The way I like to describe HF is "real life bone hurting juice" Because it's exactly that. It permeates through the skin, directly into bones, and messes them up real good
Oh, in case you got covered in HF, here's some advice the lab boys gave me: DO NOT get covered in HF. We haven't entirely nailed down what chemical it is yet, but I'll tell you this: It's a lively one, and it does NOT like the human skeleton.
On the topic of blindings from welding arcs: It's not just intense visible light but also huge doses of hard UV light, meaning you don't even notice how dangerous it actually is. Similar thing with Lasers. ALWAYS WEAR GOGGLES!
Id actually say you really undersell it. Its the hard UV light thats mostly the dangerous part. The visible light component of a typical welder is somewhere around 750 incandescent bulb. Its enough to be really uncomfortable to look at, but not that dangerous. The UV part is much worse, and also because its deceptive. Welding light reflected of a white wall, is not really painful to look at - but it still is very dangerous. Ill illustrate with a real life example. My good friend around 15 years ago had some friends come over to his house to smoke some weed and have a good time. They arrived a bit early, and he was busy in his garage welding stuff. He was welding shit since he was like 10 yo and of course he had all the necessary protective equipement on him. They didnt. He told them he has to finish whatever he was doing , and since they are early they are welcome to sit in his guest room (on other side of the house). They left his garage and he proceeded to weld. He wasnt aware, that instead of heading to where he told them to, they sat few meters behind the door to the garage, behind a corridor corner. So there they were, with no direct line of sight - in fact the welding light bounced of 2 walls before getting to them. Sure enough, the effect wasnt immediate. But after the half hour has passed, they had to be rushed to hospital, because all of them eventually developped severe conjunctivitis due to uv actually causing blistering burns on their eyes. It got worse in the hospital (not because of care, but because it tends to develop over time, so initial 24 hour their condition actually deteriorated), to the point that one of them went temporarily blind (although i believe it was simply because his eyelids got so swollen he couldnt open his eyes anymore). They recovered with no apparent long term damage, although i dont think it is possible to not have at least some residual effect from such trauma.
The hard UV from welding only damages the outside layers of the eyeball, like a sunburn on your eyes. The intense bright light though will definitely cause blindness though, Like staring at the sun continuously. I believe an up close welding arc is brighter then the sun. More akin to a nuclear explosion.
Phenol is much more hazardous than most people seem to think. My friend used to work at a plant where they make phenol-formaldehyde resins. They take delivery of phenol via railcar tanks of twenty thousand gallons. Getting the phenol out of the tank requires melting it with a steam-heated wand. This process is done by a team of two workers in head-to-toe PPE--one who melts the phenol, and one who stands by in case the phenol overheats and burps out of the tank onto the guy doing the melting. If that happens, worker #2 is to grab worker #1 by the collar, throw him into the safety shower, and call for an ambulance. Everyone pretty much agrees that worker #1 is toast at that point anyway (skin exposure over 25 % of the body is potentially fatal).
True some paint strippers contain a combination of methylene chloride (dichloromethane), phenol and methanol and the containers of that type of paint stripper specifically warns of the highly dangerous nature of such paint strippers. In addition methylene chloride fumes can cause central nervous system depression respiratory depression and cardiac dysrhythmias if inhaled
Adding this to the list of "careers to nope out of on your very first day". No amount of money is worth that shit. But in seriousness, wtf? Surely they could have higher tier protective gear that wouldn't make a burp a death sentence?
The USCSB has a video case study on their channel about a DuPont employee who was sprayed with liquid phosgene after a transfer hose broke. He died hours later, even with medical treatment. Nasty stuff.
I thought about the exact same one, we should all binge watch the USCSB videos, I have and it makes you realize how large scale can drastically change how dangerous stuff is
I can't believe there are so many different chempolation stories with such cursed accidents... I'm just glad most of them were came out to be fine/not dead
I have a fun acid in the eyes story from when I was doing my post grad project.. I opened a fridge in the lab and immediately got the classic eye sting, told the senior PhD student that my eyes were stinging and something in the fridge was leaking before I washed my eyes out. It turns out that a bottle of an acid chloride had polymerised and the solid polymer expanded, breaking the container it was in. The fumes had been building up for days and I just happened to be the one to discover it. I didn't need to go to the hospital but the uni safety officer was pissed off because it was in the original manufacturer's packaging and we had multiple bottles of the stuff from the same company in like 3 other labs. The uni got a refund for that.
I just remembered this story from grammar school. We had a short break in chem class and I found what looked like a sparkler or something in the grass just outside the school building. I picked it up and with my friends tried lighting it with a lighter, but to no avail since it was still too wet. Our teacher agreed to let it dry inside and a week or so after, we took it back out. Attempts to light it with a lighter were still futile, so our teacher brought a fing bunsen burner (one of those ones with a gas tank included) and we started blasting it with the flame. It almost seemed like the thing was just nonflammable until the brightest flash of white light erupted from it. Could hardly see for like a minute. I don‘t know why someone would make such a thing, or why it would be lying around a school or why our teacher agreed to assisting our idiocy, but that was the most rad sparkler I had ever seen. Still, I would not encourage anyone to light dubious pyrotechnics they find in the school yard.
