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For those not aware, that first story implies he had to wait five days in a general ward in the hospital before he could get into a burn ward with the doctors and equipment to properly treat his burns at a high level - not that they waited five days to seek help because it was just too far away.
i got it initially, but not the reason. Isn't the main concern, like, you know the major skin eating chemical and or thermal burns? what prevented him being treated for his burns for 5 days? and what burns are we even talking about? i get that he got burned as in pour gasoline and light it burn, but i inferred with the skin falling and those nice details that there was also some sort of chemical reaction, burn? i'm a physicist with very little knowledge of chemistry as you can see lol, but i would guess those 2 types of injuries are of a differrent nature right, and they have to wait till the chemical shit flesh eating process or whatever was finished, or at least halted, stopped neutralized before healing the remaining burned flesh? would the chemical nasty stuff be over by then, as in either naturally (or not) eliminated, the tissue either removed or 'detoxifyed' (you can't imagine how painful writing that word was) and then the burn deparrtment handles the leftover damage from chems and heat? reminds me of a story that happened before i was born to my grandma, you got to imagine they used bleach as hand soap or whatever back then cause i can't imagine being able to do this today with widely available household products. i mean she used hydrochloric acid and other nasty stuff regularly, so she knew what corrosion was and when she should be careful but one day, don't ask me what caused it idk and she's dead so mystery, she was cleaning outsiide with some nasty stuff, wearing heavy duty chem gloves, and finished. a few hours later her forearm began to burn, moderateely, then quickly became intolerable. she was rushed to the hospital which gave her a prescription consisting of her soaking her arm 24/7 for whatever number of days or hours in some mixture, she said that anyway she would have done it a the pain instantly disappeared when immeresed and immediately came back when her rm was exposed to air again. only after a while of that did they address physical damage thee stufff had done, and boy even 30 years later you could see the burn and that it wasn't a simple heat one, either a horrible chem one or some result of complications cause it looked nasty
@@alexisjuillard4816 White phosphorous would just be a straight thermal burn. Molten phosphorous ignites spontaneously in air- ua-cam.com/video/LMlXhJevCV0/v-deo.html
@@AshKetchum442 They had to load up the covered wagon, get enough hay for the oxen, squirrel jerky, spare axles... had to caulk the wagon and float it across one river... stuff takes time.
I'm extremely curious as to what happened to cause the oven to explode as well. Surely there wouldn't be enough HF left to make an explosive atmosphere inside the oven, right?
@@liam3284 probably wouldn't have dented the roof upwards if it was an implosion, not to mention it would probably crunch up the door before attempting to swing it outwards. Maybe the HF reacted with something inside the oven to create more explodey stuff?
I had a distant recollection that doing something odd with silicon made it explosive, a quick search turned up "Explosive Nanocrystalline Porous Silicon and Its Use in Atomic Emission Spectroscopy" but I wouldn't have thought HF was an oxidiser. Fluorine yes but as HF its already done its thing surely? @@williamnixon3994
A little info was left out that i am just now realizing. I didn't wait 5 days to go to the hospital. I went to the hospital immediately after it happened. But the hospital here does not have its own burn ward. So I was forced to make an appointment with them and 5 days later was the earliest they could get me in. I sought help immediately after it happened. I just know that it doesn't read like that from the messages. I was in the hospital for what felt like an eternity waiting for the burn ward appointment. The burn ward appointment was absolutely the most painful thing I've ever been through in my entire life and if you know my life, that's surprising. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reply to this comment and I will answer them as I find time to do so. And yes, I know I'm a total idiot. That's been established already, but this was years ago and I am much wiser now and we now do things very, very differently in my lab/business. We now have employees to worry about, quarterly inspections from the FBI and DEA, a reputation as a trustworthy chemical and elements supplier to worry about, etc. No need to remind me of my stupidity when I was younger and more ignorant than I am today..
@@TheMrbunGeeah ok, cool. That's the way I would recommend doing it to clean it up and make it whiter. Just never hold it while heating and always, always, always do it on a hotplate with every conceivable safety precaution in place, just in case. I don't want anyone to ever have happen what happened to me back then. I was reckless and in a hurry at the time, which is a huge no-no when dealing with this allotrope. If anyone ever has to deal with it, like you have no other choice, wait until you literally have hours to spare, you're fully rested and have researched for days on how to do it. I normally never say things like that as I know most do that exact thing. But with this certain element and allotrope, I make an exception.
as soon as i heard your story involved white phosphorus I knew it was going to be bad. Man to think humans used that nasty shit in warfare it truly boggles my mind
My story is pretty simple comparatively: I was moving a crucible of molten bronze and the crucible failed (I suspect an air bubble, as the crucible had been dried for 4 hours in a 300c oven just the previous day.) The crucible broke right where my tongs were holding it and ~3kg of bronze splashed all over as the rest of the crucible shattered when it hit the brick floor. I was splashed with molten bronze from my shoulder to my shoes. All the natural fibers in my clothing were unblemished. All the artificial ones melted. . . into the natural fiber clothing beneath. My shoes were destroyed but my wool socks were utterly unscathed. Anywhoo, I jumped back the instant I dropped the Crucible and immediately doused the area with my safety bucket. This was the last time I wore sneakers while moving molten metal. I managed to escape without a single burn though I got a nice case of the Adrenalin shakes. Fortunately my working area was devoid of any tripping hazards (I choreograph my movements VERY VERY carefully when moving molten metal, so I'm very cognizant to remove any hazards in the area, an path of emergency egress.) I will say, molten bronze is a great way to clean aged brickwork. When I peeled off the layer of spilled bronze, the brick underneath looked brand new, and the grout was the cleanest I've ever seen it!
Yeah molten metal spills cann be quite dramatic 😅😅 Ich my self had a shower of 1650°C steel As you may see in my profile pic I work with tonns of molten steel and well the crane operrater had the crucible hanging too low and gave the furnace operrater the signal too start pouring the steel out of the furnace in the crucible the stream of metal hit the heat shielding on the crucible spraying steel all over a 4m radius Well you might ask why is was so close but my part was too to hold the crucible with a long steel rod so it doesn't rotate on the crane The spray was so thick I couldn't see shit in 1-2m distance My reaction was too let go of the rod flip my collar up tug my head in and go backwards till I could feel the wall behind me scary shit but thanks to me PPE I didn't had a single burn but next to my position were I stood was a poodle of around 300kg soo i was quite lucky that would have hit like a truck and would burn through the PPE 😅 Oh and the concrete didn't like the heat of the poodle and it's uper layer cracked in very smal steam explosions (the poodle was already solidified but still glowing red at that point)
the thing about OSHA that a lot of people miss is that its mostly about what your employer can or can't make you do. i was always crazy about safety and PPE with my guys because i didn't want them to get hurt, but also because i wanted to cover myself if they did get hurt. basically, i made it so that if one of my guys got hurt then it was either a freak accident or he was being negligent. and some people just think they are immortal and will not only shake hands with danger, but tickle its taint too. and some of those people never do get hurt despite all the dangerous taint tickles!
There is such a thing as too much safety that actually makes things less safe. Now, I do not work with dangerous chemicals etc, so I cannot comment on the safety precautions. Two bad things can happen - one, if the safety precautions look like an overkill, the people may ignore some of them and possibly ignore the more important ones. Another is that if the safety precautions slow the work down, but there are strong incentives to work faster, people will ignore safety. My grandmother worked in a factory (pressing things out of plastic) where the rules said that you first set everything up (pour the plastic pellets etc), then push a button to start the press. Seems reasonable. However, the incentives for making more were strong enough that people would instead push the button first, then pour the pellets while the press was closing. The vast majority of the time it went OK, sometimes someone was a bit too slow and got their hand pressed with the plastic. To me, this shows two problems - the strong incentives for working faster and the fact that the press was slow enough so it was possible to do things the unsafe way and get away with it the vast majority of the time.
@@Pentium100MHzthis sounds more like a company that only gives lip service to safety but actually prioritizes productivity and punishes the lack thereof. The problem in your scenario isn’t too much safety. It’s corporate greed and toxic work metrics. I work at a company that prioritizes safety to the point even I find it ridiculous sometimes and I can truly say they have prevented a TON of accidents. In the long run, losing an experienced operator to disability or injury is far more damaging to output metrics than cutting safety corners for incremental gains.
@@Grak70 Yeah, my example was about the incentives. This was in the USSR. AFAIK, every worker had to produce some minimum number of parts to not get in trouble, but after that minimum, if you produced more, you got a bonus. My grandmother bragged that she was able to produce a lot of the parts (not going for a smoke break and sometimes operating two presses helped), getting a high salary for the time and was the first to get to work on new, better equipment. As for too much safety, if people find it ridiculous, it can be ignored even in situations when it is not ridiculous. If someone told me to dress up like a firefighter to just fill the gas tank of my car I would think the person was stupid and possibly ignore some other of his rules. Or, if I was not allowed in a gas station without dressing up like a firefighter, I would not just fill up the tank in my car, I would bring a lot of gas cans and fill those up, so that I have to go to the gas station as infrequently as possible.
This isn't chemistry related but I made a mistake that cost more than my salary when I was an apprentice machinist at a factory. I accidentally destroyed a massive press die by continuing to operate the press while my mentor was away despite the bottom being slightly misaligned. If I remember correctly the tool and die engineer said it would probably cost the company ~$100k to replace. I made ~$25k. Fortunately it was taken as a learning opportunity and I wasn't disciplined.
I feel like companies do this all the time where they don't train you properly and then leave you to work on stuff on your own. Luckily for you, it sounds like they realized that was on them but in my experience, a lot of places will blame the employee for their shitty or virtually non existent training
@@theodorekorehonen sometimes they hire people just to have them 'accidentally' break stuff because of bad training so they get a debt slave to replace their equipment
@@BusinessWolf1 That is illegal where I live. The rule is that you can not be held liable as an employee for accidental damage to equipment. My million dollar mistake was not actually equipment damage: but a liability lawsuit. Maintenance guy asked me, who handles food, to throw out florescent tubes: which broke. A fragment then ended up in a box of food. The restaurant at the other end was NOT happy.
I once got conc. Sulphuric acid on my hand. I was expecting itching or irritation, but it felt like someone was torching my skin like it was a creme brulee. Luckily I got the tap running and ran my hand under it, no lasting effects but it discoloured my skin and nails. I cannot imagine the pure agony of getting White Phosphorus on my hands like that guy. WTF.
The closest I've had to that was battery acid on my shirt. Shirt turned this weird off-green color in the spots that were exposed (it was black) and was destroyed, noticed a full day later when it started falling apart from the air movement. Skin underneath was SOMEHOW fine despite prolonged contact for two work days. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Didn't even notice because the damaged battery I disposed of was in a tote behind the store, the tote was filled with rainwater. Boss told me to throw the battery away even though dumping car batteries in the trash is illegal for several reasons. Didn't feel like arguing because we were trying to figure out what to do with it (company couldn't take it as a core because it was pancaked in a car accident), so I dumped the rainwater out and picked up the battery bare-handed like a fucking moron and tipped it into the dumpster, walked off with a damp shirt thinking "ah, it was submerged in water and this battery's been back here for weeks, surely all the acid would've leaked out by now." It didn't. Hopefully the EPA doesn't murder me in my sleep for that lol
Our chemistry teacher said he used to clean his hands with conc. sulphuric acid as a Ph.D student when working with scary chemicals. Sounded like bullshit, but he demonstrated it in front of us. You slosh it all over your hands, rub about twice, then straight under the running tap.
The only reason conc. H2SO4 is dangerous is that it's hygroscopic and generates heat as a result. So if your hand is wet or oil-less it'll immediately start burning your skin via hydrolysis. Dilute H2SO4 is pretty harmless as long as you get it off fast.
Your story of the leaking waste barrel reminded me of one of my old workplaces. I was working as an electronics engineer in a workshop at a university, helping the scientists maintain their equipment aswell as fabricating custom equipment to their needs. Anywas we had the need to upgrade our workshop and got it completely rebuilt, everything from ESD flooring to custom made furniture and so on. One day the principal of the university showed some other higher ups around, including some goverment officials. The principal also wanted to show our almost completed new workshop, so while me and my colleagues were in the workshop, talking with some of the electricians about some minor changes, the principal along with a small group of other people, suddenly showed up in our workshop. We were a bit startled but greeted them and talked abit bout our ideas for the new workshop and so on. Shortly after the maintenance director of the uni, wanted to show our new mains switchboard that had just been installed, so he called the chief electrician over to demonstrate it. The chief electrician turned on the main breaker and an ear deffening loud bang sounded from the room next door (which was our storage room for the workshop), out from that room came an apprentice of the electrician, who was in the middle of installing some three phase outlets when the chief electrician turned on the main breaker, having forgotten all about his apprentice working. That poor apprentice was white as a sheet and still held, shakingly, onto a pair of halfmolten cutting pliers. The looks on everybodys face were priceless. Fortunately the apprentice didn't endure any enjuries except for perhaps on his mental wellbeing.
RE kitty litter: those blue flecks are, or at least used to be, cobalt chloride, serving as a moisture indicator. You won't get rid of them with organic solvents.
Re: HF. If you're using concentrated stuff, if you're not going to wear at least double gloves - with one of those layers being proper rubber gloves - don't go near HF. I recommend a third layer of latex gloves on top of your nitriles because they react (safely) rapidly with HF (turning brown) so you'll know immediately when to change the outer layer. Also, I've definitely pulled HF fumes through a vacuum pump before. Some fluorinated compounds decompose partially when you're distilling them and you can see the fumes coming off. We had a special dist setup (that was etched a lot) for these distillations. That vacuum pump suffered greatly, I pulled so much chlorine through it.
Oh, this is a fun game I can participate in! Not a chemist, but a biomedical story. During my bachelor, I was working in a lab on some bacterial spores (cool fellas, but not important) with 8 other students, a few PhD students working/baby sitting us and our lab tech. All of a sudden we all heard a muffled boom, the sound of glass breaking and then the door of our incubator being flung open by a 40L flood of the foulest smelling… anything I have ever encountered, shards of glass of all sizes and everyone’s petri dishes. Turns out, some genius from another lab had gotten permission to run an experiment in our incubator where he filled a 120L glass vat with 40 L of his culture to accumulate the gasses for over a week and had left to go on vacation. The problem was that he did this without a pressure release valve, so it had turned into a pressure bomb and went off. The scary part, apart from the cleanup, was that my partner had pulled some petri dishes out of that incubator 3 minutes before it went off. If he had timed that a bit worse, he might have gotten hit by that. Or it might have gone off at night and damaged electronics, etc. The good news is that we could all hear our lab tech chews this guy out, it was not pretty but well deserved. That explosion destroyed about 12 weeks of PhD student and 20 weeks of bachelor student work, which was not fun.
2:00 Happens to the best of us 4:05 funfact. In Beaches in eastern germany you can find white phosphorus. It looks a lot like amber so sometimes people will get burnt from sticking it in their pants. There still tons of it left over from WW1
Even as kids on the west coast of germany we would get reminders before the summer holidays that amber could be phosphorus and to put any and all "amber" we might find on the east coast in a seperate bag instead of putting it in the pants pocket. The mental image of an un-extinguishable fire on my leg made me scared of that stuff before I ever knew I wanted to become a scientist (biology, because RNA, DNA and Thermocyclers dont eat hands)
Would love to tell you about my first Bio lab job. That place was a mess I worked in food saftey. So most of our workplace hazards were very common. Worst I’ve experienced was a few E-Coli contamination I dealt with. Although the worst hazard wasn’t what I dealt with, but was my other lab workers. We couldn’t consistently get people to clean. There was food stains on everything, but worst was the biohazard room We typically use rough morphology to ID contaminated samples (to help dial in why they might have been, if it was filler error, or system sterilization errors) Basic gram staining was more than enough like 70% of the time. But occasionally we’d have spore staining we’d need to do. That uses Malachite Green. Since a previous accident 2 Years before I got there, our fume hood was destroyed. But we have a biological saftey cabinet. Tech there just assumed they functioned identical, right? So when I got there and learned we were basically evaporating malicite green with no respiratory protection. I started causing a huge stink. There would also be green stains on everything. Since that malichite was the only green thing we had in the lab, I was horrified to clean a random surface and see my paper towels mysteriously turn green. The worse contender was the fact our DI water sink (only one in the facility) had odd green staining in the tubes coming from it. I’m guessing a pervious tech probably washed something covered in it, and let it get into the piping. Who knows how containited all the DI was there. I also heard how my (now previous) supervisor spilled half a bottle on his arm and just wiped it off. And carried on. No incident report. Nothing. Didn’t even use the Shower. Probably rinsed it off in the sink. Pretty sure I’m like 1/4 people who heard that story. We couldn’t consistently do it there in a safe way so we have to pay an outside lab to do it. I refused to even learn. Not under those conditions and with those techs as my teachers. God I’m glad I’m out of there
A Chem story from a different perspective: I am a cancer survivor who went through chemotherapy as a secondary treatment post surgery. For younger chemo patients (I was 24 at the time) common practice is to surgically install a port just above the left pectoral muscle as the access for your IV meds. Now, the port sits above the muscle, and connects via catheter to your vena cava. This usually spares your veins from the cytotoxic effects of your medication, and can prevent neuropathy in the hands. I had a pretty normal but potent schedule of drugs (Cisplatin, Etoposide Phosphate, and Bleomycin) and after finishing treatment, have an entire patch of my left pec area stained a kind of Jaundiced yellow color, likely from some slight leakage of the port. Moral of the story, check your seals.
