whatever the excuse was. I was 20 and stupid/intimidated at the time and did not want to argue with him.
He took it upon himself to bring over a hot plate with an exposed heating element, and instructed me to plug it in and put the Pyrex on it.
I plugged it in, with my face directly over the dish, and as soon as I walked back into the house we heard a large “whoosh!” when the heating element kicked on it ignited the butane, scorching the side of the house all the way up to the gutters. Very close call.
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That thing is sexy
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Not my story, actually my old boss thought he could run extraction while I was off for the week having a baby.
He was trying to unload the biomass columns and used an air compressor to push instead of the n2 bottle that was next to the columns. As soon as the biomass shot out of the column it ignited from the static and oxygen and the whole column rack shot up in flames. He contained the fire with an extinguisher and then never tried to work in the lab again.
Even more recently I had to kick someone out my lab because they tried to vape next to our GC and the shelf of solvents. When I immediately shouted don’t smoke in my lab he tried to argue that it wasnt smoke it was vape. Same guy that did this also decarbs in beakers at his “lab” 
literally clueless to the fact he was holding an ignition source next to solvent.
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No cold trap?
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Back in college I was open blasting and had purged my tray for about 2 hours on the hot plate. I lived in Marquette and it was like -20 outside so I took it inside to finish on the stovetop. I stepped away to take a dab or whatever dumb shit I was doing and came back to 3-4 foot flames shooting off the tray.
As I scrambled to find a fire extinguisher my roommate, as cool as a cucumber, walked to the kitchen, grabbed a towel, got it wet and tossed it over the tray and managing to save the wax
Only managed to slightly burn the cabinet doors right above the oven. Talk about lucky! Granted there couldn’t have been much solvent left to burn but still a ridiculously stupid mistake
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Lmfao, no. They had no idea. I had them take a cigarette break outside the facility, our front.
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