Hm possibly. I have no idea about welding so I have no idea. Would explain why it would just randomly lie about though, especially since there was a lot of construction there.
Could be a thermal cutting rod filled with aluminum or magnesium, or even a solid magnesium bar (maybe a firestarter?). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance
The phosgene reminds me. I was doing HVAC in the 90s and was fixing a R12 refrigerator. Well in Job Corpse they taught me to use a flame to leak test. I found a leak, only something was wrong with the stuff. I bright evil purple flame showed me a leak on a filter. Suddenly it felt like I swallowed a cactus down my lungs, my entire body was all pain and tingles and I fell to the ground in excruciating pain and then just laid there for about 3 hours before moving again. Having been exposed to phosgene it sure seemed worse. It tasted like pain, it smelled like pain and purple, and was the worst anything I have ever took a breath of. Not hay or anything of the sort. I suspect an oxime of phosgene was formed. Thinking back, it is pretty stupid to leak check with a flame a system filled with chlorofluoroalkanes and mineral oil, but that is what happened.
I was exposed to phosgene once in an open area. It tasted sour and felt essentially like acid was forming in my lungs. It was powerful considering the very low dose i got. It could be the dose, or it could be a breakdown product or a reaction like you said.
One ore thing about welding, The UV light can burn your skin. A guy from our school once came to class with red face and arms. There was a stripe of normal skin around his eyes, where he coverd them with his arm(at least). He told us that he "didn't feel like waring a mask or gloves". He got a painfull lesson. Also flying molten metal is other reason for wearing PPE when welding.
I learned the hard way why you wear full sleeves to weld. It was literally my first time around a welding machine so I didn't know any better, and I didn't think anything of it while I held a piece in position for my coworker. My forearms were lobster red and peeling by the end of the day. Worst sunburn I've ever had.
@@lefthandedspanner I remember when I was learing to weld with an oxyfuel torch, the flux popped and startled me, I jerked the torch, the torch backfired. That was pretty scary, and probably th quickest i ever closed the valves on the torch.
When i bought my new tig welder i had to build a cart for it and it was 40 degrees so putting on all my welding clothes didn't sound like fun so i tacked it all together wearing only a pair of shorts thinking i wouldn't get to burnt just tacking.. i woke up that night in pain and within a couple of days all my chest and arms completely peeled, I'll never weld without a shirt again.. tig is the worst for uv burns because there's no smoke to block any of the uv
Yeah, middle of winter I was welding, next day I was wondering why my knees felt sunburned, before realising I remembered to use long shirt, gloves, full face mask, but was wearing shorts lmao
The phosgene thing is another example of how everyone should read the MSDS first, get a rough idea of what hazards to expect before they even get near a bottle of chemicals. The HF and the nuclear reactor incident are a good example of everyone who could possibly be exposed needing to know what hazards are there. Either keep people out of your work area or make sure they’re safe.
Room-mate was stripping paint off of car-parts using chlorinated solvent. Yes, he was using the stove-top for heat. I found it boiling over, got the kettle outside, got a moderate dose of phosgene. The absence of any immediate choking sensation makes this one especially dangerous! "Hmmm, do I smell wet grass? There it is again..."
I helped the teacher with it in the early 2000s and did the experiment multiple times over the 4 years and stared right at it pretty often. Nobody really told us not to. Yes my vision is very bad and I know for a fact I’ll be a blind old person! Cheers
I had my eyes flashed by welding once. That was a crappy night. Waking up and can't see anything. I didn't even know why I woke up. Dry eyes and all. Definitely learned a lesson there.
Not a chemistry incident, but it's so stupid that i wanted to share it When i was a kid, i really liked staring into lamps/the sun/bright glowing objects in general, so one day, i somehow got my hands on a laser mouse and stared into the laser for like 5 minutes straight. The eye i shined the laser in has mild damage, but otherwise it's fine. It's a miracle how i didn't go blind
Yeah, I tried to stare at the sun as a kid. Being a smart stupid kid, I did it close to sunset so that the visible light intensity would be bearable. Still have a small spot of damage in one eye that I can see sometimes in the right lighting conditions.
@LabRat Knatz ehhh, I mean plenty of cheap laser pointers lie about the strength of the laser itself, some of them turn out to be far more powerful than they should be, had a bit of an incident with one as a kid
I built a fume hood for my home lab and it has saved my lungs many times! I cut the side out of a 1000l IBC and made a sliding Perspex window with timber and aluminium chanel. Fume extraction is done via a bouncy castle air pump and PVC pipe and it's lit by a fluorescent tube that shines through the translucent polyethylene to avoid sparks.