Non-Chemistry Safety Equipment Story --- I was taking a fiberoptics class in the Army. At the time, pretty much all fiber connectors were done by hand and required a fair bit of fiddly work. That morning we had gone over all of the safety equipment you should have for working with fiber. Including a special set of tweezers for removing the thin/fragile glass fiber from flesh should you spike yourself. Since you really don't want it to shatter inside of you. Fast forward a few hours. We are all stripping the ends of fiber cables to get to the inner glass core. That core is surrounded by a bunch of loose fine synthetic protective fibers you need to trim away. Easiest way to separate those from the core so you can trim them is to blow at the end of the cable. Fibers spread away and the glass core stays put. One student in our class points the end of the cable at his mouth (instead of blowing at it from the side), tilts his head way back for a deep breath, and then jerks his head forwards to produce a mighty (and unnecessary) puff of air. Succeeding in spiking himself in the lip with the human hair thickness glass. Can you guess what safety equipment we didn't have on hand? Thankfully, these special tweezers are commonplace in hospitals. Though he had to keep his lip/mouth still until we could drive him from on-base to the local hospital in town. So glad I was in that class and not the next since I'm sure the safety briefing got CONSIDERABLY longer ...
@@That_Chemistoccasionally I use your videos to fall asleep to. Entertaining enough to listen to and long enough to have time. I have UA-cam Premium so you get that at least. I do actually watch your videos when they come out and not try to fall asleep to them.
Before finding your channel, I pictured professional chemists as... well, professional 😁 I mean smart perfectionists in lab coats and glasses. Now I know, that they are the same as the rest of us, reckless apes with oversized brains. Thinking about it now, I was the same when I was in my chemistry phase in mid school. You know, lighting up calcium carbide in puddles, throwing bottles with it near fire, taking lead grids from car batteries without gloves to melt them, mixing ammonia nitrate with sodium hypochlorite in my living room (yikes). Thank god I never got access to anything more serious during those times 😅
i read an old < 1930s> chemistry book.. it said ' pottasium permanganate and glycerine is an interesting reaction'.... what it actually meant is a fire that willl not go out
youre the first channel to make chemistry interesting to me. i love when people explain all the details, and dont make things too brief to "keep it simple for the stupid people". If youve watched any high school science video, you know what i mean. Keep up the good work man
This is not my story, but something that happened a good while ago in my uni. Still insane. Back in the day, in lab classes for the 1st years people would just throw into the sink all of the liquid waste, since the freshmen didn't work with organic solvents or metals (save for Cu). They advised, of course, to let the faucet running a good while when doing so to dilute the waste so it didin't react in the plumbing. Turns out 18yo fresh faces often don't hear things, and ended up throwing stuff without diluting enough. One day, because of whatever unholy concotion brew in those sewers, the pipes started spewing fire into several of the ground floor labs simultaneously for nearly a minute. Unsurprisingly, after that incident, they started using the proper waste containers for EVERYTHING. The problem is that, because of the really screwed up way that the building was built, it's nigh impossible to replace the underground pipes without pretty much halting the whole class labs for at least a year, which is unfeasable. So, as far as we know, those pipes can be cracked and leaking the wastewater into the soil, and we wouldn't know. However, the floor in the hall is slightly bumpier in the middle.
My PI warned me about making sure all solvent from column silica was fully evaporated before disposing of it. Apparently a previous student had failed to do so and emptied all silica into the (EHS approved) plastic jug, sealed it, and left for the day. The warm summer day. At some point during the evening, despite the air conditioning, the heat in the lab caused the residual solvent in the closed container to go boom. Fortunately, the container was stored in a location where the only damage was to the drywall, and the fine layer of silica deposited around the room.
Regarding the hotplate, my brother in law works in a metallurgy lab and has a hotplate that's got to be kept at 300°C. They test it by dropping water onto it
In High School I had a great AP chemistry teacher. He set a good example with respect to PPE and ran a tight lab, and was also well liked by students. I don't recall any incidents, even among the badly behaved kids. Except one time. This teacher also kept some pretty sketchy chemicals at the school which I don't think he was supposed to have. They made for entertaining demonstrations, however, and he was highly competent, so I'm sure they were safely stored and secured. One such demonstration, to celebrate the last day of the school year, involved white phosphorus. About a minute into the lecture after his demonstration, his hand started smoking. He calmly stuck it under the tap, rinsing it while he continued the lecture. About a minute after removing it from the water, it again started to smoke, and he again placed it under the stream of water. This repeated once or twice more before the bell rang and we left. For all I know, he was there all summer.
My PhD PI always was very strict about never entering the elevator with liquid nitrogen (we would walk the stairs while sending the dewar up specifically using the freight elevator), and also never pushing the dewars by the oh-so-convenient top ring, because there are usually handles lower down specifically for you to handle. Honestly, I never even considered the tip risk till this video.
I built a hot plate specifically to go to 500°C in grad school with a motorized stage for spray pyrolysis. It was enclosed in a separate ventilation system - in materials research, 500°C is pretty tame.
People that research ceramics or metallurgy typically deal with temperatures a lot higher than 500ºC, so I was surprised when he said 500ºC was a lot. It's, admittedly, for organic chemistry, which is what most people probably do in current research.
I've used one that hot but was for inorganic chemistry, specifically for making test batches of case hardening material for making steel hardened with nitride and carbide. Nothing like molten cyanide salts 😮
@VeteranVandal pretty much, but the melt was surprisingly stable. It did make some vapor though it was in a fume hood. Would not advise doing this on a regular bench though! 🙄 🤢🤮😱💀
I'd say any experimental work done under sleep deprivation is a bad idea. Things that don't look dangerous can become dangerous because your mind is fixating in how long it'll take to sleep next time. And if things aren't idiot proofed, there's likely a big enough idiot in the room to prove it should have been idiot proofed.
what, pull over and light yourself on fire with white phosphorus? I mean yeah that'll wake you up, but I doubt it's as good as just pulling over and taking a nap.
I used to work at Autozone, and we have PPE for batteries (gloves, apron, goggles) that we were supposed to wear any time we handle a battery. I was there 5 years and I only strapped everything on once. Dude brought his Chevy Malibu in for us to check the battery. He pops the hood, and I see the battery bulged to its max and smoking. I told him it was at extreme risk to burst, and the $13.50 an hour I was making wasn’t nearly enough to touch it. He asked if I’d change it, and I said not a chance. He had a buddy come and take the battery out, and we had him leave it out to the side of the building. 5 hours later at the end of my shift I suited up and put it in the battery charging station that had a plexiglass burst shield for a few days. 😂
As a janitor at a college I've had to go into lab buildings and nothing makes me more weary than walking past the giant tank of liquid nitrogen especially when something around it goes psssh.
I am particularly impressed by your choice of sponsor. It's refreshing to see a UA-cam video about Chemical safety being sponsored by a brand of lab safety gear, instead of some cringeworthy Segway into a VPN sponsor. Also: washing hands in DCM... that's something I'd expect to see in a back-alley auto body shop, not a lab!
The first (and last time) I played with fire was when at 12yo, I was at a friend's place with 2 others and we started setting fire to small amounts of wood alcohol in metal caps. Burning some leaves in there, just fooling around a bit. Maybe 1h into this fun activity, my friends started upping the scale of the project by dousing a metal skate ramp with this alcohol while it was burning. I was already some distance from them, but I started backing up and said I was going home because I felt things were getting a bit dodgy and their movements too careless....I was right. That distance kept me out of harm, otherwise I would've gotten burned too, but one of those kids in particular got almost 50% of his body burned (mostly 2nd & 3rd degree burns). Skin grafts for him, epic 800k$ lawsuit that dragged on for years for us...For quite a while, my parent's insurance company didn't seem like they would want to cover the costs of this incident...I was deemed equally responsible (33%) because of my presence, involvement and the fact I was still legally on the property when the exploaion happened. Reading about everyone's relative luckiness while acting completely reckless makes me squirm. Don't make the mistake of underestimating danger, even in situations that may seem under control. In my case, while I was being relatively careful in my actions, this whole accident was caused because one of the kids poured some more wood alcohol while maintaining a continuous stream. The fire then climbed up and made the bottle explode. This wasn't MY or even the victim's mistake per say, yet the amount of consequences that unfurled was pretty dramatic. Stay safe and alert people!
I'm only 2:30 into the video and having burned myself on glassware that we were learning to bend and stretch in high school chem class, I was immediately seeing red flags when OP said they were heating the vial by holding it with their bare hand
The only pumps I know of that could tolerate HF may have to be pumps used in the semiconductor industry. They are like a thousand pounds, require a constant stream of nitrogen and cooling water but they do work pretty well.
It's very rare that one mistake will kill you, but all too often the first mistake it choosing to be in a situation where one more mistake (by anyone) will kill you.
This incident occurred during my first year of studying chemistry at university. During one of our laboratory sessions, we were tasked with synthesizing 1-bromobutane from butan-1-ol. Unfortunately, much of our equipment was quite old and some of it was slightly damaged. One of the cleaning steps in this experiment required us to mix the crude 1-bromobutane with highly concentrated sulfuric acid in a separatory funnel. During this procedure, the stand that belonged to my classmate behind me suddenly gave way, causing the separatory funnel to drop and spilling concentrated sulfuric acid and 1-bromobutane all over the floor. Fortunately, no one was splashed in the process. However, there is still a noticeable mark on the floor where the spill occurred.
As a grad student at a “Ivy League” university in the great white north we had large (about 6 litres) stills to dry our solvents in which we used sodium metal with an indicator. We had about 10 across a set of fumehoods in the back end of our lab. One of the more senior grad students was finishing up her project and was to head out on vacation for a few months. Each of us were typically assigned a few stills to maintain. We had a best operation procedure that a still could be regenerated (ie add more sodium metal) only 3 times after which it was a lengthy procedure to take down and quench and renew the still. Two of us would also need to be present for safety. As this senior grad student took vacation a colleague of mine and myself were assigned to take down and quench her stills. The procedure is quite lengthy in that you would place the large round bottom of the still in an ice bath to slow any exothermic reaction as first you would slowly drop by drop add isopropanol to quench the sodium metal as it would react relatively slowly with the sodium as compared to water… which as many of you will know can cause a violent reaction with sodium… as you add isopropanol there would be some bubbling as what should only be a few grams at best of sodium in the round bottom was reacted to form an inert Sodium oxide… once bubbling stopped from addition of the isopropanol you would add carefully some water to ensure no metal was left… then if safe you could add a few milliliters of water too be sure …. as we completed these steps over hours we determined the still was quenched and proceeded to dump the waste into one of a series of very large (20L) waste containers that lay on the back wall of the lab directly opposite the actual working stills … as we did so we watched in horror as a baseball sized chunk of sodium clunked out of the round bottom on to the container and split apart into many various sized pieces onto the floor next to our compressed gas cylinders used for the stills and over the waste container as it was too big to simply fall into the waste container…. our panic was well predictable … apparently rather than follow our three renew rule for stills this student in a rush to finish her work had just kept adding sodium metal to the still which resulted in a large ball of sodium to which our quenching efforts had only oxidized the outside of the sphere that had rolled out and busted exposing raw highly moisture bad metal all over the floor … as a reminder this is between very large volume stills and very large volume solvent waste containers on either side of us… after a few seconds we jumped into probably not well thought out action… I grabbed a sand bucket hoping to put a non flammable barrier between the exposed metal and the air or moisture… while my colleague has started to seek out metal pieces on the floor and began try to put isopropanol on the metal to oxidize them … while we tried to scoop them into a jar of immune spirit oil … we’d almost cleared the danger when we went to move a compressed gas cylinder to check behind it when water seeped up from between the floor tiles as we moved the cylinder across the floor …. You see some weeks earlier the lab above us had flooded and had soaked the back of our lab where … yup the stills and waste storage was … instantly the entire floor coated in isopropanol ignited in a massive fire…. as the flames immediately started crawling for the solvent stills and waste I grabbed the fire extinguisher on one of our benches it was empty or malfunctioned… I didn’t have time to find another extinguisher so I grabbed a spare lab coat hanging near bye and began trying yo beat the flames away from the solvents all the while screaming for my colleagues to grab fire extinguishers … they immediately grabbed one other in the lab and one just outside our lab… both didn’t work… while still trying to beat down the flames I had pushed the fire toward me to the point the bottom of my lab coat caught fire … just as it really started to take hold and almost at the point of running for my life someone finally came around the corner and doused me with extinguisher…. we managed to get the fire out and clean up. Needless to say you don’t forget something like that. It would have easily been the end of the entire department had those solvents went up. Bonus safety fail… same university and I’m getting instructed on proctoring exams … the policy of the university was that in the event of a fire alarm you where to rather than evacuate you had to go confirm the fire first … I promptly interjected and argued this policy will kill people should they be in the chemistry building as alarms aren’t just pulled for fires but for loose poison gas or eminent explosions … they pushed back hard against me … however after a formal complaint they revised the evacuation policy … I suppose someone had the good sense to review the complaint and determined someone getting out of an exam wasn’t worth killing everyone in a building over
I grew up with a friend who lost his dad in a Chem Lab. Chemistry always been scary to me. Pressure tanks too. God bless you all who take the risks, even if those risks are minimized. For me, it is the slight oversight or potential of stuff others around may doing. Very scary job, not for me.
Reminds me of a story: I was working in R&D for Catalysts with a production plant a couple dozen meters away. For maintenance one of the quenchinglines wasnt producing and the other line was used for two products. To keep the story short, someone didnt clean the tank after their shift and the inside got coated with Paladiumhydride and the worker trying to clean after his line was finished knew what could happen if both lines mixed. He climbed the tank to clean it out extra thouroughly. As soon as the water from the hose hit the wall of the tank, the blastwave knocked him off, sending him 3 stories down. The entire tank raptured along its side like a peeled fruit despite the open lid. The shockwave broke most of the windows in the R&D center. At least the ones facing towards the productionplant. I have some other great storys of my time working there... fun times.
Not my story but my friends. This is also biology rather than chemistry. He was studying biology in highschool and they were supposed to do a gene modification lab where they make ecoli glow in the dark. Their teacher explains the procedure, and they perform the lab. Nothing special. Except that this gene modification used Crispr. Crispr is illegal to use without authorization in Sweden. How did he find this out? Another teacher walked in and was surprised of how well the lab went. So the lab teacher talks about how incredible Crispr is to which the other teacher responds with "Wow! How did you get clearance for that?" That's when he realised it was, in fact, extremely illegal to use Crispr without authorization and he could land in jail for several years, which in Sweden is a big deal (most sentences are rarely over a year). He hasn't been arrested yet luckily. I'm still wondering how the hell he got a hold of it. So that also means that technically my friend broke the law by performing an illegal laboration.
Here's a chemistry unsafety story. My Junior year of College, when I was in Orgo I we had to do a multiweek lab for the identification of an unknown substance (The Professors knew we were just supposed to apply our knowledge of different chemical properties to the identification of a substance from a list of potentials) in any case I was often the last if not close to the last one done jusr because I tend to like to take my time on each step of the process. Important note before continuing, I'm relatively tall and my assigned hood was quite low so I would often ignore the rules of how high to leave the sash since I wouldn't be able to manipulate my materials well with it so low. So one day when we were supposed to be testing for solubility at varying pHs and I was gently heating my substance in a solution of HCl and decided to "add agitation" by hand. We had always been told that when mixing a substace in a tube like this to point the tube away and to not completely cover the top to allow for off-gassing. I did not do either of these. To make a long story short,HCl wants to be a gas, the reaction is exothermic so I ended up exploding a tube of HCL + mystery substance in my face. Luckily, the substance mostly neutralized the acid but for the next few days my lungs hurt when I did anything strenuous like go up the hundreds of stairs I needed to go up every day to get to and from my classes. (Also I ended up incorrectly identifying my substance because I messed up my melting point)
These stories remind me of my time as a water treatment engineer. At large industrial sites, we often use chlorine dioxide as a biocide for keeping the bacteria levels in cooling towers low. This is generated on-site from various commercially available reactants. The aqueous solution goes to a day tank which feeds several metering diaphragm pumps, injecting the ClO2 into the cooling tower loops. All of this is monitored with various automated water chemistry probes but the risky part comes from those damn pumps. ClO2 is obviously going to off-gas out of solution so it’s supposed to be sealed, but it often feeds ten or more of those metering pumps. Considering a lot of them have parts that have a short operational lifespan (ClO2 seems to ruin a lot of plastics with continuous exposure, turning them brittle via oxidation), they break down all the time. This rarely results in a “leak” because the day tank is not pressurized, so whenever there was a flow issue I often fixed it myself, braving the noxious odor of ClO2 with a trusty gas detector on my belt so I know when to dip if there really is a major leak. However, a lot of the technicians I worked didn’t care as much. I’ve seen rush down from the lab without PPE to fix issues with chemical pumps all the time. I guess they’ve done it so many times they get careless. One time I was by the day tank and noticed the smell was WAY worse than normal. At dangerous concentrations in the air (which is still only 100 ppb or greater) it smells like really strong bleach or chlorine, and makes you want to gag. I immediately wanted to gag, but the gas alarms on the wall hadn’t detected anything so I decided to go and grab a buddy to figure out what’s going on. I found a technician who had probably 15+ years of experience on the job and knew those pumps in and out, but of course he neglected his PPE (including his safety glasses). When we got there though all the pumps were running fine. He got close to inspect one of them and as the diaphragm pulsed, a small jet of ClO2 solution shooting out from the pump at an odd angle splashed him right in the face. He immediately doubled back and hurled on the floor, and rushed over to the eyewash. Right at that moment the alarm went off which means the ClO2 concentration in the room had finally reached 100 ppb (and it was probably WAY higher next to the pumps since the gas detectors were about 50 feet away from us at the end of the hallway). I shut off all of the pumps, called the safety officer and plant manager, and escorted the guy to an eyewash in a different room that wasn’t currently being gassed like it’s 1917 in a German trench. Thankfully he ended up being totally ok after being medically cleared, the eyewash nearby was definitely a lifesaver. There had been just a tiny little hole in diaphragm membrane on the pump that was causing it to spirt ClO2 every time it pulsed, and sure enough we found a little splash puddle about ten feet away from the pump where it was shooting out to. Only maybe a few milliliters at a time but enough cause a problem. Lesson here? I don’t care how much experience you have, always wear your PPE. Even if you’re not a chemist in a lab, at an industrial site the points of failure in any system are far greater and amount of control you have is far less. And I’m not blameless too, I should have told the guy to put on his PPE of course. And for the record, that ClO2 we were so casually working with is about twice as worse as straight elemental chlorine gas in terms of health effects and exposure limits.