I used to be a welder by trade many years age. I was using some brake cleaner to de-grease the areas that needed welding. I did not realize it at the time, but the strong UV-C from TIG welding reacts with the vapors of the brake cleaner and produces phosgene gas. I inhaled some of it by accident and it immediately took my breath away and I felt like I was suffocating. It only lasted for a few seconds though. I believe there is some kind of fluorocarbon, used as a solvent, in the brake cleaner that I was using. That reacted with the strong UV-C. BTW the welding arc with TIG welding can get as high as 35,000 Deg. F. Hence the production of UV-C. Upon reading the warnings on the can, one was something like "Do not expose to ultraviolet light".
A lot of welders have been caught out by chlorinated brake cleaner, i won't even have it in my workshop incase I ever accidentally grab the wrong can, i normally just use acetone because i don't trust using any brake cleaner 100%, it's just not worth the risk
There's a wide variety of things that might be in brake cleaner, blows my mind that they'll throw just about any solvent in a can and sell it to whoever at the auto parts store. My ex-neighbor went through a lot of the stuff while he was trying to pull a Walter White...
In high school we had a chemistry lab that was used once a year. Once our teacher told us that years ago they used it more because laws were less strict and had a lot of fun stuff, then the law changed, the school didn't care/had the money for setting up a proper lab. So, they were asked to dispose all the "illegal" stuff but, instead, my teacher and a friend of him choose to take care of all the chemicals (which included mercury and a lot of concentrated acids), bringing them home with them.
regarding ATR, I used to keep some silica in a big container cuz the lab so often runs out of silica, it was always labeled Na2SO3/starch, which of course worked well
I certainly wouldn't even touch triphosgene, although it us a solid, or diphosgene, despite being liquid. If I heard someone was working with monophosgene anywhere near me, the only PPE I would need would be a very good pair of running shoes!
While phosgene isn't used much in research labs today, it can still show up accidentally in chlorinated solvents that have been well aged (i.e. sat on a shelf so long that the air oxidation inhibitors have all been consumed). Got a bad bottle of chloroform once, that lead to a polycarbonate product, rather than a polyester.
I remember the burning Mg demo from high school because our teacher dropped it into a beaker; I learned later that soda glass will block at least UV-C, which may be why we didn't all go blind. The other chem teacher in the school allegedly used a very much too-large beaker for the hydrogen-goes-pop demo and blasted a hole in a ceiling tile, but alas I wasn't there for that one.
Why are chem teachers in high school doing this? In my school it was the lab technician that did all the lab stuff.. and coincidently our lab technician was my mom
The burning Metal Story reminded me of a comment I found under a conservative pundit's rant in a newspaper. Some guy over 50 (according to his profile pic) bragged that "back in the good old days" during Chemistry class, one of his Classmates talked during class. The Chemistry teacher than asked him to blow some Metal powder into a Bunsen burner Flame, to see which Metal it was. The teacher had given him Magnesium (on purpose). The Student went temporarily blind (even for a few days if I recall it correctly). This Commentator seemed to have seen this as an appropriate punishment for talking in class. The Phosgene Story reminded me of the ClO2 story in my Family. My Stepfather had bought a bottle of Sodiumchlorit solution and a bottle of diluted HCl because they advertised it as a "cure for everything" to him. My mother suddenly called me at 5:00(am) because she said she suffered from shortness of breath and other lung symptoms after my Stepfather had mixed the two solutions together the evening before. I asked her how much he had mixed, and she told me it was only one drop, and also they (my mother and my brother who also suffered symptoms as I found out later) opened the window immediately and didn't get to close to the mixture. As I roughly had a rough Idea of the concentration that was in the bottle (I googled which concentration this stuff was usually sold at) I though they probably where just panicking and that's what caused the symptoms, so I advised them to calm down. During the day, I walked to my parents house, and found a jar outside, that clearly indicated that my Stepfather had in fact not mixed one drop, but at least 50mL of that stuff. That jar clearly contained an explosive concentration of ClO2. I got my gas mask and face shield, and vented it into the wind. Had I known how much ClO2 my Stepfather had actually made, I would probably have advised my mother and brother to seek medical attention.
I am so glad, that safety protocols improved a lot during the last decades. My grandma told me that when she was working in a drug store when she was young in the early 50's, she accidently spilled HCl all over her stockings. I don't know how concentrated the HCl was, but even the thought of going to a drug store and finding HCl there and the staff handling it without any PPE is terrifying. Luckily there was no permanent damage, but the stockings and the shoes were gone.
This one doesn’t have any cool chemicals or reactions , but shows the importance of the MSDS labels and situational awareness, which clearly I lack. I used to work for an industrial concrete plant when I graduated high school. Every year around Christmas time , we would spend time cleaning and preparing for the new year. My assigned job was to prep and paint a metal structure. I was given a grinder and a wire wheel to do so. It was a platform that was yellow , and covered in a years worth of concrete buildup. It was a simple job, strip the old paint , put the new stuff on. I was rearing to go so off I went grinding. The first half of my shift of grinding was ok , I had a stuffy and runny nose , and whenever I wiped my nose , it was bright yellow. The entire time I was grinding, the whole surrounding area was opaque with a yellow dust cloud. Towards the end of my shift (at least 9 hours in), I started to cough really aggressively , like when you drink water and breath some in. At first I was coughing out the dust , but then the dust became a phlegmy mess. I coughed until something started bleeding and coughed blood for a bit . Blood alongside yellow dust. After that I got told to put on a respirator , so I finished the shift with it on , in quite a bit of discomfort. Even my eyes hurt. That night was miserable and painful, but I pretended to my parents I just picked up a cough from someone. When I went to paint the next day , feeling a little better , I checked the barrel of replacement paint (presumably what was on there before) I noticed a whole list of health and safety warnings. Carcinogenic , acute and long term toxicity , targets liver , targets kidneys , targets CNS, mutagenic, the whole works. I didn’t tell anyone other than the guy who told me to put the respirator on. I am still young , and haven’t had any noticeable health issues, but I also haven’t been screened for anything like what the warnings represented. Maybe someday I’ll pay the price , or I’ll have been another lucky 18 year old that beat the odds. Please please check what you are working with beforehand to see what PPE you need,no matter the industry or trade.
My high school chemistry teacher showed us what happens when magnesium is burned, and he actually turned off the lights because there was no point to have them on when you are holding what looks like a small strip of the sun. Coolest thing I've ever seen in person, second only to the time he showed us how to destroy a test tube by making a very small amount of rocket fuel in it.
0:45 yes i agree, i accidentaly didn't put on my welding glasses one time and from a like half a second exposure now i have a semi-permanent blind spot on my vision (it will go away in a little less that two years)
My chem class recently did an experiment with burning magnesium recently. We were given these little squares (like 3 in) of dark tinted glass to look through. My partner's job was to hold up the square for both of us while I ignited the magnesium and transferred it to the intended receptacle, which the lab tech was handling. The thing is, my partner couldn't hold the square level and kept moving it closer to herself. I told her that I couldn't see through it like that and to please hold it steady. Well, I covered my left eye and tried to look through the square with my right eye. I held the magnesium over the burner, my partner moved the square, and I closed my other eye most of the way so I wouldn't see it burn. I tried to move the magnesium into the receptacle blind, but the lab tech told me to look while I was asking my partner to move the square so I could, that overloaded my brain and my instinct was to follow the lab tech's order, so I opened my right eye and, low and behold, my partner hadn't moved the square. I got an eyeful of burning magnesium (directly over pure O2, idk if that makes a difference) for what was probably about 1-2 seconds. Later that day my eye actually hurt and I am terrified I'm going to go blind. These classmates are going to get me killed. Last semester we had students arguing with the professor over how they "didn't have to wear a lab coat because he said he would, 'tell them when it necessary"" (he absolutely did not), and I had one person open the fume hood completely on my during a reaction because she apparently didn't know what a _fume_ hood is supposed to do (this same person didn't know what litmus paper was either). Yes, we did get a safety briefing, twice, and were quizzed on it, but people are stupid.
Welding fumes are no joke , either , especially if you are welding galvanized steel . Acetylene and many of it's compounds are entirely to touchy to use as rocket fuel , which is saying something . I am fairly certain you can still get Acetylene generators that use water and calcium carbide for cutting torches in large production shops . Of course carbide lamps were once state of the art and you can still get them , despite carbide no longer being sold in every hardware store . I still have several of my own and lots of carbide which i occasionally use to annoy the neighbors ... At one time you could buy large acetylene generators and light your home with acetylene gas , cook your meals , and , heat your water . A cousin of mine bought an old farmhouse years ago that had one in the basement , right next to the huge pile of calcium hydroxide that was once carbide . They just dumped it there rather than hauling it out . Fun times ....
In the factory, we had got new bleaching chemicals, two different containers, that were not to be mixed together! But it happened. I think ( but I am not absolutely sure) that a chlorine gas reaction occurred (it could have been something else) and the building had to be evacuated. A specialized firefighter team had to be called in to remove, and neutralize the containers and spray down the area before the workers could go in again. What happened the next morning: One of the workers on the first shift fell very ill, became unconscious, and had continuing health and liver problems. Why did that happen, even though the air measurements of the specialists signaled that the air was okay before the first workers were allowed to go in? the thing is, when the production team started up the machines, the motors, pumps, etc., the whole production hall got warm and partially even hot again. This temperature increase may have released some poison, previously absorbed on the cold surfaces! The absorbed chemicals were not detected by the control measurements the firefighters did before startup, while all machines were relatively cold.
Phosgene? Yikes. Go watch the CSB video on a phosgene leak at DuPont. A hose cracked and sprayed a worker walking by. Even though he received immediate treatment, he died a few hours later.