OMFG!!!!!!! @backyardscience2000 is very lucky not to have lost a hand to this accident. In fact, he's lucky to still be alive. Working with phosphorus 75 miles away from emergency services is insane. Also, he should have left immediately for the burn center, not waited five days. WTF????? He needs to find a new job that doesn't involve phosphorus of any color.
A little info was left out, I went to the hospital immediately. That's what the ice was for, to keep it from burning (cold water on burns, you know) until I could get there. But they didn't have a burn ward. They did what they could for the burns, but even though it was white phosphorus burns, they forced me to make an appointment with the burn center 5 counties over. A drawback to living in the middle of nowhere. But I also agree that working with white phosphorus is about the dumbest thing I've ever done. But, I also work with the red allotrope a lot and I am one of the very few who can legally buy and sell it, making it available for the wider community (everyone from teachers to the home chemist and homeschool teachers) to experiment with and with most element sellers not selling it, I'm one of the only legal sources for it. That said, I do have to follow all of the associated laws and regulations associated with the allotrope due to it being regulated under the DEA's list of regulated and watched chemicals. I even am subjected to quarterly inspections from the FBI and DEA due to the vast array of chemicals and elements that we keep in stock. We aren't just some random person selling chemicals. But rather, a legit business that pays our taxes and tries to do everything by the book. That said, that doesn't mean that everything is perfectly safe. We go to extreme lengths to ensure that everything is stored correctly, safely and up to regulations. If we didn't, we would have been shut down a long, long time ago. The incident happened within the first few months of starting the business and things have changed a lot since then. It's extremely rare that we deal with WP these days, but we do still get the random lab or school wanting a single gram here and there for their collections/experiments/syntheses. When I do have to make it, I pretty much do the opposite of what was described in the video and the procedure is like what you would see in a normal lab these days. I really should make a new video on it one day to show how it's done these days. But if I were to just stop messing with phosphorus altogether, that would take the ability to acquire it away from so many people that I just can't do that. I can't just take that from the chemistry community and take the experience away from those who want to experience it without having to go through the troublesome danger of making it themselves. I'd much rather someone order it from me than risk making it themselves because they don't have that experience with it and have never had such a thing happen to them before and who am I to take that away from them? No it seems like me being with it is here to stay, but in a much safer and more controlled way. The feds make sure of that, trust me. Not saying that you should agree with me, just that people much higher up than any of us make sure that we do things safely, legally and follow all the laws associated with everything that we offer. We really don't have a choice in the matter and I am fine with that.
I have a few smaller stories, due to being a lab chemist in trainig atm: - A cotrainee of mine managed to mistake sulfiric acid (w(H2SO4)=96%) with ethanole and was joking around with it, gesturing to spill it over another cotrainee as a joke. As one does, thinking it is ethanole, he handled it outside of the fumehood and only noticed, after wiping spilled liquid with a paper towel and the paper turning black. - I managed to make a metal-bath, heated to 200°C, crash down - while trying to lower it with a 'Lab-Boy', spilling hot Wood-Metall (Cd, Pb, Sn, Bi) in my fume hood. - In a internship I did, someone had the bright idea to scare my partner and me, whilst we were doing stuff, by setting of quite a large volume of elephants toothpaste in the sink, about half a metre behind us. - Someone managed to put wet papertowel into a steeldrums, filled with waste contamineted with isocyanates, making the steeldrum rupture. The meeting afterwards was akward, because everyone thaught it was me or another trainee, because we were new in the lab and hadn't this much expirience, but the first thing, they told us was that we should NEVER, EVER put anything with water into the isocyanate waste.
To be fair, LN2 has such a low heat capacity that the Leidenfrost effect goes a long way. I always pick up my frozen protein with bare hand from the LN2 into the boxes in the -80C freezer. As long as I warm my hand every once in a while no damage is done.
if you don't keep the dewars at temperature you can actually wear them out - always assume that letting one warm up will cause a crack First Rule of LN Spills: you DO NOT talk about LN spills.
I just quit an environmental chemistry internship because my supervisor is a bumbling fool and we're using concentrated sulfuric acid. In addition to being 45-60 min late to literally every lab day, he is lazy about gloves, exact measurements, and broke at least one beaker and graduated cylinder every lab day. I am not fucking around with a klutz and sulfuric acid
I only own two stirplates and they *both* max out at 540°C. It's an interesting story how I got them. I started out just looking for a decent-quality bargain stirplate. I would up with two high-end Fischers, one of them new-in-box.
I worked at a place around liquid nitrogen. the stuff is weirdly safe to touch. the leidenfrost effect does a lot of work to keep it off something as hot as a human, and the nitrogen itself has piss poor heat capacity. the elevator thing is real. the procedure we had was to roll the dewar onto the elevator, hit the floor you wanted it at, get off, and have your colleague meet it on the floor it was going. in theory you were also supposed to inform people the elevator was not to be used, and there were procedures for securing the elevator so no one would get on, but everyone just learned to check for giant metal canisters before getting on.
When I was writing a chemistry paper on the synthesis of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) in high school, I was showered with boiling acetone. In order to have a reference substance for my own product, I decided to simply isolate ASA from tablets. To do this, I crushed them in a mortar and dissolved them in acetone, as the ASA dissolved while the fillers were not soluble. After I filtered off the solids, I decided to distill off the acetone because I didn't want to waste the 500ml of acetone. When I set up a distillation apparatus (thank God) in the laboratory fume cupboard, I began to distill off the acetone. The acetone, which was supposed to boil at 56°C, was now at a temperature of around 62°C and I wondered if I had done something wrong. I realized I had forgotten the stirrer. So I opened the apparatus and threw the stirring rod into the round bottom flask. The moment the stir bar touched the liquid there was immediately a loud hissing sound, the contents of the flask shot out of the opening and splashed all over the hood and onto me because I did not close the window of the fume hood. I was in a huge panic at that moment because I thought the acetone might ignite along with the lab and me and I just screamed "Oh shit" whereupon my teacher entered the lab, which is right next to a chemistry classroom where she was teaching a 6th grade class. I simply asked her if I was burning to which she said no and helped me figure out what happened. All I can say is that superheating can be dangerous and that since that day I have become even more careful about only entering a laboratory wearing a lab coat and safety goggles. Because of these saefty mesurements nobody was hurt and the only damage was done to the fume hood and some parts of the floor as ASA-crystals were forming everywhere which were a pain to remove. Even in my hair grew cristals which I discovered while showering at home. Greetings from Germany
I was opening old dry solvents from sigma in a fumehood, like 50 100mL ones, with a spatula and straight into organic waste. Someone left a bottle of n-BuLi in the pile and it got all over my gloves which heated up so fast that i took them off immediately after putting the bottle down. Miracle that there was no fire
19:51 I mean the way you do it is. You put the chemicals/nitrogen in the evator and either take a 2nd elavator or take the stairs. I break that rule ONLY if I am traveling with vacuum sealed stuff.
When I was in undergrad, a friend of mine was working in a low-dimensional materials lab. They had a huge electromagnet for levitating little pieces of graphene. They had taped off the "danger zone" around the electromagnet which was roughly where the field would no longer pull any big pieces of metal towards it. Once while visiting the lab, I leaned past the line and the machine stole my glasses, just to give you some context of how strong this thing was. This was in a historical physics building which had been around for a hundred+ years or so, and they had these heavy steel desk chairs for the lab benches. One day a grad student stood up too fast and their chair rolled back and crossed the line, slamming into the electromagnet at 50+ Mph. Luckily it didn't do too much damage, so they just needed to spend a few days re-calibrating everything.
the closest thing i did to chemist was in my friends back yard in the 8th grade. when i went over there it was mostly the same but when it got late we got bored and we thought it would be fun to fuck around with butane. So we played around a bit pressing the nozzle down with are fingers and having a flame thrower, but we then we had a stroke of genus if we poked a hole in the top of a empty 2 liter bottle of soda we could push the nozzle up on it pushing a lot of butane into hit the butane turned to a liquid and we got it about a quarter full before we decided to unscrew the bottle cap with a small hole kick it over and light it on fire. thankfully it just got done raining a lot so we didnt burn down the neighbor hood, but we also did it twice and if things were to go wrong we would have had a lot of problems. other smaller thing was slapping other people with my hand on fire. Making a camp fire at a bus stop to warm me and some tweakers and thats about it for things i have done.
ohoho, new chempilation! from a future geologist, love the videos. I come here often to learn how I will not be acting should I find myself in a chemistry setting
Story 1; Not a very detailed story, but the reason I refuse to ever go into any form of science or job in general that deals with chemicals. My freshman year of highschool I took an AP Physics course. In this course, there was a classmate who had absolutely no regard for safety procedures. She thought she was better than the and refused to follow them at all. She was a very smart person in terms of the equations and so myself, her, and two other students were in a group most of the class. We constantly changed groups, but for some reason it seemed like the 4 of us were a table group most of the year. So I had to deal with her, a lot. Her blatant disregard for safety procedures and proper equipment safety led to nearly a thousand dollars in damages over the course of that year. Which would have been bad enough, but she didn’t suffer any consequences because her parents didn’t care and just paid the fee for the materials (her parents were rich) so she didn’t exactly get better about safety two years later. My sophomore year I took both Honors Biology and Honors Chemistry and nothing particularly interesting happened in them other than a few kids getting told off for not wearing PPE, but because of this, I knew the story that the teacher would always tell at the beginning of the year Lab Safety and PPE unit. They had only ever had to use the shower once. Some TA messed up which chemicals they were supposed to grab and accidentally brought out some chemicals (don’t remember which ones) that were not supposed to go together. The AP Chem kids were doing that lab and the first kid to get to that part wasn’t wearing proper eye protection. The chemical mixture went boom and he had to go to the hospital to make sure everything was out of his eyes and that the burns he got weren’t going to cause him issues. The eyewash station had been used plenty of times, including by myself (note; do NOT touch your eye if it itches when you haven’t washed your hands!) but that remained the only shower incident… until that previous classmate with no regard for safety shows up to that class the next year. I was walking around the halls for some yearbook work when there was an explosion sound from the general direction of that specific science class. Us yearbook students, being YEARBOOK students, decided to see what happened. This classroom had no interior windows and only one small tiny window on the door (you probably know the one I’m talking about) so I peaked in. Only to be confronted with the image of three students, but especially the aforementioned classmate, absolutely soaked in the shower area while another two students were frantically trying to get something out of their eyes. As far as I know, no one was permanently injured, but the story came out later that Anti-Safety Kid was, you guessed it, ignoring proper procedure! And unfortunately, 4 other kids were just close enough to get caught in the crossfire. The meet idea that I could end up working somewhere with explicit safety instructions with someone like her one day has scared me away from most “hazardous” jobs… the best pert about this whole story is that in my freshman year, I told this kid that some day she’d get in a ton of trouble because of ignoring procedures, but at the time she laughed it off and said “I don’t care, my parents will pay for the broken equipment and it’s not like anyone will actually get hurt, this is highschool not a factory” Moral of the story; Follow procedures, treat equipment with respect, wear the correct PPE, and don’t get cocky around dangerous materials! Story 2; This one is much shorter. This also happened my freshman year, to put into perspective, this was a ways before I told the Anti-Safety kid about how she’d get hurt eventually… and this is why I was such a stickler for following procedure in Physics and every other class after this incident. I like to call this particular incident “Burning Lung”. I was in my Intro to Engineering course in highschool and for one unit, we had to make a project. Any project, as long as the teacher approved it. I really wanted to use the lathe as it was most interesting to me that year. My dumbass decided to simply use a medical mask instead of any sort of mask made for wood turning. I did wear goggles and a face shield, but the class didn’t have a proper respirator as it should have. This was mistake number 1… mistake number two was not checking what materials the wood I was turning was made of! I picked wood that “looked cool” because I didn’t realize that some wood has fibers that you don’t want to breathe in! Mistake number three, which could have prevented all of this, I did not look up ANYTHING about wood turning, like a complete idiot. My teacher taught me the basics of the tools, but didn’t really know any of the basic safety regarding the actual turning material. And even then, he did not let me know that I should have used at the very least an N95. So I assumed everything was good. One day, I move to a new piece of wood to start carving and this wood is making my lungs hurt a bit. To this day, I still have no clue what wood it was. But I continued cutting, because why not! I was very, very dumb to do that. I could have gotten myself killed doing that. So once class was over for the day, I cleaned up the station and left. All of my clothes were coated in wood dust which I kept inhaling throughout the day. I could not breathe. My lungs started to feel like they were on fire just a few hours later, but I refused to tell anyone because they’d make me go to the hospital and then we might get put in medical debt if it was anything serious. Not to mention how embarrassed I was to have messed up that badly. I did a ton of research that night and made sure to wear actual safety gear from then on (and stopped using that specific wood piece) and also educated myself on far more safety related things around a lathe and around the materials themselves. My lungs are fine now, they got much better after almost a month, but that experience drilled it into my head that knowing everything about a material or chemical or really anything is EXTREMELY important! Honestly, for all I know I’m going to develop lung cancer down the line because of this situation. Currently? Im just glad im alive. Moral of this story; TELL SOMEONE IF YOU THING SOMETHING IS WRONG, look up actual proper safety equipment for what you are doing, and don’t just trust one source when they say that’s all you need to know, please double check these things.
Wow, some of these are bad. I was working at a farm supply store in a 100+ year old warehouse, so one guy starts going out the bay door with the forklift forks raised up way too high and hit the top of the door frame. It shoved the big cross beam like 90% of the way off it's supporting beam. It seems he didn't even notice cause if we all hadn't been screaming at him to stop he probably would have ripped the whole beam down, most likely bringing down that whole corner of the warehouse. No idea how some people can be so oblivious.
i've got one from high school chem; not *too* bad, but definitely funny. we're supposed to be determining the identity of several unknowns, and one of the tests we have is to put them on a hot plate and compare their melting points. these hot plates are pretty twitchy and imprecise, and we're also not doing this in a fume hood (too many students, not enough fume hoods), but we've been instructed to use "very small" amounts of each solid. well, I clearly have a different definition of "very small" than the teacher did, because I grab a nice sizeable lump of several of the solids, throw them on there, crank that bad boy up, and wait for each of them to start melting. after a while, all but one had melted, and while I waited for the last one to melt (which, in hindsight, we were probably meant to determine has a MP higher than we could achieve), I didn't think to remove the ones which had already melted. well, as it turns out: one of the solids was iodine - which has a boiling point only 70 C higher than its melting point. so while I waited patiently for my lump of Unknown D to melt, the puddle of Unknown B began giving off a very distinct purple gas. and did I mention that this wasn't done in a fume hood? yeah. a few people near me coughed a bit before the teacher intervened, but I definitely caught the brunt of it; my lungs hurt for the rest of the day.
Not exactly chemistry, but i just remembered two of my favorite high school stories. The first one happened in like 11th grade physics class when our lovely old teacher brought tons of dry ice to class. My friend group had the inside joke of messign with each others water bottles at the time (Hiding them in weird places, etc.), so my best friend had the genius idea to fill another friends water bottle with dry ice. While our teacher was talking to other students, my friend went to the styrofoam container, epxlained his plan to the studemt handing out dry ice, who put about a handful of dry ice into the bottle and screwed it shut. Said bottle was made from solid aluminum, and had a ridiculously good seal. Needless to say, my friend, realising he just build the worlds worst sniper rifle, tried to get the cap of again, until he was disrupted by a loud FOOMP. Miraculously not a single person was hurt, nor was amy damage done to the surroundings (This all happened right next to glass cabinets). Only the water bottlle never quite reached its former seal again. Our teachers reaction was along the lines of "If you're gonna do something that stupid, st least tell me about it." Funny detail: kid with the water bottle is the son of a internationally renowned physicist Second story, which I have been told by my teacher from the first story is about why the old chemistry & physics building from the local university was demolished. Apparently some physicist had just gotten his phd and decided he wanted to order some americium, recieved the package, and promptly forgot about it. Years later when the building was to be renovated, he realised that he had left radioactive material just lying around the lab for all this time, and decided to just put it alongside some other trash that had been collected. Said trash was for some reason tested for radioactivity in a city a 4 hour drive away, which i assume ruined the physiscists day. The whole building stood empty for years, and was demolished eventually. Positive is that the chemistry faculty now has one of the best buildings on the campus!
You showing that flying lawnmower in the background reminds me of a story where at a NFL game once there was a exhibition with flying model airplanes that were flying real close to the crowd. Just after one airplane had crashed into the field a model airplane in the shape of a lawnmower had crashed into the crowd actually killing a person!
I had a girl in my hs chem class burn her hand after picking up a strip of magnesium with wet hands. The teacher had explained for the whole week never to do that
At my (equivalent to) high school, they were renovating the chemistry/physics building. They had to move out all the chemicals and found a full 5L bottle without label on the windowsill. They asked around of someone knew what it was and one of the younger teachers remembered that it probably was the pure nicotine he ordered for a student who needed some for a project some years ago. Now I'm don't know much, but a quick google search says that 5 mg/m3 on skin is immediately dangerous to life and health. Doesn't sound like something you should have at a school, much less in an unlabeled bottle on the windowsill in a classroom.