I remember getting a tiny bit of Phenol on my finger in a chemistry lesson. The skin blistered up and once I'd washed my hands I was left with a little hole in the top few layers of skin. Phenol is nasty.
I used to design industrial control systems for a living many years ago. My first project by myself was a chemical plant that made fertilizer additives on an absolutely massive scale. For this project, we had a literally four story tall tank of acid that gets mixed with other goodies to make salts that plants absorb easily and on this tank was a probe at the bottom to measure temp of the acid coming out. During the first test run, one of the techs comes to me and tells me there is acid dripping out of the electrical conduit. There is obviously no way that is true…it must just be rain water that got in the conduit. So I bend down, dip my fingers in the liquid, and smell it…sure as hell, it’s acid. Turns out, the contractor we hired to install everything didn’t put in a protective barrier called a “well” on the output pipe, so when we turned on the pumps, we were literally pumping acid into the electrical lines. All of the wiring had to be replaced as the acid in question (trade secret) was known to eat the wiring jackets. As a bonus story, I also did breweries and food controls. To clean the pipes and tanks between batches, breweries will use a concentrated sodium hydroxide solution to eat just about everything from the walls. Breweries will ALSO use CO2 to push product through the pipes and out of tanks to keep everything fresh. If you know anything about sodium hydroxide is that it LOVES CO2. On one fateful day, it came time for the techs to clean the brewing vessel with an automated shower of sodium hydroxide solution and they forgot to purge and vent the tank. When the caustic solution got atomized and sprayed into the atmosphere of the tank, it consumed all of the CO2 and caused the entire tank to implode. Keep in mind, this tank is the size of a house and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a very bad day for some of those folks.
On the topic of phosphorus pentachloride. I once left a reaction of PCl5 an d POCl3 over the weekend in a pressure vessel for a particularly difficult chlorination. After setting up the reaction I noticed double layered gloves had started to melt even under an argon blanket. When I returned the next weak the plastic cap had melted all over the heating block. I had to remove the melted plastic with piranha solution to save the block. The chlorination didn't work btw costing me a few months of work.
Im a swimmer, and i currently swim at a pool that is mostly outdoor execpt for during the winters where we have a "dome" up. One year, the sucked at managing the chemical levels during winter, where we weren't required to go to practice because too much chemicals. Some of the other swimmer who where dedicated, also probably had some tolerance to it, still swam. Eventually, one kid got burnt by the chemicals, and the pool got in trouble. Also, when the dome is up, sometimes we have to go out to get some breaths of fresh air because of the chlorine.
And once more: Fluorine is evil, it is the yellow chemistry of the periodic elements, and any subsequent molecule containing it is instantly less cool than it would be without Fluorine. Also, the amount of times i hear "yeah so this dude was messing around with HF without knowing how bad it was" scares me. If i had a nickle for every time, i'd have like 4 nickles, which isn't a lot, _but still too many._
The Navy story with an unshielded reactor core just chilling next to servicemen doesn't surprise me at all. From what I've heard from my friend, he's a Nuke, the Navy does shit like this all the time.
I am a private conservator for Mauser rifles. They can be as old as 140 years, back to the old 1888 Commission rifles and beyond. After determining it was properly headspaced, I was test firing a 1943 Mauser Karabiner 98k (JP Sauer & Sohn, if anyone's curious) with some 1974-dated Romanian-manufactured surplus 8x57mm Mauser ammunition in a matching crate, which is widely regarded as the best quality surplus 8x57 ever made. The first 3 rounds went off just fine, but on the 4th, I pulled the trigger and only got a click. Without thinking about what kind of predicament I was in, I opened the bolt and looked inside. I WAS wearing eye protection as it was mandatory at my range. I only realized after about 5 seconds after opening the bolt that I shouldn't have. I carefully closed the bolt again, and waited for about a minute. After this minute I carefully opened the bolt and ejected the unspent round, trying not to shock the powder into igniting. I kept the other spent shell casings and compared the primer strikes to determine if the firing pin was a little short. I concluded that the firing pin was the proper length and struck the primer just like it did the other rounds. I tried the 5th round and had the same problem, this time I kept the bolt closed and the rifle pointed downrange. I waited 30 seconds and ejected the unspent round. I called it quits after that. I went back a week later to try again but experienced 60% duds. I am currently in the process of getting rid of the ammunition; pulling the projectiles, igniting powder on an Al sheet for funsies, and disposing of the primed shell casings. The moral of the story is that if it doesn't go bang at first, it's a ticking timebomb and it's only a matter of time before it does go bang.
I've opened the bolt without waiting when a round didn't go off before too, it's not a good feeling when it finally sinks in that it could blow at any time.. if that brass is boxer primed just soak them in water and knock the primers out like normal, they won't go off when wet
@@markshort9098 It's corrosive steel case, Berdan-primed, with a lacquer coating. Thanks for the advice, though. I'm going to use more brass in the future.
This video serie reminds me when i was in 3. semester doing the basic organic chemstry lab interchip. One in the lab has do start synthese a grignard starting compound. He had difficulties to get the Magnesium starting the reaction. So i asked him if his ether solvent is carfully dry. Yes so i help him by etching the Magnesium with jodine and his reaction started well and he was happy sbout the help. Next day he had to continue the synthese by adding carbondioxid ice to the mixture. But he has not read the instruction well and put the carbondioxid ice once whole to the mixture. I saw this too late from my fume at the end of the lab and shortly after that whooosh the Thermometer and the mixture flows on the top of his fume due to the exothermic reaction. So he had to clean the mess and need to start again the synthese from scratch. I was a little bit sad about him but i think he learned the lesson the hard way to better read more carfully the synthese instructions before starting the synthese. Sometimes also you should read publications synthese routes carefully.
That magnesium light story reminded me of how I got my vision problems. I used to stare at the sun a lot as a child- I thought it was one of those myths like "don't make a silly face in the cold or it'll stay that way" or "whistling at night will bring bad luck". I also shone bright flashlights directly into my eyes because the blind spots looked funny and colourful. Needless to say, my eyes are a little messed up and I need to wear glasses, but I've been a relatively successful artist despite that so it clearly didn't affect anything important. Only bad problems I've had since are unrelated to staring contests with the sun and flashlights, which is a real relief.
A former boss of mine was rebuilding a small engine and decided to swipe a jug of dichloromethane from the lab to degrease it with. Shortly after immersing the block and head in pails of DCM, white fumes began pouring forth, as the aluminum castings were converted to AlCl3 (apparently, there was enough clean aluminum surface under the grease and crud to allow reaction). Fortunately, this was done outside, so no harm, other than the loss of the engine.
@@petevenuti7355 I would think yes, if there is a section of metal that has had its sapphire coating scraped off. On chemical compatibility charts from various suppliers, TCE typically gets a fair, or "C" rating compared to DCM's incompatible or "D" rating.
In what would correspond to late high school, I snuck out a whole roll of magnesium band from class and that night after dark, me and a few friends put it on a cliff, lit it on fire and ran behind another cliff. The dark urban Winter night turned to day, and we made some lava out of that cliff. Apparently an elderly couple living in a house a kilometer away reported they saw an UFO where we were at, appearing as a glowing orb which came and went. Burning at a temperature about equal to the temperature of the surface of the Sun, magnesium is pretty cool and is probably my favorite alkaline metal.
I had a coworker at an analytical lab that distilled HF out of samples. No degree required for her position. Not even $20/hr. Just her, alone in a separate room (and no, it wasn't a fume hood room like the one I used for distilling cyanide), her high school education, dumping concentrated H2SO4 into who-knows-what and collecting HF gas. Scary AF.
My uncle used to bring back a massive amount of magnesium cuttings from his machine tooling business. We would burn them in the bonfire pretty regularly and I have pretty decent vision.
Here's a good one. In the 1970s, a junk yard in Tucson (where I lived) had a fire in a 55 gal drum filled with scrap Mg. They called the Fire Dept. They arrived, to put out the fire. How? With their trusty fire hoses, of course! BOOM!!! At the time, I was a chem student at a local college, and *I* knew, damn well, that you DON'T get a Mg fire wet. And these were pros, who presumably, had completed some haz-mat training. And I'm sure, even if they didn't have the special fire extinguishers required for metal fires, they certainly had shovels, to dig up and throw dirt on the fire.
When I worked at an opthalmic company before we occasionally had to strip AR coatings off of lessons to reuse the lens for testing. What we used for this was, as I was told, a dilute mixture of HF that was kept outside in a plastic hotel cup like you'd find in a restaurant. They always said to make sure to use a nitrile glove with it. I don't know if it was actually HF but I definitely feel lucky to have not had any slip ups if it was, as I was and still am not a well trained chemist. There wasn't any sort of kit for dealing with it if something went wrong, but that doesn't mean anything really 😂😅
A little while ago a friend was working on extracting mercury from cinnabar as part of a geochemistry research project. She was using the sodium sulfide method which involves nearly boiling 25% NaOH. She was transferring/combining the contents of one extraction vessel into another. Unfortunately the receiving vessel was too tall with liquid too low in the bottom and aggressive pouring caused the extremely caustic fluid with dissolved mercury to splash over her face-shield and into her hair. Her stomach sank with that "Oh Shit" feeling and she ran to the safety shower. Luckily she didn't have any permanent damage and it didn't get into her eyes.
Eight years ago I worked in a chemistry lab and when I got dry solvents from the dry solvent tap in the neighboring lab, I noticed the inventory list on the freezer listing fosgene.... Crazy stuff, I stayed away from it...