I was in 7th or 8th grade and decided to make nitroglycerine. I stole some concentrated sulphuric acid, nitric acid and glycerine in the school, took it home and proceeded to make the explosive. Had no idea how to do it just what was in it. Mixing the acids I accidentally spilled a bunch of nitric acid on my desk, got it on my hand (no gloves) that turned yellow and ruined the surface pretty badly. I mixed the glycerine in and made a half test tube of the stuff. Tried to explode drops of it but didn’t work. Luckily the nitric acid wasn't fuming but the regular 68% so guess the nitration didn’t work. My ten year older brother came home and asked what on earth I was doing. He wasn't to happy but taught me how to do it (relatively) safely anyway. For some unexplicable reason I have now managed to survive into my sixties. :)
hehe, remembering the good old days when our chemical storage was flooded...me and my labmate volunteered to evacuate 10kg of potassium from the top shelves :D still, see the box filled with osmic acid ampules floating past us as we went waist-deep into the flooded basement...
The phosphorus episode only happened because the guy went to work without sleeping. He could have died in the ride home. You should never work after 36 hours awake. You are simply asking to become a statistic. Even if your job is typing. Now the demolition and cleanup stories are absolutely insane. How can anyone clean chemical labs safely? It doesn't look like we really have good enough procedures to do it, because they were clearly winging it.
Speaking of OSHA violations... the last company I worked at has been fined by OSHA so many times it made local news multiple times (as in, multiple people were killed or seriously injured -- usually new temp workers due to non-existent/inadequate training). Anyway, at this company I worked overnight shift as the electrician/controls person along with my mechanical maintenance colleague. Usually we would help each other out if we didn't have anything going on ourselves. This particular plant made cement board siding from paper pulp, concrete, mica, and other materials, so there was quite a lot of wastewater that had to be dealt with. The wastewater treatment area was the my least favorite place to work in. In order to not be fined by the city, we had to keep the pH of the outgoing wastewater within a certain threshold (6.8 to 9.0 or something like that), so sometimes the boiler/wastewater operator would need to make manual adjustments by either transferring 10% HCl to the outflow holding tank, or manually dumping in bags of soda ash. The tank area had a ~2 foot containment dam around the outside, along with drains on the bottom.. The HCl and holding tanks had overflowed so many times almost everything below the dam height was disintegrating, and we were constantly replacing the sump pumps, sensors, and wiring. I was out there a couple times when the tanks overflowed and I got a big splash of the 10% HCl solution, but didn't realize it until my hands and face/head started burning. Thankfully the safety shower out there still worked... lol
Not good stories, but pretty good reminders of the importance of PPE ! I used to work as a truck driver, transporting bulk liquid chemicals. We often unloaded in remote areas, sometimes alone with no one to check on your on a regular basis in case something happened. For most of the products, rubber boots, full rubber suit and gloves, hard hat with face shiels and goggles. You know, perfect clothing for really hot humid summer days ! Some drivers, thinking no one would know they weren't wearing all their PPE, took shortcuts. One was unloading high strenght sodium hypochlorite with a small percentage of NaOH mixed in. A bad seal on his unloading hose (@30 psi) had him sprayed with the product. He was wearing black clothes. When we saw him with his black and orange clothes, we knew immediately what happened... He was lucky he only got some on his shirt and pants. One not so lucky guy got 70% H2O2 in his faces and eyes. He did not enjoy his day . Worst of all, was the guy who got liquid coal tar pitch at about 475 degrees Fahrenheit in his face and in his eyes. He was extremely lucky that plant employee noticed immediately and had very competent, highly trained first responders on site. He has burn marks on his skin, and was very lucky not to go blind ! Just. Wear. Your. F-ing. PPE !
My current job is a maintenance tech/pallet carpenter in a shop making galvanic anodes. We cast most of our zinc cores in-house so in the back corner of the shop we've got a big industrial kiln with a 10 gallon crucible for melting the zinc, and all the associated equipment. Unfortunately, pour-casting zinc is apparently less common than die casting, so for the small scales we're operating on, the only kiln we could purchase takes graphite-ceramic crucibles when a simple stainless one would do perfectly fine at these temperatures. Predictably, every month or two, one of the crucibles breaks because of a power flicker on a weekend or the jib crane's claw slipping off an ingot or something, because ceramic crucibles are annoyingly fragile, AND that kiln is REALLY not designed for that circumstance - it usually takes a good week or so to get it running again, and another week to actually cast because of the whole burn-in process for the crucibles. Oh, and did I mention this is in the back corner of the shop sandwiched between the chemical booth and the wood-and-foam soundproof cutting booth, less than 5 feet away from the 480V 3-phase power for the whole building with the feeder run in PVC conduit? And did I mention this is 10 gallons of molten zinc metal at 600C in a container that shatters on a regular basis and makes a Chernobyl elephant's foot on the floor? This is also the shop where the mortar casting crew usually finishes a pour with at least one LiOH chemical burn on their face or forearm and I've had to fight the bosses not to dump wastewater down storm drains.
I hate when people say that prehistoric people were just eating poisonous plants and dying to figure out what's poisonous. They almost certainly just plain licked it and if they didn't get sick ate a tiny bit and if they still didnt get sick it's because it's edible. Smarter individuals would opt to rub it in their skin first and see if it gets a rash.
The liquid nitrogen elevator story reminds me of a story I have. I’m not a chemist but my uncle is, about 8 years ago my family went to the museum of natural science in Boston when my sister decided to ask my Uncle if he could get us some liquid nitrogen to make a banana hammer. My uncle of course agrees as he’s still at work for the day, so when he’s ready to leave he gets a wine cooler from a liquor store across the street and fills it with liquid nitrogen, he puts it in his car and starts driving but then it breaks, spilling liquid nitrogen all over his car. He got out then when back to work to do it again and this time succeeded in bringing it to my other uncles driveway where we proceed to play with liquid nitrogen. No one got hurt and it’s still one of my fondest memories.
I don't know if I've shared this one before, its not the most exciting but I suppose it did ruin a couple people's yields. In my ochem lab in uni we were doing the Friedel-Crafts reaction using ferrocene, acetyl chloride, and aluminum trichloride as a catalyst to make monoacetyl ferrocene. After the reaction was done we were going to use column chromatography with alumina to separate out the different fractions (since it's impossible to ONLY get the monoacetyl, you'll either get some diacetyl or have some unreacted ferrocene left) but for some reason, in one of the classes a work-study set up column chromatography with aluminum _trichloride_ instead of aluminum _trioxide._ Yes, that is the same aluminum trichloride that was being used in the reaction itself, and yes, it did react in the column chromatography setup and ruin everyone's product.
So, at my institute we got an HCN lab where we're working with liquid HCN. The lab is stuffed with sensors für cyanide, which are constantly beeping, special fume hoods (with HCN filters and such), syringes with antidote (not quite sure what is inside, but they look really cool) and of course the most sophisticated PPE. One day a colleague of mine had to do some work there. In a procedure he was using around 100 mL of liquid HCN (it needs to be cooled constantly, otherwise...). However, he turned on the stirring plate and didn't notice the heating was turned on as well. At some point the whole HCN evaporated in a flash. Although he wore a respirator somehow he managed to breath in enough HCN to knock him out. All the sensors where beeping so loud that all others heard it (fortunately) and we ran there, put on the appropriate PPE and took a few syringes. We dragged him out of the lab and gave him a couple antidote shots. Then we evacuated the whole floor. Our mate somehow managed to survive. None of the people involved ever worked in this lab since. Stuff of my nightmares.
19:14 as he mentioned those dewars are huge and hold a bunch of cell lines in them. Most often the original original cells used for experiments. One of those Dewars can easily hold decades of research and the cells for an entire institute. This is pretty much the absolute worst, worst, worst case scenario possible (safe from someone dying) as losing them would mean shutting down your research for 6-12 months at the very least or possibly suffering irrecoverable damages that no amount of money can make up for. Also as a general note: never enter the elevator with chemicals period. You may drop and shatter a bottle or volatile chemicals may be liberated. Just take the stairs and let the elevator go empty.
Y'know, I'm not sure why UA-cam sent this channel my way, but I'm extremely pleased it did. I was an English major but during my (alas paused for health problems) path into archival science & museum studies in grad school I heard some WILD stories that made me wish I'd been better at chemistry in HS. Radioactive books, letters full of unidentified powder, wet specimens in two-hundred-year-old cracked leaded glass jars full of liquids of mysterious composition, poisonous historical clothing, random white phosphorus, and of course arsenic in literally everything, thanks to the Victorians. Will definitely be subscribing, not just because you are hilarious, but because I think it'll be a healthy reminder that I am not safe in the humanities and chemistry WILL get me if I don't follow safety procedures. (Wearing gloves is no longer considered best practice for handling rare books, unless the book is trying to kill you!)
I had an incident where I chlorime gassed the house once. It was evening(6pm) was trying to make iodine from sodium iodide, and I had the genius idea of using chlorine gas. Btw, I was doing chemistry In the bedroom. I was going to make the chlorine by mixing kmno4 and hcl, which would then travel down a tube into some Sodium iodide solution. I hadded a bit too much water however, and the whole mixture spilled over and bubbled a lot, each bubble releasing an extra amount of chlorine gas. Just one breathfull of chlorine gas feels like getting a bunch in the face, and I ran away from the smell when I smelled it. That lasted for some time as I had the genius idea of not using the filter. My parents came over, who brought in an air filter and filtered all the chlorine. The dirty flasks were cleaned soon after.
So most of my chemistry experience is working in a hospital lab (so more like testing sodium, troponin, tumor markers, blood alcohol content, etc.). So forgive me but I've forgotten most other chemistry stuff. Since you don't want to use an open flame with white phosphorus, would you use a hot plate or something like that?
Once i nearly burned down and flooded the lab at the same time. Why? I was heating something on the heating pan under fume hood, and had distilation column connected. I put the hose from the column into this tiny sink under fume hood. Under this hood another hearing pan and some lamp were connected to the electricity too. When i left for a minute to help my friend with something, i found profesor and some other students yelling at me - turns out that the hose jumped out of the sink and the whole hood was flooded with about 3 cm of water. Thank god it didn’t reach electric devices yet, but it was very close. The other story is from my friend. He needed oil bath for something and forgot that WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO MOVE IT ANYWHERE. He spilled out some oil, slipped on it, and covered half of the lab (including profesor) with hot, sticky oil. It was hot, but not as hot as to burn someone. They nearly let him go from the university 😂
I was once into amateur rocketry, and I was always extremely excited to get my hands on fuel and oxidizer to make some rocket fuel. I've always been careful with chemicals and treated all chemicals with respect, so protection was worn. However, as what I was working with was sugar and Potassium Permanganate, I was certain that contact with those chemicals was perfectly safe. After grinding down the crystals into powders to mix, I had this genius idea of putting the mixture of fuel and oxidizer back into the blender. Needless to say, it's the worst decision I've ever made, and I've never worked with powder based solid rocket fuels ever since. I held down the blend button, and suddenly, fire. I was encased in a huge fireball, and as I'm aware of its dangers, I made sure to get everything done outside. Manganese dioxide was everywhere. little fireballs spreading all over the balcony. Some flammable things around also caught fire, and my first thing I did was to immediately pour the water I prepared right onto the table. My mother quickly responded and came to fight the fire with me. Fortunately it was put out quickly, and till the day we moved, the Manganese dioxide stains still remained on the wall. I went to school next day with burn treatment and bandages all over my hands and face, and my classmates finally understood what the equations I've been solving on the windows are for. Moral of the story: Even if you treat chemicals with respect, there are always times when you may just have the worst idea in the world, and as things go so fast, you may not have much time to think about it. Think before you act people.
Oh gosh; that reminds me of a story my dad once told me. Now, my dad isn‘t a chemist, in fact he studied geology and recently became a doctor of archeology but he works together with a whole bunch of different scientists. He knew this one guy who used to work at the same institute. For his research this guy had to dissolve something (I can’t recall what) in hydroflouric acid. He wasn‘t a chemist and didn‘t usually do something like that tho, so he didn‘t have the right equipment. He got a proper suit and fume mask but all he had to pour the stuff into was a large plastic bottle. So with proper safety equipment, he poured the acid in the bottle and put whatever he had to dissolve in there as well…and then CLOSED THE LID. When he went to check on it when it was supposed to almost be done he put on gloves and the mask and called it a day. After all, all he had to do was open the bottle and take a look inside right?…Well, right when he wanted to open the lid the whole bottle just EXPLODED on him…he did not survive that
Here’s a chem story that I just remembered 😅 I was in gen chem 1 and my teacher was a bit crazy. I was installing a rubber bulb on an old fashioned glass pipet and the glass broke about half way down. Skewering my hand with a dirty pipet that had weak hcl residue in it. I removed the glass From my hand and stopped the blood. She came over and was mad that I was cleaning the glass up. She proceeds to go light headed and our lab tech gets another professor. We clean up the blood glass and sterilize. Apparently it is procedure to have the cops come and write up a report anytime some one is injured. I was sent home after being chewed out(for nothing specific).
repost from the other chemistry stories episode (by me) my grandfather, we shall call big Dave, worked as the head of a county traffic department, like doing signage and snow plowing in the winter, (this was the late 70's to the 80's) big Dave had a few friend that worked in the truck repair shop, doing basic jobs like brakes and tires, one of the few chemicals that they used pretty frequently for cleaning brake pads and brake drums that were not in bad condition, was a chemical by the name of CARBON TETRACHLORIDE, they had about 15 gallons on hand at a time, and just poured it onto the brakes and scrubbed the surface with brass wire brushes and their bare hands, no protective gear at all. one day the EPA came in to do a shop inspection due to the new DEF fluid requirements (used for reducing NOx emissions, its basically at 35% urea solution by weight,) and freaked the hell out when they saw the ~15 gallons of CCl4, immediately confiscating it. most of his buddies passed away in there early 40's from skin and blood cancer from the exposure to the cariogenic compound.
A new student in the lab where I was working on my thesis project had to bubble nitrogen through solutions of PFOS to get the oxygen out. Bro didn’t step up the pressure slowly and also didn’t make sure the tip of the nitrogen line was elevated out of the neck of the tiny volumetric flask, forming a seal and launching a flask of carcinogen water into a wall and spraying shards of cancer glass everywhere
Good lord, the first one reminds me of my phosphorus accident. I was making white phosphorus from red phosphorus and sealing it in little glass ampules. Anyway one of the little vials with still molten WP inside rolled off the bench and broke. It splattered all over and some burned my leg and had when I instinctively tried to wipe it off. The burn was similar to hot grease in feel but deeper. Wiped as much away as possible with a wet rag then treated the burns with lugol's solution which turns the WP to phosphate and hydroiodic acid. The worst burn took about a month to heal, it burns so hot and deep that it cooks the flesh so it fake heals, then a week later the wound oozes and the fried flesh comes off. Then the wound is a small ulcer that leaves a nasty scar 😮😢
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Quick chem question: Are there any reactions that can only be accomplished at very high or very low pressures?
That appears to work a lot like a gas pump overfill mechanism
Where did you find the first story i can't find it?
minor point :
debriding = De-BREE-ding
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For those not aware, that first story implies he had to wait five days in a general ward in the hospital before he could get into a burn ward with the doctors and equipment to properly treat his burns at a high level - not that they waited five days to seek help because it was just too far away.
Thank you for saying this. I made a comment explaining it as well, but I doubt many will see it. Thanks. 🙂
i got it initially, but not the reason. Isn't the main concern, like, you know the major skin eating chemical and or thermal burns? what prevented him being treated for his burns for 5 days? and what burns are we even talking about? i get that he got burned as in pour gasoline and light it burn, but i inferred with the skin falling and those nice details that there was also some sort of chemical reaction, burn? i'm a physicist with very little knowledge of chemistry as you can see lol, but i would guess those 2 types of injuries are of a differrent nature right, and they have to wait till the chemical shit flesh eating process or whatever was finished, or at least halted, stopped neutralized before healing the remaining burned flesh?
would the chemical nasty stuff be over by then, as in either naturally (or not) eliminated, the tissue either removed or 'detoxifyed' (you can't imagine how painful writing that word was) and then the burn deparrtment handles the leftover damage from chems and heat?
reminds me of a story that happened before i was born to my grandma, you got to imagine they used bleach as hand soap or whatever back then cause i can't imagine being able to do this today with widely available household products.
i mean she used hydrochloric acid and other nasty stuff regularly, so she knew what corrosion was and when she should be careful
but one day, don't ask me what caused it idk and she's dead so mystery, she was cleaning outsiide with some nasty stuff, wearing heavy duty chem gloves, and finished. a few hours later her forearm began to burn, moderateely, then quickly became intolerable. she was rushed to the hospital which gave her a prescription consisting of her soaking her arm 24/7 for whatever number of days or hours in some mixture, she said that anyway she would have done it a the pain instantly disappeared when immeresed and immediately came back when her rm was exposed to air again. only after a while of that did they address physical damage thee stufff had done, and boy even 30 years later you could see the burn and that it wasn't a simple heat one, either a horrible chem one or some result of complications cause it looked nasty
i thought for some reason it took five days worth of traveling
@@alexisjuillard4816 White phosphorous would just be a straight thermal burn. Molten phosphorous ignites spontaneously in air- ua-cam.com/video/LMlXhJevCV0/v-deo.html
@@AshKetchum442 They had to load up the covered wagon, get enough hay for the oxen, squirrel jerky, spare axles... had to caulk the wagon and float it across one river... stuff takes time.
"a solid 20kg of potassium"
"waist deep water"
I'm going deaf just reading that. Imagine the bang that would make 😮
Time for a Koulombic explosion
hot potato: potassium edition
Suicide bomber: involuntary edition.