Yep, pure phenol is absolutely vicious stuff, definitely not safe to get on your hands in even small quantities. Will strip the first few layers of your skin off if you don't wash it off pretty quickly. Some "beauty treatment" parlours use phenol (not pure, in solution usually) as facial "peels" for this exact purpose - to strip the outer layers of skin off the face. But it isn't commonly done because it is so dangerous and can (unsurprisingly) be rather painful. One of the old names for phenol is "carbolic acid", which is where the name "carbolic soap" comes from - yes, there used to be a type of soap which contained phenol as one of its ingredients - fortunately at quite low concentrations, and due to soap being alkaline, most of it was probably present as the sodium phenoxide (or phenolate if you prefer) salt. This kind of soap was commonly used in hospitals to clean floors and surfaces because of its antiseptic properties (soaps with triclosan have replaced carbolic soap for this purpose now), which is why phenol is often thought of as having a "clinical" or "hospital" smell. As an aside, is there any type of rubber or flexible plastic glove which will withstand DCM or chloroform? The only time I ever used those solvents in the lab was for cleaning out my high vacuum line, since you needed a chlorinated solvent to dissolve out the special "lithelen" brand grease we used in them. I usually did this in a fumehood of course (or outside if one wasn't available), and we had multiple different types of gloves available. But all of them would swell up, go soft or turn to slime when exposed to chloroform or DCM, and of course would start letting the solvent permeate through and onto your hands before that happened. I could always tell because you get the infamous "chloroform finger tingle", which was like a combination of numbness and "pins and needles", though it went away as soon as you took the gloves off and let the solvent evaporate. The only solution was to wear several layers of gloves, but that seemed wasteful and only gave a few more minutes before the solvent would permeate through anyway.
If I recall correctly, phosgene is used to make carbamates, and the alternative methods are not quite as good for various reasons. I know I spoke to one person on reddit who works with phosgene in a lab for making carbamates.
I'd imagine that the use of phenol in nailbed cleaning is based on the assumption that if you aren't cleaning your nailbed *every day* then your body can handle the poison, similar to how the patient can just stroll around in a radiology lab while the nurses have to be careful of all sources of radiation because the patient is likely only there for a single visit while the nurses are there several days a week, all year, so the nurses could accumulate a large dose over many months if they're not careful. That's just speculation though. (I also assume it's just fairly dilute?)
Another optical hazard that's gotten very very common is lasers. Don't get too comfortable around lasers, especially now considering you can get a completely hazardous engraving machine with a 5W+ diode source and trivial safety interlocks for less than $500 on the river site or the bay site. Luckily my own incident didn't leave any lasting damage, it was from maybe a 10% reflection of a 0.25W violet diode source and left a squiggly line on my vision that was detectable as an afterimage distortion for a few weeks.
I was in an intro chem class a few years ago. we were doing an oxygen creation lab, and then burning stuff in the air and the o2. My group didn't hear the thing about "Don't burn the magnesium in the oxygen, only watch it in air." Almost cracked the beaker.
Instead of using gaseous phosgene, why not use triphosgene instead? It's a stable white crystalline solid which can be weighed in air without difficulty, and reacts exactly like monomeric phosgene, but is far less dangerous. I actually used some yesterday to make an isocyanate, and it worked beautifully.
i spilled a kilogram of sodium hydroxide pellets because i knocked the container over on carpet then i had to somehow clean it with my only PPE being nitrile gloves and goggles
i accidentally made phosgene gas thanks to TIG welding on a plate that had be cleaned with chloronated brake cleaner agent, and hadn't flashed off yet... the slightest whiff of the stuff felt like i got kicked in the chest by a horse, drove all the air out of my lungs and i crashed out of the shop knowing i had to get to fresh air quick... stuff was deadly dangerous for sure
When we did the magnesium burn in high school, I don't think our teacher ever passed any goggles out. I do still occasionally see spots in my vision, but I don't know if it's from that, the many times I've accidentally looked at the sun, or the one time I watched my grandfather do some welding.
So, once I was cleaning out herbicide hose filters with carburetor cleaner that was basically just full-strength acetone. It was designed to dissolve carbon. I was wearing nitrile gloves. What I forgot is that my hands are made of carbon and nitrile gloves aren't really chemical resistant. I left that day with chem burns on my hands.
Back in my 1st year of a-levels one of our practicals was the reduction of cyclohexanol to cyclohexene with phosphoric acid. In total there was about 15 reflux setups going full bore, and after the 90 min prac lesson the entire room smelt of that forbidden sweet smell. I probably shouldn’t have cycled home that night as I was definitely high of the fumes.
The reactor is dangerous yes, but if it was being changed it dropped below the required ratios of isotopes (this is a grand simplification, I happen to know a large amount about nuclear and particle physics), I’m assuming it was an isolated uranium reactor, but in general, this is not as hazardous as you’d think, uranium is primarily an alpha emitter with some beta emissions as well. Even what you’d consider unshielded for gamma could PROBABLY block beta radiation. Depending on distance and a few other factors, such as is there uranium particulates in the air, short term exposure would likely be safe. In chemistry terms, (once again a grand simplification) formaldehyde is more likely to give you cancer than that reactor core (it was probably a spent fuel cask, as the reactor is built into the submarine). Though if you were in extremely prolonged exposure to it, or you were in exposure to a high output source, you’d be worried about radiation poisoning and sickness, not cancer.