Your ears might be ringing, but fortunately you'd be nowhere near them.
@@elitearbor ideally I would be out of the blast radius and adequately shielded from potassium bits
You know it's a special episode when the guy who got his hand covered in molten white phosphorus doesn't earn the yikes award.
I'm extremely curious as to what happened to cause the oven to explode as well. Surely there wouldn't be enough HF left to make an explosive atmosphere inside the oven, right?
@@liam3284 probably wouldn't have dented the roof upwards if it was an implosion, not to mention it would probably crunch up the door before attempting to swing it outwards. Maybe the HF reacted with something inside the oven to create more explodey stuff?
@@DeuxisWasTaken HF reacting with something is VERY unspecific
A handful of Willy Pete.
I had a distant recollection that doing something odd with silicon made it explosive, a quick search turned up "Explosive Nanocrystalline Porous Silicon and Its Use in Atomic Emission Spectroscopy" but I wouldn't have thought HF was an oxidiser. Fluorine yes but as HF its already done its thing surely? @@williamnixon3994
A little info was left out that i am just now realizing. I didn't wait 5 days to go to the hospital. I went to the hospital immediately after it happened. But the hospital here does not have its own burn ward. So I was forced to make an appointment with them and 5 days later was the earliest they could get me in. I sought help immediately after it happened. I just know that it doesn't read like that from the messages. I was in the hospital for what felt like an eternity waiting for the burn ward appointment. The burn ward appointment was absolutely the most painful thing I've ever been through in my entire life and if you know my life, that's surprising.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to reply to this comment and I will answer them as I find time to do so. And yes, I know I'm a total idiot. That's been established already, but this was years ago and I am much wiser now and we now do things very, very differently in my lab/business. We now have employees to worry about, quarterly inspections from the FBI and DEA, a reputation as a trustworthy chemical and elements supplier to worry about, etc. No need to remind me of my stupidity when I was younger and more ignorant than I am today..
When I first made my WP (0.5g scale) I cleaned it by heating in a nitric acid, kind of glad You just had it in water. :D
@@TheMrbunGeeah ok, cool. That's the way I would recommend doing it to clean it up and make it whiter. Just never hold it while heating and always, always, always do it on a hotplate with every conceivable safety precaution in place, just in case. I don't want anyone to ever have happen what happened to me back then. I was reckless and in a hurry at the time, which is a huge no-no when dealing with this allotrope. If anyone ever has to deal with it, like you have no other choice, wait until you literally have hours to spare, you're fully rested and have researched for days on how to do it. I normally never say things like that as I know most do that exact thing. But with this certain element and allotrope, I make an exception.
5 days of waiting with severe burns... what country is that? 😬
as soon as i heard your story involved white phosphorus I knew it was going to be bad.
Man to think humans used that nasty shit in warfare it truly boggles my mind
Man you are lucky to not need to learn to write with the other hand.
My story is pretty simple comparatively: I was moving a crucible of molten bronze and the crucible failed (I suspect an air bubble, as the crucible had been dried for 4 hours in a 300c oven just the previous day.) The crucible broke right where my tongs were holding it and ~3kg of bronze splashed all over as the rest of the crucible shattered when it hit the brick floor. I was splashed with molten bronze from my shoulder to my shoes. All the natural fibers in my clothing were unblemished. All the artificial ones melted. . . into the natural fiber clothing beneath. My shoes were destroyed but my wool socks were utterly unscathed.
Anywhoo, I jumped back the instant I dropped the Crucible and immediately doused the area with my safety bucket. This was the last time I wore sneakers while moving molten metal. I managed to escape without a single burn though I got a nice case of the Adrenalin shakes. Fortunately my working area was devoid of any tripping hazards (I choreograph my movements VERY VERY carefully when moving molten metal, so I'm very cognizant to remove any hazards in the area, an path of emergency egress.)
I will say, molten bronze is a great way to clean aged brickwork. When I peeled off the layer of spilled bronze, the brick underneath looked brand new, and the grout was the cleanest I've ever seen it!
were you able to remelt down the bronze afterwards? Could be an effective brick cleaner
@@kahlzun yeah but it produced excessive amounts of slag. Can't recommend it.
Yeah molten metal spills cann be quite dramatic 😅😅
Ich my self had a shower of 1650°C steel
As you may see in my profile pic I work with tonns of molten steel and well the crane operrater had the crucible hanging too low and gave the furnace operrater the signal too start pouring the steel out of the furnace in the crucible the stream of metal hit the heat shielding on the crucible spraying steel all over a 4m radius
Well you might ask why is was so close but my part was too to hold the crucible with a long steel rod so it doesn't rotate on the crane
The spray was so thick I couldn't see shit in 1-2m distance
My reaction was too let go of the rod flip my collar up tug my head in and go backwards till I could feel the wall behind me scary shit but thanks to me PPE I didn't had a single burn but next to my position were I stood was a poodle of around 300kg soo i was quite lucky that would have hit like a truck and would burn through the PPE 😅
Oh and the concrete didn't like the heat of the poodle and it's uper layer cracked in very smal steam explosions (the poodle was already solidified but still glowing red at that point)
@@TheLtVossA 300kg poodle? That's one big dog!
@@userequaltoNullhahahahahaahah oh God, that caught me so bad
the thing about OSHA that a lot of people miss is that its mostly about what your employer can or can't make you do. i was always crazy about safety and PPE with my guys because i didn't want them to get hurt, but also because i wanted to cover myself if they did get hurt. basically, i made it so that if one of my guys got hurt then it was either a freak accident or he was being negligent. and some people just think they are immortal and will not only shake hands with danger, but tickle its taint too. and some of those people never do get hurt despite all the dangerous taint tickles!
There is such a thing as too much safety that actually makes things less safe. Now, I do not work with dangerous chemicals etc, so I cannot comment on the safety precautions. Two bad things can happen - one, if the safety precautions look like an overkill, the people may ignore some of them and possibly ignore the more important ones. Another is that if the safety precautions slow the work down, but there are strong incentives to work faster, people will ignore safety.
My grandmother worked in a factory (pressing things out of plastic) where the rules said that you first set everything up (pour the plastic pellets etc), then push a button to start the press. Seems reasonable. However, the incentives for making more were strong enough that people would instead push the button first, then pour the pellets while the press was closing. The vast majority of the time it went OK, sometimes someone was a bit too slow and got their hand pressed with the plastic.
To me, this shows two problems - the strong incentives for working faster and the fact that the press was slow enough so it was possible to do things the unsafe way and get away with it the vast majority of the time.
@@Pentium100MHzthis sounds more like a company that only gives lip service to safety but actually prioritizes productivity and punishes the lack thereof. The problem in your scenario isn’t too much safety. It’s corporate greed and toxic work metrics. I work at a company that prioritizes safety to the point even I find it ridiculous sometimes and I can truly say they have prevented a TON of accidents. In the long run, losing an experienced operator to disability or injury is far more damaging to output metrics than cutting safety corners for incremental gains.
@@Grak70 Yeah, my example was about the incentives. This was in the USSR. AFAIK, every worker had to produce some minimum number of parts to not get in trouble, but after that minimum, if you produced more, you got a bonus. My grandmother bragged that she was able to produce a lot of the parts (not going for a smoke break and sometimes operating two presses helped), getting a high salary for the time and was the first to get to work on new, better equipment.
As for too much safety, if people find it ridiculous, it can be ignored even in situations when it is not ridiculous. If someone told me to dress up like a firefighter to just fill the gas tank of my car I would think the person was stupid and possibly ignore some other of his rules. Or, if I was not allowed in a gas station without dressing up like a firefighter, I would not just fill up the tank in my car, I would bring a lot of gas cans and fill those up, so that I have to go to the gas station as infrequently as possible.
That's why he's called 3 fingered Joe
This isn't chemistry related but I made a mistake that cost more than my salary when I was an apprentice machinist at a factory. I accidentally destroyed a massive press die by continuing to operate the press while my mentor was away despite the bottom being slightly misaligned. If I remember correctly the tool and die engineer said it would probably cost the company ~$100k to replace. I made ~$25k. Fortunately it was taken as a learning opportunity and I wasn't disciplined.
I feel like companies do this all the time where they don't train you properly and then leave you to work on stuff on your own. Luckily for you, it sounds like they realized that was on them but in my experience, a lot of places will blame the employee for their shitty or virtually non existent training
@@theodorekorehonen sometimes they hire people just to have them 'accidentally' break stuff because of bad training so they get a debt slave to replace their equipment
My boss once said "why would I fire him, I just spent a lot of money teaching him a lesson, and he'll never do that again!"
@@dangerszewski9816good boss.
@@BusinessWolf1 That is illegal where I live. The rule is that you can not be held liable as an employee for accidental damage to equipment.
My million dollar mistake was not actually equipment damage: but a liability lawsuit. Maintenance guy asked me, who handles food, to throw out florescent tubes: which broke. A fragment then ended up in a box of food. The restaurant at the other end was NOT happy.
I once got conc. Sulphuric acid on my hand. I was expecting itching or irritation, but it felt like someone was torching my skin like it was a creme brulee. Luckily I got the tap running and ran my hand under it, no lasting effects but it discoloured my skin and nails.
I cannot imagine the pure agony of getting White Phosphorus on my hands like that guy. WTF.
The closest I've had to that was battery acid on my shirt. Shirt turned this weird off-green color in the spots that were exposed (it was black) and was destroyed, noticed a full day later when it started falling apart from the air movement. Skin underneath was SOMEHOW fine despite prolonged contact for two work days. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Didn't even notice because the damaged battery I disposed of was in a tote behind the store, the tote was filled with rainwater. Boss told me to throw the battery away even though dumping car batteries in the trash is illegal for several reasons. Didn't feel like arguing because we were trying to figure out what to do with it (company couldn't take it as a core because it was pancaked in a car accident), so I dumped the rainwater out and picked up the battery bare-handed like a fucking moron and tipped it into the dumpster, walked off with a damp shirt thinking "ah, it was submerged in water and this battery's been back here for weeks, surely all the acid would've leaked out by now." It didn't. Hopefully the EPA doesn't murder me in my sleep for that lol
Our chemistry teacher said he used to clean his hands with conc. sulphuric acid as a Ph.D student when working with scary chemicals. Sounded like bullshit, but he demonstrated it in front of us. You slosh it all over your hands, rub about twice, then straight under the running tap.
@@BooBaddyBig I'd rather wash them with Liquid Nitrogen. No thanks lol.
@@kingflynxi9420 Pouring LN2 over your hands is pretty meh. The Leidenfrost effect stops it touching your skin.
The only reason conc. H2SO4 is dangerous is that it's hygroscopic and generates heat as a result. So if your hand is wet or oil-less it'll immediately start burning your skin via hydrolysis.
Dilute H2SO4 is pretty harmless as long as you get it off fast.
Your story of the leaking waste barrel reminded me of one of my old workplaces. I was working as an electronics engineer in a workshop at a university, helping the scientists maintain their equipment aswell as fabricating custom equipment to their needs.
Anywas we had the need to upgrade our workshop and got it completely rebuilt, everything from ESD flooring to custom made furniture and so on.
One day the principal of the university showed some other higher ups around, including some goverment officials. The principal also wanted to show our almost completed new workshop, so while me and my colleagues were in the workshop, talking with some of the electricians about some minor changes, the principal along with a small group of other people, suddenly showed up in our workshop.
We were a bit startled but greeted them and talked abit bout our ideas for the new workshop and so on. Shortly after the maintenance director of the uni, wanted to show our new mains switchboard that had just been installed, so he called the chief electrician over to demonstrate it. The chief electrician turned on the main breaker and an ear deffening loud bang sounded from the room next door (which was our storage room for the workshop), out from that room came an apprentice of the electrician, who was in the middle of installing some three phase outlets when the chief electrician turned on the main breaker, having forgotten all about his apprentice working. That poor apprentice was white as a sheet and still held, shakingly, onto a pair of halfmolten cutting pliers.
The looks on everybodys face were priceless. Fortunately the apprentice didn't endure any enjuries except for perhaps on his mental wellbeing.
The main breaker ought to have been tagged out of course!
LOTO saves lives... yikes!
If anyone wondered why we have this silly lock out tag out stuff
Lock Out Tag Out or you'll win the lotto
What is lock out tag out?
RE kitty litter: those blue flecks are, or at least used to be, cobalt chloride, serving as a moisture indicator.
You won't get rid of them with organic solvents.
Re: HF. If you're using concentrated stuff, if you're not going to wear at least double gloves - with one of those layers being proper rubber gloves - don't go near HF. I recommend a third layer of latex gloves on top of your nitriles because they react (safely) rapidly with HF (turning brown) so you'll know immediately when to change the outer layer.
Also, I've definitely pulled HF fumes through a vacuum pump before. Some fluorinated compounds decompose partially when you're distilling them and you can see the fumes coming off. We had a special dist setup (that was etched a lot) for these distillations. That vacuum pump suffered greatly, I pulled so much chlorine through it.
@@noodlelynoodle. 100% the only smart call if you find random bottles of HF in your house. Almost certainly quite dilute but not worth the risk.
Oh, this is a fun game I can participate in!
Not a chemist, but a biomedical story. During my bachelor, I was working in a lab on some bacterial spores (cool fellas, but not important) with 8 other students, a few PhD students working/baby sitting us and our lab tech. All of a sudden we all heard a muffled boom, the sound of glass breaking and then the door of our incubator being flung open by a 40L flood of the foulest smelling… anything I have ever encountered, shards of glass of all sizes and everyone’s petri dishes.
Turns out, some genius from another lab had gotten permission to run an experiment in our incubator where he filled a 120L glass vat with 40 L of his culture to accumulate the gasses for over a week and had left to go on vacation. The problem was that he did this without a pressure release valve, so it had turned into a pressure bomb and went off. The scary part, apart from the cleanup, was that my partner had pulled some petri dishes out of that incubator 3 minutes before it went off. If he had timed that a bit worse, he might have gotten hit by that. Or it might have gone off at night and damaged electronics, etc.
The good news is that we could all hear our lab tech chews this guy out, it was not pretty but well deserved. That explosion destroyed about 12 weeks of PhD student and 20 weeks of bachelor student work, which was not fun.
"destroyed about 12 weeks of PhD student and 20 weeks of bachelor student work"
Oh, this hurts!
2:00 Happens to the best of us
4:05 funfact. In Beaches in eastern germany you can find white phosphorus. It looks a lot like amber so sometimes people will get burnt from sticking it in their pants. There still tons of it left over from WW1
time to start a mining company to exploit this wonderful unnatural resource
Correction: WW2
Correction:- Unfun Fact.
Even as kids on the west coast of germany we would get reminders before the summer holidays that amber could be phosphorus and to put any and all "amber" we might find on the east coast in a seperate bag instead of putting it in the pants pocket. The mental image of an un-extinguishable fire on my leg made me scared of that stuff before I ever knew I wanted to become a scientist (biology, because RNA, DNA and Thermocyclers dont eat hands)
@@lagggoat7170 idk man, if a chemist screws up he might die, if a biochemist screws up millions might die.
Would love to tell you about my first Bio lab job. That place was a mess
I worked in food saftey. So most of our workplace hazards were very common. Worst I’ve experienced was a few E-Coli contamination I dealt with. Although the worst hazard wasn’t what I dealt with, but was my other lab workers. We couldn’t consistently get people to clean. There was food stains on everything, but worst was the biohazard room
We typically use rough morphology to ID contaminated samples (to help dial in why they might have been, if it was filler error, or system sterilization errors)
Basic gram staining was more than enough like 70% of the time. But occasionally we’d have spore staining we’d need to do. That uses Malachite Green.
Since a previous accident 2 Years before I got there, our fume hood was destroyed. But we have a biological saftey cabinet. Tech there just assumed they functioned identical, right?
So when I got there and learned we were basically evaporating malicite green with no respiratory protection. I started causing a huge stink.
There would also be green stains on everything. Since that malichite was the only green thing we had in the lab, I was horrified to clean a random surface and see my paper towels mysteriously turn green. The worse contender was the fact our DI water sink (only one in the facility) had odd green staining in the tubes coming from it. I’m guessing a pervious tech probably washed something covered in it, and let it get into the piping. Who knows how containited all the DI was there.
I also heard how my (now previous) supervisor spilled half a bottle on his arm and just wiped it off. And carried on. No incident report. Nothing. Didn’t even use the Shower. Probably rinsed it off in the sink. Pretty sure I’m like 1/4 people who heard that story.
We couldn’t consistently do it there in a safe way so we have to pay an outside lab to do it. I refused to even learn. Not under those conditions and with those techs as my teachers.
God I’m glad I’m out of there
A Chem story from a different perspective: I am a cancer survivor who went through chemotherapy as a secondary treatment post surgery. For younger chemo patients (I was 24 at the time) common practice is to surgically install a port just above the left pectoral muscle as the access for your IV meds. Now, the port sits above the muscle, and connects via catheter to your vena cava. This usually spares your veins from the cytotoxic effects of your medication, and can prevent neuropathy in the hands. I had a pretty normal but potent schedule of drugs (Cisplatin, Etoposide Phosphate, and Bleomycin) and after finishing treatment, have an entire patch of my left pec area stained a kind of Jaundiced yellow color, likely from some slight leakage of the port. Moral of the story, check your seals.
Non-Chemistry Safety Equipment Story --- I was taking a fiberoptics class in the Army. At the time, pretty much all fiber connectors were done by hand and required a fair bit of fiddly work. That morning we had gone over all of the safety equipment you should have for working with fiber. Including a special set of tweezers for removing the thin/fragile glass fiber from flesh should you spike yourself. Since you really don't want it to shatter inside of you. Fast forward a few hours. We are all stripping the ends of fiber cables to get to the inner glass core. That core is surrounded by a bunch of loose fine synthetic protective fibers you need to trim away. Easiest way to separate those from the core so you can trim them is to blow at the end of the cable. Fibers spread away and the glass core stays put. One student in our class points the end of the cable at his mouth (instead of blowing at it from the side), tilts his head way back for a deep breath, and then jerks his head forwards to produce a mighty (and unnecessary) puff of air. Succeeding in spiking himself in the lip with the human hair thickness glass. Can you guess what safety equipment we didn't have on hand? Thankfully, these special tweezers are commonplace in hospitals. Though he had to keep his lip/mouth still until we could drive him from on-base to the local hospital in town. So glad I was in that class and not the next since I'm sure the safety briefing got CONSIDERABLY longer ...
Hell yeah, a new Chempilation. I’ve been binging old episodes I’ve already seen, so it’s awesome to have a new one!
Glad you like them!
@@That_Chemistoccasionally I use your videos to fall asleep to. Entertaining enough to listen to and long enough to have time. I have UA-cam Premium so you get that at least.
I do actually watch your videos when they come out and not try to fall asleep to them.
Before finding your channel, I pictured professional chemists as... well, professional 😁 I mean smart perfectionists in lab coats and glasses. Now I know, that they are the same as the rest of us, reckless apes with oversized brains. Thinking about it now, I was the same when I was in my chemistry phase in mid school. You know, lighting up calcium carbide in puddles, throwing bottles with it near fire, taking lead grids from car batteries without gloves to melt them, mixing ammonia nitrate with sodium hypochlorite in my living room (yikes). Thank god I never got access to anything more serious during those times 😅
i read an old < 1930s> chemistry book.. it said ' pottasium permanganate and glycerine is an interesting reaction'.... what it actually meant is a fire that willl not go out
youre the first channel to make chemistry interesting to me. i love when people explain all the details, and dont make things too brief to "keep it simple for the stupid people". If youve watched any high school science video, you know what i mean. Keep up the good work man
Thanks :) I try to make videos just like this!
This is not my story, but something that happened a good while ago in my uni. Still insane.
Back in the day, in lab classes for the 1st years people would just throw into the sink all of the liquid waste, since the freshmen didn't work with organic solvents or metals (save for Cu). They advised, of course, to let the faucet running a good while when doing so to dilute the waste so it didin't react in the plumbing. Turns out 18yo fresh faces often don't hear things, and ended up throwing stuff without diluting enough. One day, because of whatever unholy concotion brew in those sewers, the pipes started spewing fire into several of the ground floor labs simultaneously for nearly a minute.
Unsurprisingly, after that incident, they started using the proper waste containers for EVERYTHING. The problem is that, because of the really screwed up way that the building was built, it's nigh impossible to replace the underground pipes without pretty much halting the whole class labs for at least a year, which is unfeasable. So, as far as we know, those pipes can be cracked and leaking the wastewater into the soil, and we wouldn't know. However, the floor in the hall is slightly bumpier in the middle.
My PI warned me about making sure all solvent from column silica was fully evaporated before disposing of it. Apparently a previous student had failed to do so and emptied all silica into the (EHS approved) plastic jug, sealed it, and left for the day. The warm summer day. At some point during the evening, despite the air conditioning, the heat in the lab caused the residual solvent in the closed container to go boom. Fortunately, the container was stored in a location where the only damage was to the drywall, and the fine layer of silica deposited around the room.
Regarding the hotplate, my brother in law works in a metallurgy lab and has a hotplate that's got to be kept at 300°C. They test it by dropping water onto it
In High School I had a great AP chemistry teacher. He set a good example with respect to PPE and ran a tight lab, and was also well liked by students. I don't recall any incidents, even among the badly behaved kids. Except one time. This teacher also kept some pretty sketchy chemicals at the school which I don't think he was supposed to have. They made for entertaining demonstrations, however, and he was highly competent, so I'm sure they were safely stored and secured.
One such demonstration, to celebrate the last day of the school year, involved white phosphorus. About a minute into the lecture after his demonstration, his hand started smoking. He calmly stuck it under the tap, rinsing it while he continued the lecture. About a minute after removing it from the water, it again started to smoke, and he again placed it under the stream of water. This repeated once or twice more before the bell rang and we left. For all I know, he was there all summer.
My PhD PI always was very strict about never entering the elevator with liquid nitrogen (we would walk the stairs while sending the dewar up specifically using the freight elevator), and also never pushing the dewars by the oh-so-convenient top ring, because there are usually handles lower down specifically for you to handle. Honestly, I never even considered the tip risk till this video.
So...can I use your grill in the back of your van if no selenium is involved? Asking for a friend...
😑
Tellurium? Isocyanates? What are you grilling this week?
Keep it to yourself m8. Just leave innocent people alone, that's all I ask.
Wow chemists beef before gta Iv 😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😂😂😂😅😅😅😂
Good gravy....using ozs to measure white phosphorus is scary as heck. It isn't weed lmao.
imperial measure is horrifically innaccurate
@@andyf4292What the fuck are you talking about?
running joke,,, ounces, furlongs chains and drahms @@Texan_BoyKisser
I built a hot plate specifically to go to 500°C in grad school with a motorized stage for spray pyrolysis. It was enclosed in a separate ventilation system - in materials research, 500°C is pretty tame.
People that research ceramics or metallurgy typically deal with temperatures a lot higher than 500ºC, so I was surprised when he said 500ºC was a lot. It's, admittedly, for organic chemistry, which is what most people probably do in current research.
I've used one that hot but was for inorganic chemistry, specifically for making test batches of case hardening material for making steel hardened with nitride and carbide. Nothing like molten cyanide salts 😮
@@christopherleubner6633 Jesus. Death staring you across the room?
@VeteranVandal pretty much, but the melt was surprisingly stable. It did make some vapor though it was in a fume hood. Would not advise doing this on a regular bench though! 🙄 🤢🤮😱💀
Was gonna say, I'm a metallurgical engineer and 500 C is child's play.
The phospherous story just shows what to do when you want to stay up after already being awake for 36hrs and your falling asleep at the wheel.
💯 just go to sleep and don't worry about it. It's not worth the risk to deal with chemistry while sleep deprived.
I'd say any experimental work done under sleep deprivation is a bad idea. Things that don't look dangerous can become dangerous because your mind is fixating in how long it'll take to sleep next time. And if things aren't idiot proofed, there's likely a big enough idiot in the room to prove it should have been idiot proofed.
what, pull over and light yourself on fire with white phosphorus?
I mean yeah that'll wake you up, but I doubt it's as good as just pulling over and taking a nap.
@@lsswappedcessnadepending on wich country you live in, phosphorus might be safer than sleeping in your car, hahahahah. Cries in Brazilian's safety
Yeah, trucker here. Don't drive when awake that long lol. You go downhill quick.
I used to work at Autozone, and we have PPE for batteries (gloves, apron, goggles) that we were supposed to wear any time we handle a battery. I was there 5 years and I only strapped everything on once.
Dude brought his Chevy Malibu in for us to check the battery. He pops the hood, and I see the battery bulged to its max and smoking. I told him it was at extreme risk to burst, and the $13.50 an hour I was making wasn’t nearly enough to touch it. He asked if I’d change it, and I said not a chance. He had a buddy come and take the battery out, and we had him leave it out to the side of the building. 5 hours later at the end of my shift I suited up and put it in the battery charging station that had a plexiglass burst shield for a few days. 😂
As a janitor at a college I've had to go into lab buildings and nothing makes me more weary than walking past the giant tank of liquid nitrogen especially when something around it goes psssh.
Enough to make Terminator jumpy.
I am particularly impressed by your choice of sponsor. It's refreshing to see a UA-cam video about Chemical safety being sponsored by a brand of lab safety gear, instead of some cringeworthy Segway into a VPN sponsor.
Also: washing hands in DCM... that's something I'd expect to see in a back-alley auto body shop, not a lab!
Segue*
The first (and last time) I played with fire was when at 12yo, I was at a friend's place with 2 others and we started setting fire to small amounts of wood alcohol in metal caps. Burning some leaves in there, just fooling around a bit. Maybe 1h into this fun activity, my friends started upping the scale of the project by dousing a metal skate ramp with this alcohol while it was burning. I was already some distance from them, but I started backing up and said I was going home because I felt things were getting a bit dodgy and their movements too careless....I was right. That distance kept me out of harm, otherwise I would've gotten burned too, but one of those kids in particular got almost 50% of his body burned (mostly 2nd & 3rd degree burns). Skin grafts for him, epic 800k$ lawsuit that dragged on for years for us...For quite a while, my parent's insurance company didn't seem like they would want to cover the costs of this incident...I was deemed equally responsible (33%) because of my presence, involvement and the fact I was still legally on the property when the exploaion happened. Reading about everyone's relative luckiness while acting completely reckless makes me squirm. Don't make the mistake of underestimating danger, even in situations that may seem under control. In my case, while I was being relatively careful in my actions, this whole accident was caused because one of the kids poured some more wood alcohol while maintaining a continuous stream. The fire then climbed up and made the bottle explode. This wasn't MY or even the victim's mistake per say, yet the amount of consequences that unfurled was pretty dramatic. Stay safe and alert people!
I'm only 2:30 into the video and having burned myself on glassware that we were learning to bend and stretch in high school chem class, I was immediately seeing red flags when OP said they were heating the vial by holding it with their bare hand
The only pumps I know of that could tolerate HF may have to be pumps used in the semiconductor industry. They are like a thousand pounds, require a constant stream of nitrogen and cooling water but they do work pretty well.
It's very rare that one mistake will kill you, but all too often the first mistake it choosing to be in a situation where one more mistake (by anyone) will kill you.
This incident occurred during my first year of studying chemistry at university. During one of our laboratory sessions, we were tasked with synthesizing 1-bromobutane from butan-1-ol. Unfortunately, much of our equipment was quite old and some of it was slightly damaged.
One of the cleaning steps in this experiment required us to mix the crude 1-bromobutane with highly concentrated sulfuric acid in a separatory funnel. During this procedure, the stand that belonged to my classmate behind me suddenly gave way, causing the separatory funnel to drop and spilling concentrated sulfuric acid and 1-bromobutane all over the floor. Fortunately, no one was splashed in the process. However, there is still a noticeable mark on the floor where the spill occurred.
As a grad student at a “Ivy League” university in the great white north we had large (about 6 litres) stills to dry our solvents in which we used sodium metal with an indicator. We had about 10 across a set of fumehoods in the back end of our lab. One of the more senior grad students was finishing up her project and was to head out on vacation for a few months. Each of us were typically assigned a few stills to maintain. We had a best operation procedure that a still could be regenerated (ie add more sodium metal) only 3 times after which it was a lengthy procedure to take down and quench and renew the still. Two of us would also need to be present for safety. As this senior grad student took vacation a colleague of mine and myself were assigned to take down and quench her stills. The procedure is quite lengthy in that you would place the large round bottom of the still in an ice bath to slow any exothermic reaction as first you would slowly drop by drop add isopropanol to quench the sodium metal as it would react relatively slowly with the sodium as compared to water… which as many of you will know can cause a violent reaction with sodium… as you add isopropanol there would be some bubbling as what should only be a few grams at best of sodium in the round bottom was reacted to form an inert Sodium oxide… once bubbling stopped from addition of the isopropanol you would add carefully some water to ensure no metal was left… then if safe you could add a few milliliters of water too be sure …. as we completed these steps over hours we determined the still was quenched and proceeded to dump the waste into one of a series of very large (20L) waste containers that lay on the back wall of the lab directly opposite the actual working stills … as we did so we watched in horror as a baseball sized chunk of sodium clunked out of the round bottom on to the container and split apart into many various sized pieces onto the floor next to our compressed gas cylinders used for the stills and over the waste container as it was too big to simply fall into the waste container…. our panic was well predictable … apparently rather than follow our three renew rule for stills this student in a rush to finish her work had just kept adding sodium metal to the still which resulted in a large ball of sodium to which our quenching efforts had only oxidized the outside of the sphere that had rolled out and busted exposing raw highly moisture bad metal all over the floor … as a reminder this is between very large volume stills and very large volume solvent waste containers on either side of us… after a few seconds we jumped into probably not well thought out action… I grabbed a sand bucket hoping to put a non flammable barrier between the exposed metal and the air or moisture… while my colleague has started to seek out metal pieces on the floor and began try to put isopropanol on the metal to oxidize them … while we tried to scoop them into a jar of immune spirit oil … we’d almost cleared the danger when we went to move a compressed gas cylinder to check behind it when water seeped up from between the floor tiles as we moved the cylinder across the floor …. You see some weeks earlier the lab above us had flooded and had soaked the back of our lab where … yup the stills and waste storage was … instantly the entire floor coated in isopropanol ignited in a massive fire…. as the flames immediately started crawling for the solvent stills and waste I grabbed the fire extinguisher on one of our benches it was empty or malfunctioned… I didn’t have time to find another extinguisher so I grabbed a spare lab coat hanging near bye and began trying yo beat the flames away from the solvents all the while screaming for my colleagues to grab fire extinguishers … they immediately grabbed one other in the lab and one just outside our lab… both didn’t work… while still trying to beat down the flames I had pushed the fire toward me to the point the bottom of my lab coat caught fire … just as it really started to take hold and almost at the point of running for my life someone finally came around the corner and doused me with extinguisher…. we managed to get the fire out and clean up. Needless to say you don’t forget something like that. It would have easily been the end of the entire department had those solvents went up.
Bonus safety fail… same university and I’m getting instructed on proctoring exams … the policy of the university was that in the event of a fire alarm you where to rather than evacuate you had to go confirm the fire first … I promptly interjected and argued this policy will kill people should they be in the chemistry building as alarms aren’t just pulled for fires but for loose poison gas or eminent explosions … they pushed back hard against me … however after a formal complaint they revised the evacuation policy … I suppose someone had the good sense to review the complaint and determined someone getting out of an exam wasn’t worth killing everyone in a building over
Actually you can use vacuum pumps for HF chemistry, but you need to make sure that the pump oil is perfluorinated!
not quite alkyl as it's got 3 esters on it right
Yup spendy oil called fumblin
I grew up with a friend who lost his dad in a Chem Lab. Chemistry always been scary to me. Pressure tanks too. God bless you all who take the risks, even if those risks are minimized. For me, it is the slight oversight or potential of stuff others around may doing. Very scary job, not for me.
Reminds me of a story:
I was working in R&D for Catalysts with a production plant a couple dozen meters away.
For maintenance one of the quenchinglines wasnt producing and the other line was used for two products.
To keep the story short, someone didnt clean the tank after their shift and the inside got coated with Paladiumhydride and the worker trying to clean after his line was finished knew what could happen if both lines mixed. He climbed the tank to clean it out extra thouroughly. As soon as the water from the hose hit the wall of the tank, the blastwave knocked him off, sending him 3 stories down. The entire tank raptured along its side like a peeled fruit despite the open lid.
The shockwave broke most of the windows in the R&D center. At least the ones facing towards the productionplant.
I have some other great storys of my time working there... fun times.
My plate goes to 500C, it's handy for calcinations.
Fairly common for that to be the hi-temp model of a range, although I've seen a few going to 650C.
Not my story but my friends. This is also biology rather than chemistry. He was studying biology in highschool and they were supposed to do a gene modification lab where they make ecoli glow in the dark.
Their teacher explains the procedure, and they perform the lab. Nothing special. Except that this gene modification used Crispr. Crispr is illegal to use without authorization in Sweden.
How did he find this out? Another teacher walked in and was surprised of how well the lab went. So the lab teacher talks about how incredible Crispr is to which the other teacher responds with "Wow! How did you get clearance for that?"
That's when he realised it was, in fact, extremely illegal to use Crispr without authorization and he could land in jail for several years, which in Sweden is a big deal (most sentences are rarely over a year). He hasn't been arrested yet luckily. I'm still wondering how the hell he got a hold of it. So that also means that technically my friend broke the law by performing an illegal laboration.
Here's a chemistry unsafety story. My Junior year of College, when I was in Orgo I we had to do a multiweek lab for the identification of an unknown substance (The Professors knew we were just supposed to apply our knowledge of different chemical properties to the identification of a substance from a list of potentials) in any case I was often the last if not close to the last one done jusr because I tend to like to take my time on each step of the process. Important note before continuing, I'm relatively tall and my assigned hood was quite low so I would often ignore the rules of how high to leave the sash since I wouldn't be able to manipulate my materials well with it so low. So one day when we were supposed to be testing for solubility at varying pHs and I was gently heating my substance in a solution of HCl and decided to "add agitation" by hand. We had always been told that when mixing a substace in a tube like this to point the tube away and to not completely cover the top to allow for off-gassing. I did not do either of these. To make a long story short,HCl wants to be a gas, the reaction is exothermic so I ended up exploding a tube of HCL + mystery substance in my face. Luckily, the substance mostly neutralized the acid but for the next few days my lungs hurt when I did anything strenuous like go up the hundreds of stairs I needed to go up every day to get to and from my classes. (Also I ended up incorrectly identifying my substance because I messed up my melting point)
this is one of the most entertaining videos I've seen all year, in a morbid curiosity type of way
These stories remind me of my time as a water treatment engineer. At large industrial sites, we often use chlorine dioxide as a biocide for keeping the bacteria levels in cooling towers low. This is generated on-site from various commercially available reactants. The aqueous solution goes to a day tank which feeds several metering diaphragm pumps, injecting the ClO2 into the cooling tower loops. All of this is monitored with various automated water chemistry probes but the risky part comes from those damn pumps.
ClO2 is obviously going to off-gas out of solution so it’s supposed to be sealed, but it often feeds ten or more of those metering pumps. Considering a lot of them have parts that have a short operational lifespan (ClO2 seems to ruin a lot of plastics with continuous exposure, turning them brittle via oxidation), they break down all the time. This rarely results in a “leak” because the day tank is not pressurized, so whenever there was a flow issue I often fixed it myself, braving the noxious odor of ClO2 with a trusty gas detector on my belt so I know when to dip if there really is a major leak. However, a lot of the technicians I worked didn’t care as much. I’ve seen rush down from the lab without PPE to fix issues with chemical pumps all the time. I guess they’ve done it so many times they get careless.
One time I was by the day tank and noticed the smell was WAY worse than normal. At dangerous concentrations in the air (which is still only 100 ppb or greater) it smells like really strong bleach or chlorine, and makes you want to gag. I immediately wanted to gag, but the gas alarms on the wall hadn’t detected anything so I decided to go and grab a buddy to figure out what’s going on. I found a technician who had probably 15+ years of experience on the job and knew those pumps in and out, but of course he neglected his PPE (including his safety glasses). When we got there though all the pumps were running fine. He got close to inspect one of them and as the diaphragm pulsed, a small jet of ClO2 solution shooting out from the pump at an odd angle splashed him right in the face. He immediately doubled back and hurled on the floor, and rushed over to the eyewash. Right at that moment the alarm went off which means the ClO2 concentration in the room had finally reached 100 ppb (and it was probably WAY higher next to the pumps since the gas detectors were about 50 feet away from us at the end of the hallway).
I shut off all of the pumps, called the safety officer and plant manager, and escorted the guy to an eyewash in a different room that wasn’t currently being gassed like it’s 1917 in a German trench. Thankfully he ended up being totally ok after being medically cleared, the eyewash nearby was definitely a lifesaver. There had been just a tiny little hole in diaphragm membrane on the pump that was causing it to spirt ClO2 every time it pulsed, and sure enough we found a little splash puddle about ten feet away from the pump where it was shooting out to. Only maybe a few milliliters at a time but enough cause a problem.
Lesson here? I don’t care how much experience you have, always wear your PPE. Even if you’re not a chemist in a lab, at an industrial site the points of failure in any system are far greater and amount of control you have is far less. And I’m not blameless too, I should have told the guy to put on his PPE of course.
And for the record, that ClO2 we were so casually working with is about twice as worse as straight elemental chlorine gas in terms of health effects and exposure limits.
At least you know he won't ever have to worry about developing autism. 😜
OMFG!!!!!!!
@backyardscience2000 is very lucky not to have lost a hand to this accident. In fact, he's lucky to still be alive.
Working with phosphorus 75 miles away from emergency services is insane. Also, he should have left immediately for the burn center, not waited five days. WTF?????
He needs to find a new job that doesn't involve phosphorus of any color.
A little info was left out, I went to the hospital immediately. That's what the ice was for, to keep it from burning (cold water on burns, you know) until I could get there. But they didn't have a burn ward. They did what they could for the burns, but even though it was white phosphorus burns, they forced me to make an appointment with the burn center 5 counties over. A drawback to living in the middle of nowhere. But I also agree that working with white phosphorus is about the dumbest thing I've ever done. But, I also work with the red allotrope a lot and I am one of the very few who can legally buy and sell it, making it available for the wider community (everyone from teachers to the home chemist and homeschool teachers) to experiment with and with most element sellers not selling it, I'm one of the only legal sources for it. That said, I do have to follow all of the associated laws and regulations associated with the allotrope due to it being regulated under the DEA's list of regulated and watched chemicals. I even am subjected to quarterly inspections from the FBI and DEA due to the vast array of chemicals and elements that we keep in stock. We aren't just some random person selling chemicals. But rather, a legit business that pays our taxes and tries to do everything by the book. That said, that doesn't mean that everything is perfectly safe. We go to extreme lengths to ensure that everything is stored correctly, safely and up to regulations. If we didn't, we would have been shut down a long, long time ago. The incident happened within the first few months of starting the business and things have changed a lot since then. It's extremely rare that we deal with WP these days, but we do still get the random lab or school wanting a single gram here and there for their collections/experiments/syntheses. When I do have to make it, I pretty much do the opposite of what was described in the video and the procedure is like what you would see in a normal lab these days. I really should make a new video on it one day to show how it's done these days. But if I were to just stop messing with phosphorus altogether, that would take the ability to acquire it away from so many people that I just can't do that. I can't just take that from the chemistry community and take the experience away from those who want to experience it without having to go through the troublesome danger of making it themselves. I'd much rather someone order it from me than risk making it themselves because they don't have that experience with it and have never had such a thing happen to them before and who am I to take that away from them? No it seems like me being with it is here to stay, but in a much safer and more controlled way. The feds make sure of that, trust me. Not saying that you should agree with me, just that people much higher up than any of us make sure that we do things safely, legally and follow all the laws associated with everything that we offer. We really don't have a choice in the matter and I am fine with that.
I have a few smaller stories, due to being a lab chemist in trainig atm:
- A cotrainee of mine managed to mistake sulfiric acid (w(H2SO4)=96%) with ethanole and was joking around with it, gesturing to spill it over another cotrainee as a joke. As one does, thinking it is ethanole, he handled it outside of the fumehood and only noticed, after wiping spilled liquid with a paper towel and the paper turning black.
- I managed to make a metal-bath, heated to 200°C, crash down - while trying to lower it with a 'Lab-Boy', spilling hot Wood-Metall (Cd, Pb, Sn, Bi) in my fume hood.
- In a internship I did, someone had the bright idea to scare my partner and me, whilst we were doing stuff, by setting of quite a large volume of elephants toothpaste in the sink, about half a metre behind us.
- Someone managed to put wet papertowel into a steeldrums, filled with waste contamineted with isocyanates, making the steeldrum rupture. The meeting afterwards was akward, because everyone thaught it was me or another trainee, because we were new in the lab and hadn't this much expirience, but the first thing, they told us was that we should NEVER, EVER put anything with water into the isocyanate waste.
To be fair, LN2 has such a low heat capacity that the Leidenfrost effect goes a long way. I always pick up my frozen protein with bare hand from the LN2 into the boxes in the -80C freezer. As long as I warm my hand every once in a while no damage is done.
if you don't keep the dewars at temperature you can actually wear them out - always assume that letting one warm up will cause a crack
First Rule of LN Spills: you DO NOT talk about LN spills.
The O in OSHA stands for optional
lol, yeah, having hands is also optional
I just quit an environmental chemistry internship because my supervisor is a bumbling fool and we're using concentrated sulfuric acid. In addition to being 45-60 min late to literally every lab day, he is lazy about gloves, exact measurements, and broke at least one beaker and graduated cylinder every lab day. I am not fucking around with a klutz and sulfuric acid
Damn right
I only own two stirplates and they *both* max out at 540°C. It's an interesting story how I got them. I started out just looking for a decent-quality bargain stirplate. I would up with two high-end Fischers, one of them new-in-box.
I worked at a place around liquid nitrogen. the stuff is weirdly safe to touch. the leidenfrost effect does a lot of work to keep it off something as hot as a human, and the nitrogen itself has piss poor heat capacity. the elevator thing is real. the procedure we had was to roll the dewar onto the elevator, hit the floor you wanted it at, get off, and have your colleague meet it on the floor it was going.
in theory you were also supposed to inform people the elevator was not to be used, and there were procedures for securing the elevator so no one would get on, but everyone just learned to check for giant metal canisters before getting on.
When I was writing a chemistry paper on the synthesis of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) in high school, I was showered with boiling acetone.
In order to have a reference substance for my own product, I decided to simply isolate ASA from tablets. To do this, I crushed them in a mortar and dissolved them in acetone, as the ASA dissolved while the fillers were not soluble. After I filtered off the solids, I decided to distill off the acetone because I didn't want to waste the 500ml of acetone. When I set up a distillation apparatus (thank God) in the laboratory fume cupboard, I began to distill off the acetone. The acetone, which was supposed to boil at 56°C, was now at a temperature of around 62°C and I wondered if I had done something wrong. I realized I had forgotten the stirrer. So I opened the apparatus and threw the stirring rod into the round bottom flask.
The moment the stir bar touched the liquid there was immediately a loud hissing sound, the contents of the flask shot out of the opening and splashed all over the hood and onto me because I did not close the window of the fume hood. I was in a huge panic at that moment because I thought the acetone might ignite along with the lab and me and I just screamed "Oh shit" whereupon my teacher entered the lab, which is right next to a chemistry classroom where she was teaching a 6th grade class. I simply asked her if I was burning to which she said no and helped me figure out what happened.
All I can say is that superheating can be dangerous and that since that day I have become even more careful about only entering a laboratory wearing a lab coat and safety goggles. Because of these saefty mesurements nobody was hurt and the only damage was done to the fume hood and some parts of the floor as ASA-crystals were forming everywhere which were a pain to remove. Even in my hair grew cristals which I discovered while showering at home.
Greetings from Germany
I was opening old dry solvents from sigma in a fumehood, like 50 100mL ones, with a spatula and straight into organic waste. Someone left a bottle of n-BuLi in the pile and it got all over my gloves which heated up so fast that i took them off immediately after putting the bottle down. Miracle that there was no fire
19:51 I mean the way you do it is. You put the chemicals/nitrogen in the evator and either take a 2nd elavator or take the stairs.
I break that rule ONLY if I am traveling with vacuum sealed stuff.
When I was in undergrad, a friend of mine was working in a low-dimensional materials lab. They had a huge electromagnet for levitating little pieces of graphene. They had taped off the "danger zone" around the electromagnet which was roughly where the field would no longer pull any big pieces of metal towards it. Once while visiting the lab, I leaned past the line and the machine stole my glasses, just to give you some context of how strong this thing was. This was in a historical physics building which had been around for a hundred+ years or so, and they had these heavy steel desk chairs for the lab benches. One day a grad student stood up too fast and their chair rolled back and crossed the line, slamming into the electromagnet at 50+ Mph. Luckily it didn't do too much damage, so they just needed to spend a few days re-calibrating everything.
When OSHA just won’t do, you can always yell OSHit.
the closest thing i did to chemist was in my friends back yard in the 8th grade. when i went over there it was mostly the same but when it got late we got bored and we thought it would be fun to fuck around with butane. So we played around a bit pressing the nozzle down with are fingers and having a flame thrower, but we then we had a stroke of genus if we poked a hole in the top of a empty 2 liter bottle of soda we could push the nozzle up on it pushing a lot of butane into hit the butane turned to a liquid and we got it about a quarter full before we decided to unscrew the bottle cap with a small hole kick it over and light it on fire. thankfully it just got done raining a lot so we didnt burn down the neighbor hood, but we also did it twice and if things were to go wrong we would have had a lot of problems.
other smaller thing was slapping other people with my hand on fire. Making a camp fire at a bus stop to warm me and some tweakers and thats about it for things i have done.
Ah yes entertainment via other people's mistakes.
Minus the phosphorus mishap, that's just nerve racking too even think about.
ohoho, new chempilation! from a future geologist, love the videos. I come here often to learn how I will not be acting should I find myself in a chemistry setting
Just be careful which rocks you lick. =)
@@robertb6889 I will o7
Geology? Interesting!
Story 1;
Not a very detailed story, but the reason I refuse to ever go into any form of science or job in general that deals with chemicals. My freshman year of highschool I took an AP Physics course. In this course, there was a classmate who had absolutely no regard for safety procedures. She thought she was better than the and refused to follow them at all. She was a very smart person in terms of the equations and so myself, her, and two other students were in a group most of the class. We constantly changed groups, but for some reason it seemed like the 4 of us were a table group most of the year. So I had to deal with her, a lot. Her blatant disregard for safety procedures and proper equipment safety led to nearly a thousand dollars in damages over the course of that year. Which would have been bad enough, but she didn’t suffer any consequences because her parents didn’t care and just paid the fee for the materials (her parents were rich) so she didn’t exactly get better about safety two years later. My sophomore year I took both Honors Biology and Honors Chemistry and nothing particularly interesting happened in them other than a few kids getting told off for not wearing PPE, but because of this, I knew the story that the teacher would always tell at the beginning of the year Lab Safety and PPE unit. They had only ever had to use the shower once. Some TA messed up which chemicals they were supposed to grab and accidentally brought out some chemicals (don’t remember which ones) that were not supposed to go together. The AP Chem kids were doing that lab and the first kid to get to that part wasn’t wearing proper eye protection. The chemical mixture went boom and he had to go to the hospital to make sure everything was out of his eyes and that the burns he got weren’t going to cause him issues. The eyewash station had been used plenty of times, including by myself (note; do NOT touch your eye if it itches when you haven’t washed your hands!) but that remained the only shower incident… until that previous classmate with no regard for safety shows up to that class the next year. I was walking around the halls for some yearbook work when there was an explosion sound from the general direction of that specific science class. Us yearbook students, being YEARBOOK students, decided to see what happened. This classroom had no interior windows and only one small tiny window on the door (you probably know the one I’m talking about) so I peaked in. Only to be confronted with the image of three students, but especially the aforementioned classmate, absolutely soaked in the shower area while another two students were frantically trying to get something out of their eyes. As far as I know, no one was permanently injured, but the story came out later that Anti-Safety Kid was, you guessed it, ignoring proper procedure! And unfortunately, 4 other kids were just close enough to get caught in the crossfire. The meet idea that I could end up working somewhere with explicit safety instructions with someone like her one day has scared me away from most “hazardous” jobs… the best pert about this whole story is that in my freshman year, I told this kid that some day she’d get in a ton of trouble because of ignoring procedures, but at the time she laughed it off and said “I don’t care, my parents will pay for the broken equipment and it’s not like anyone will actually get hurt, this is highschool not a factory”
Moral of the story; Follow procedures, treat equipment with respect, wear the correct PPE, and don’t get cocky around dangerous materials!
Story 2;
This one is much shorter.
This also happened my freshman year, to put into perspective, this was a ways before I told the Anti-Safety kid about how she’d get hurt eventually… and this is why I was such a stickler for following procedure in Physics and every other class after this incident. I like to call this particular incident “Burning Lung”. I was in my Intro to Engineering course in highschool and for one unit, we had to make a project. Any project, as long as the teacher approved it. I really wanted to use the lathe as it was most interesting to me that year. My dumbass decided to simply use a medical mask instead of any sort of mask made for wood turning. I did wear goggles and a face shield, but the class didn’t have a proper respirator as it should have. This was mistake number 1… mistake number two was not checking what materials the wood I was turning was made of! I picked wood that “looked cool” because I didn’t realize that some wood has fibers that you don’t want to breathe in! Mistake number three, which could have prevented all of this, I did not look up ANYTHING about wood turning, like a complete idiot. My teacher taught me the basics of the tools, but didn’t really know any of the basic safety regarding the actual turning material. And even then, he did not let me know that I should have used at the very least an N95. So I assumed everything was good. One day, I move to a new piece of wood to start carving and this wood is making my lungs hurt a bit. To this day, I still have no clue what wood it was. But I continued cutting, because why not! I was very, very dumb to do that. I could have gotten myself killed doing that. So once class was over for the day, I cleaned up the station and left. All of my clothes were coated in wood dust which I kept inhaling throughout the day. I could not breathe. My lungs started to feel like they were on fire just a few hours later, but I refused to tell anyone because they’d make me go to the hospital and then we might get put in medical debt if it was anything serious. Not to mention how embarrassed I was to have messed up that badly. I did a ton of research that night and made sure to wear actual safety gear from then on (and stopped using that specific wood piece) and also educated myself on far more safety related things around a lathe and around the materials themselves. My lungs are fine now, they got much better after almost a month, but that experience drilled it into my head that knowing everything about a material or chemical or really anything is EXTREMELY important! Honestly, for all I know I’m going to develop lung cancer down the line because of this situation. Currently? Im just glad im alive.
Moral of this story;
TELL SOMEONE IF YOU THING SOMETHING IS WRONG, look up actual proper safety equipment for what you are doing, and don’t just trust one source when they say that’s all you need to know, please double check these things.
"...white phosphorus..."
*looks into the camera like I'm on the office*
Wow, some of these are bad. I was working at a farm supply store in a 100+ year old warehouse, so one guy starts going out the bay door with the forklift forks raised up way too high and hit the top of the door frame. It shoved the big cross beam like 90% of the way off it's supporting beam. It seems he didn't even notice cause if we all hadn't been screaming at him to stop he probably would have ripped the whole beam down, most likely bringing down that whole corner of the warehouse. No idea how some people can be so oblivious.
15:23 We just got a new hot plate at my lab from Ohaus and it goes 500°C
Stories like these are also why the USCSB exists. They have a UA-cam channel with incident breakdowns.
i've got one from high school chem; not *too* bad, but definitely funny. we're supposed to be determining the identity of several unknowns, and one of the tests we have is to put them on a hot plate and compare their melting points. these hot plates are pretty twitchy and imprecise, and we're also not doing this in a fume hood (too many students, not enough fume hoods), but we've been instructed to use "very small" amounts of each solid. well, I clearly have a different definition of "very small" than the teacher did, because I grab a nice sizeable lump of several of the solids, throw them on there, crank that bad boy up, and wait for each of them to start melting. after a while, all but one had melted, and while I waited for the last one to melt (which, in hindsight, we were probably meant to determine has a MP higher than we could achieve), I didn't think to remove the ones which had already melted.
well, as it turns out: one of the solids was iodine - which has a boiling point only 70 C higher than its melting point. so while I waited patiently for my lump of Unknown D to melt, the puddle of Unknown B began giving off a very distinct purple gas. and did I mention that this wasn't done in a fume hood? yeah. a few people near me coughed a bit before the teacher intervened, but I definitely caught the brunt of it; my lungs hurt for the rest of the day.
do not play with white phospho
Meh
Not exactly chemistry, but i just remembered two of my favorite high school stories.
The first one happened in like 11th grade physics class when our lovely old teacher brought tons of dry ice to class. My friend group had the inside joke of messign with each others water bottles at the time (Hiding them in weird places, etc.), so my best friend had the genius idea to fill another friends water bottle with dry ice. While our teacher was talking to other students, my friend went to the styrofoam container, epxlained his plan to the studemt handing out dry ice, who put about a handful of dry ice into the bottle and screwed it shut. Said bottle was made from solid aluminum, and had a ridiculously good seal. Needless to say, my friend, realising he just build the worlds worst sniper rifle, tried to get the cap of again, until he was disrupted by a loud FOOMP. Miraculously not a single person was hurt, nor was amy damage done to the surroundings (This all happened right next to glass cabinets). Only the water bottlle never quite reached its former seal again. Our teachers reaction was along the lines of "If you're gonna do something that stupid, st least tell me about it."
Funny detail: kid with the water bottle is the son of a internationally renowned physicist
Second story, which I have been told by my teacher from the first story is about why the old chemistry & physics building from the local university was demolished. Apparently some physicist had just gotten his phd and decided he wanted to order some americium, recieved the package, and promptly forgot about it. Years later when the building was to be renovated, he realised that he had left radioactive material just lying around the lab for all this time, and decided to just put it alongside some other trash that had been collected.
Said trash was for some reason tested for radioactivity in a city a 4 hour drive away, which i assume ruined the physiscists day. The whole building stood empty for years, and was demolished eventually. Positive is that the chemistry faculty now has one of the best buildings on the campus!
You showing that flying lawnmower in the background reminds me of a story where at a NFL game once there was a exhibition with flying model airplanes that were flying real close to the crowd. Just after one airplane had crashed into the field a model airplane in the shape of a lawnmower had crashed into the crowd actually killing a person!
I had a girl in my hs chem class burn her hand after picking up a strip of magnesium with wet hands. The teacher had explained for the whole week never to do that
At my (equivalent to) high school, they were renovating the chemistry/physics building. They had to move out all the chemicals and found a full 5L bottle without label on the windowsill. They asked around of someone knew what it was and one of the younger teachers remembered that it probably was the pure nicotine he ordered for a student who needed some for a project some years ago.
Now I'm don't know much, but a quick google search says that 5 mg/m3 on skin is immediately dangerous to life and health. Doesn't sound like something you should have at a school, much less in an unlabeled bottle on the windowsill in a classroom.
I was in 7th or 8th grade and decided to make nitroglycerine.
I stole some concentrated sulphuric acid, nitric acid and glycerine in the school, took it home and proceeded to make the explosive. Had no idea how to do it just what was in it. Mixing the acids I accidentally spilled a bunch of nitric acid on my desk, got it on my hand (no gloves) that turned yellow and ruined the surface pretty badly. I mixed the glycerine in and made a half test tube of the stuff. Tried to explode drops of it but didn’t work. Luckily the nitric acid wasn't fuming but the regular 68% so guess the nitration didn’t work. My ten year older brother came home and asked what on earth I was doing. He wasn't to happy but taught me how to do it (relatively) safely anyway.
For some unexplicable reason I have now managed to survive into my sixties. :)
hehe, remembering the good old days when our chemical storage was flooded...me and my labmate volunteered to evacuate 10kg of potassium from the top shelves :D still, see the box filled with osmic acid ampules floating past us as we went waist-deep into the flooded basement...
The phosphorus episode only happened because the guy went to work without sleeping. He could have died in the ride home. You should never work after 36 hours awake. You are simply asking to become a statistic. Even if your job is typing.
Now the demolition and cleanup stories are absolutely insane. How can anyone clean chemical labs safely? It doesn't look like we really have good enough procedures to do it, because they were clearly winging it.
Speaking of OSHA violations... the last company I worked at has been fined by OSHA so many times it made local news multiple times (as in, multiple people were killed or seriously injured -- usually new temp workers due to non-existent/inadequate training). Anyway, at this company I worked overnight shift as the electrician/controls person along with my mechanical maintenance colleague. Usually we would help each other out if we didn't have anything going on ourselves. This particular plant made cement board siding from paper pulp, concrete, mica, and other materials, so there was quite a lot of wastewater that had to be dealt with. The wastewater treatment area was the my least favorite place to work in. In order to not be fined by the city, we had to keep the pH of the outgoing wastewater within a certain threshold (6.8 to 9.0 or something like that), so sometimes the boiler/wastewater operator would need to make manual adjustments by either transferring 10% HCl to the outflow holding tank, or manually dumping in bags of soda ash. The tank area had a ~2 foot containment dam around the outside, along with drains on the bottom.. The HCl and holding tanks had overflowed so many times almost everything below the dam height was disintegrating, and we were constantly replacing the sump pumps, sensors, and wiring. I was out there a couple times when the tanks overflowed and I got a big splash of the 10% HCl solution, but didn't realize it until my hands and face/head started burning. Thankfully the safety shower out there still worked... lol
Not good stories, but pretty good reminders of the importance of PPE !
I used to work as a truck driver, transporting bulk liquid chemicals. We often unloaded in remote areas, sometimes alone with no one to check on your on a regular basis in case something happened.
For most of the products, rubber boots, full rubber suit and gloves, hard hat with face shiels and goggles. You know, perfect clothing for really hot humid summer days ! Some drivers, thinking no one would know they weren't wearing all their PPE, took shortcuts.
One was unloading high strenght sodium hypochlorite with a small percentage of NaOH mixed in. A bad seal on his unloading hose (@30 psi) had him sprayed with the product. He was wearing black clothes. When we saw him with his black and orange clothes, we knew immediately what happened... He was lucky he only got some on his shirt and pants.
One not so lucky guy got 70% H2O2 in his faces and eyes. He did not enjoy his day .
Worst of all, was the guy who got liquid coal tar pitch at about 475 degrees Fahrenheit in his face and in his eyes. He was extremely lucky that plant employee noticed immediately and had very competent, highly trained first responders on site. He has burn marks on his skin, and was very lucky not to go blind !
Just. Wear. Your. F-ing. PPE !
My current job is a maintenance tech/pallet carpenter in a shop making galvanic anodes. We cast most of our zinc cores in-house so in the back corner of the shop we've got a big industrial kiln with a 10 gallon crucible for melting the zinc, and all the associated equipment. Unfortunately, pour-casting zinc is apparently less common than die casting, so for the small scales we're operating on, the only kiln we could purchase takes graphite-ceramic crucibles when a simple stainless one would do perfectly fine at these temperatures. Predictably, every month or two, one of the crucibles breaks because of a power flicker on a weekend or the jib crane's claw slipping off an ingot or something, because ceramic crucibles are annoyingly fragile, AND that kiln is REALLY not designed for that circumstance - it usually takes a good week or so to get it running again, and another week to actually cast because of the whole burn-in process for the crucibles.
Oh, and did I mention this is in the back corner of the shop sandwiched between the chemical booth and the wood-and-foam soundproof cutting booth, less than 5 feet away from the 480V 3-phase power for the whole building with the feeder run in PVC conduit? And did I mention this is 10 gallons of molten zinc metal at 600C in a container that shatters on a regular basis and makes a Chernobyl elephant's foot on the floor?
This is also the shop where the mortar casting crew usually finishes a pour with at least one LiOH chemical burn on their face or forearm and I've had to fight the bosses not to dump wastewater down storm drains.
I hate when people say that prehistoric people were just eating poisonous plants and dying to figure out what's poisonous. They almost certainly just plain licked it and if they didn't get sick ate a tiny bit and if they still didnt get sick it's because it's edible.
Smarter individuals would opt to rub it in their skin first and see if it gets a rash.
The liquid nitrogen elevator story reminds me of a story I have. I’m not a chemist but my uncle is, about 8 years ago my family went to the museum of natural science in Boston when my sister decided to ask my Uncle if he could get us some liquid nitrogen to make a banana hammer. My uncle of course agrees as he’s still at work for the day, so when he’s ready to leave he gets a wine cooler from a liquor store across the street and fills it with liquid nitrogen, he puts it in his car and starts driving but then it breaks, spilling liquid nitrogen all over his car. He got out then when back to work to do it again and this time succeeded in bringing it to my other uncles driveway where we proceed to play with liquid nitrogen. No one got hurt and it’s still one of my fondest memories.
9:52 hey which one is your favorite shin
I don't know if I've shared this one before, its not the most exciting but I suppose it did ruin a couple people's yields. In my ochem lab in uni we were doing the Friedel-Crafts reaction using ferrocene, acetyl chloride, and aluminum trichloride as a catalyst to make monoacetyl ferrocene. After the reaction was done we were going to use column chromatography with alumina to separate out the different fractions (since it's impossible to ONLY get the monoacetyl, you'll either get some diacetyl or have some unreacted ferrocene left) but for some reason, in one of the classes a work-study set up column chromatography with aluminum _trichloride_ instead of aluminum _trioxide._ Yes, that is the same aluminum trichloride that was being used in the reaction itself, and yes, it did react in the column chromatography setup and ruin everyone's product.
What the eff
So, at my institute we got an HCN lab where we're working with liquid HCN. The lab is stuffed with sensors für cyanide, which are constantly beeping, special fume hoods (with HCN filters and such), syringes with antidote (not quite sure what is inside, but they look really cool) and of course the most sophisticated PPE. One day a colleague of mine had to do some work there. In a procedure he was using around 100 mL of liquid HCN (it needs to be cooled constantly, otherwise...). However, he turned on the stirring plate and didn't notice the heating was turned on as well. At some point the whole HCN evaporated in a flash. Although he wore a respirator somehow he managed to breath in enough HCN to knock him out. All the sensors where beeping so loud that all others heard it (fortunately) and we ran there, put on the appropriate PPE and took a few syringes. We dragged him out of the lab and gave him a couple antidote shots. Then we evacuated the whole floor. Our mate somehow managed to survive. None of the people involved ever worked in this lab since. Stuff of my nightmares.
I normally don't watch a sponsor ad. Well done, man... and you got my subscription.
19:14 as he mentioned those dewars are huge and hold a bunch of cell lines in them. Most often the original original cells used for experiments. One of those Dewars can easily hold decades of research and the cells for an entire institute. This is pretty much the absolute worst, worst, worst case scenario possible (safe from someone dying) as losing them would mean shutting down your research for 6-12 months at the very least or possibly suffering irrecoverable damages that no amount of money can make up for.
Also as a general note: never enter the elevator with chemicals period. You may drop and shatter a bottle or volatile chemicals may be liberated. Just take the stairs and let the elevator go empty.
Y'know, I'm not sure why UA-cam sent this channel my way, but I'm extremely pleased it did. I was an English major but during my (alas paused for health problems) path into archival science & museum studies in grad school I heard some WILD stories that made me wish I'd been better at chemistry in HS. Radioactive books, letters full of unidentified powder, wet specimens in two-hundred-year-old cracked leaded glass jars full of liquids of mysterious composition, poisonous historical clothing, random white phosphorus, and of course arsenic in literally everything, thanks to the Victorians.
Will definitely be subscribing, not just because you are hilarious, but because I think it'll be a healthy reminder that I am not safe in the humanities and chemistry WILL get me if I don't follow safety procedures. (Wearing gloves is no longer considered best practice for handling rare books, unless the book is trying to kill you!)
Please share some good stories in the TC discord!
I had an incident where I chlorime gassed the house once. It was evening(6pm) was trying to make iodine from sodium iodide, and I had the genius idea of using chlorine gas. Btw, I was doing chemistry In the bedroom. I was going to make the chlorine by mixing kmno4 and hcl, which would then travel down a tube into some Sodium iodide solution. I hadded a bit too much water however, and the whole mixture spilled over and bubbled a lot, each bubble releasing an extra amount of chlorine gas. Just one breathfull of chlorine gas feels like getting a bunch in the face, and I ran away from the smell when I smelled it. That lasted for some time as I had the genius idea of not using the filter. My parents came over, who brought in an air filter and filtered all the chlorine. The dirty flasks were cleaned soon after.
"Man Grills New Incendiary Weapon"
Do NOT let him cook ❌🔥
@@Flesh_Wizard But Jesse, we need to cook.
So most of my chemistry experience is working in a hospital lab (so more like testing sodium, troponin, tumor markers, blood alcohol content, etc.). So forgive me but I've forgotten most other chemistry stuff.
Since you don't want to use an open flame with white phosphorus, would you use a hot plate or something like that?
Once i nearly burned down and flooded the lab at the same time. Why? I was heating something on the heating pan under fume hood, and had distilation column connected. I put the hose from the column into this tiny sink under fume hood. Under this hood another hearing pan and some lamp were connected to the electricity too. When i left for a minute to help my friend with something, i found profesor and some other students yelling at me - turns out that the hose jumped out of the sink and the whole hood was flooded with about 3 cm of water. Thank god it didn’t reach electric devices yet, but it was very close.
The other story is from my friend. He needed oil bath for something and forgot that WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO MOVE IT ANYWHERE. He spilled out some oil, slipped on it, and covered half of the lab (including profesor) with hot, sticky oil. It was hot, but not as hot as to burn someone. They nearly let him go from the university 😂
I was once into amateur rocketry, and I was always extremely excited to get my hands on fuel and oxidizer to make some rocket fuel. I've always been careful with chemicals and treated all chemicals with respect, so protection was worn. However, as what I was working with was sugar and Potassium Permanganate, I was certain that contact with those chemicals was perfectly safe. After grinding down the crystals into powders to mix, I had this genius idea of putting the mixture of fuel and oxidizer back into the blender.
Needless to say, it's the worst decision I've ever made, and I've never worked with powder based solid rocket fuels ever since.
I held down the blend button, and suddenly, fire. I was encased in a huge fireball, and as I'm aware of its dangers, I made sure to get everything done outside.
Manganese dioxide was everywhere. little fireballs spreading all over the balcony. Some flammable things around also caught fire, and my first thing I did was to immediately pour the water I prepared right onto the table. My mother quickly responded and came to fight the fire with me. Fortunately it was put out quickly, and till the day we moved, the Manganese dioxide stains still remained on the wall. I went to school next day with burn treatment and bandages all over my hands and face, and my classmates finally understood what the equations I've been solving on the windows are for.
Moral of the story: Even if you treat chemicals with respect, there are always times when you may just have the worst idea in the world, and as things go so fast, you may not have much time to think about it. Think before you act people.
Oh gosh; that reminds me of a story my dad once told me. Now, my dad isn‘t a chemist, in fact he studied geology and recently became a doctor of archeology but he works together with a whole bunch of different scientists. He knew this one guy who used to work at the same institute. For his research this guy had to dissolve something (I can’t recall what) in hydroflouric acid. He wasn‘t a chemist and didn‘t usually do something like that tho, so he didn‘t have the right equipment. He got a proper suit and fume mask but all he had to pour the stuff into was a large plastic bottle. So with proper safety equipment, he poured the acid in the bottle and put whatever he had to dissolve in there as well…and then CLOSED THE LID. When he went to check on it when it was supposed to almost be done he put on gloves and the mask and called it a day. After all, all he had to do was open the bottle and take a look inside right?…Well, right when he wanted to open the lid the whole bottle just EXPLODED on him…he did not survive that
These stories always make me feel so many emotions in such rapid succession
Here’s a chem story that I just remembered 😅
I was in gen chem 1 and my teacher was a bit crazy. I was installing a rubber bulb on an old fashioned glass pipet and the glass broke about half way down. Skewering my hand with a dirty pipet that had weak hcl residue in it. I removed the glass From my hand and stopped the blood. She came over and was mad that I was cleaning the glass up. She proceeds to go light headed and our lab tech gets another professor. We clean up the blood glass and sterilize. Apparently it is procedure to have the cops come and write up a report anytime some one is injured. I was sent home after being chewed out(for nothing specific).
Love the chempilations!
repost from the other chemistry stories episode (by me)
my grandfather, we shall call big Dave, worked as the head of a county traffic department, like doing signage and snow plowing in the winter, (this was the late 70's to the 80's)
big Dave had a few friend that worked in the truck repair shop, doing basic jobs like brakes and tires, one of the few chemicals that they used pretty frequently for cleaning brake pads and brake drums that were not in bad condition, was a chemical by the name of CARBON TETRACHLORIDE, they had about 15 gallons on hand at a time, and just poured it onto the brakes and scrubbed the surface with brass wire brushes and their bare hands, no protective gear at all.
one day the EPA came in to do a shop inspection due to the new DEF fluid requirements (used for reducing NOx emissions, its basically at 35% urea solution by weight,) and freaked the hell out when they saw the ~15 gallons of CCl4, immediately confiscating it.
most of his buddies passed away in there early 40's from skin and blood cancer from the exposure to the cariogenic compound.
The CP lab safety eco funnels are great!
❤
A new student in the lab where I was working on my thesis project had to bubble nitrogen through solutions of PFOS to get the oxygen out. Bro didn’t step up the pressure slowly and also didn’t make sure the tip of the nitrogen line was elevated out of the neck of the tiny volumetric flask, forming a seal and launching a flask of carcinogen water into a wall and spraying shards of cancer glass everywhere
Good lord, the first one reminds me of my phosphorus accident. I was making white phosphorus from red phosphorus and sealing it in little glass ampules. Anyway one of the little vials with still molten WP inside rolled off the bench and broke. It splattered all over and some burned my leg and had when I instinctively tried to wipe it off. The burn was similar to hot grease in feel but deeper. Wiped as much away as possible with a wet rag then treated the burns with lugol's solution which turns the WP to phosphate and hydroiodic acid. The worst burn took about a month to heal, it burns so hot and deep that it cooks the flesh so it fake heals, then a week later the wound oozes and the fried flesh comes off. Then the wound is a small ulcer that leaves a nasty scar 😮😢