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My chemistry teacher always said "You'll never win a staring contest with magnesium". Words to live by.
Wise words
You'll never win a drinking contest with... about every chemical
I have. I wore glasses.
Watch me
What does this mean? all metals' eyes are always closed
The way I like to describe HF is "real life bone hurting juice"
Because it's exactly that. It permeates through the skin, directly into bones, and messes them up real good
Not sure where that's from, but that quote is definitely not yours.
@@AB-80X nothing new under the sun is a statement I like
@@AB-80Xyes, but... thats the joke... its a tongue in cheek reference to Futurama.
Oh, in case you got covered in HF, here's some advice the lab boys gave me: DO NOT get covered in HF. We haven't entirely nailed down what chemical it is yet, but I'll tell you this: It's a lively one, and it does NOT like the human skeleton.
oh ow my bones
On the topic of blindings from welding arcs: It's not just intense visible light but also huge doses of hard UV light, meaning you don't even notice how dangerous it actually is. Similar thing with Lasers. ALWAYS WEAR GOGGLES!
Id actually say you really undersell it. Its the hard UV light thats mostly the dangerous part. The visible light component of a typical welder is somewhere around 750 incandescent bulb. Its enough to be really uncomfortable to look at, but not that dangerous. The UV part is much worse, and also because its deceptive. Welding light reflected of a white wall, is not really painful to look at - but it still is very dangerous.
Ill illustrate with a real life example. My good friend around 15 years ago had some friends come over to his house to smoke some weed and have a good time. They arrived a bit early, and he was busy in his garage welding stuff. He was welding shit since he was like 10 yo and of course he had all the necessary protective equipement on him. They didnt. He told them he has to finish whatever he was doing , and since they are early they are welcome to sit in his guest room (on other side of the house). They left his garage and he proceeded to weld. He wasnt aware, that instead of heading to where he told them to, they sat few meters behind the door to the garage, behind a corridor corner.
So there they were, with no direct line of sight - in fact the welding light bounced of 2 walls before getting to them. Sure enough, the effect wasnt immediate. But after the half hour has passed, they had to be rushed to hospital, because all of them eventually developped severe conjunctivitis due to uv actually causing blistering burns on their eyes. It got worse in the hospital (not because of care, but because it tends to develop over time, so initial 24 hour their condition actually deteriorated), to the point that one of them went temporarily blind (although i believe it was simply because his eyelids got so swollen he couldnt open his eyes anymore).
They recovered with no apparent long term damage, although i dont think it is possible to not have at least some residual effect from such trauma.
For those in factory work and walk around welding booths: wear polycarbonate safety glasses as these lenses block the entirety of the UV bandwidth
also, *long sleeves and pants*
Welding sunburn is no joke.
and also, welding goggles are the only way you can actually see what you're doing, which is always an essential requirement
The hard UV from welding only damages the outside layers of the eyeball, like a sunburn on your eyes. The intense bright light though will definitely cause blindness though, Like staring at the sun continuously. I believe an up close welding arc is brighter then the sun. More akin to a nuclear explosion.
These titles are only getting scarier
Phosgene’s danger is a little overstated.
@@vrog better safe than sorry dude xd
Next week "Accidentally spreading osmium tetroxide on my friend’s sandwich"
@@koukouzee2923 for sure. Haha
USCSB Video same title but add "lethal exposure". This tech was lucky.
Phenol is much more hazardous than most people seem to think. My friend used to work at a plant where they make phenol-formaldehyde resins. They take delivery of phenol via railcar tanks of twenty thousand gallons. Getting the phenol out of the tank requires melting it with a steam-heated wand. This process is done by a team of two workers in head-to-toe PPE--one who melts the phenol, and one who stands by in case the phenol overheats and burps out of the tank onto the guy doing the melting. If that happens, worker #2 is to grab worker #1 by the collar, throw him into the safety shower, and call for an ambulance. Everyone pretty much agrees that worker #1 is toast at that point anyway (skin exposure over 25 % of the body is potentially fatal).
no full body biohazard equipment?
@@brainletmong6302 I guess "we told you to be careful" is less expensive in the long run than maintaining equipment and training...
@@brainletmong6302 "Hiring a new worker is cheaper than providing a bunch of sets of full-body PPE."
-Management, probably.
True some paint strippers contain a combination of methylene chloride (dichloromethane), phenol and methanol and the containers of that type of paint stripper specifically warns of the highly dangerous nature of such paint strippers. In addition methylene chloride fumes can cause central nervous system depression respiratory depression and cardiac dysrhythmias if inhaled
Adding this to the list of "careers to nope out of on your very first day". No amount of money is worth that shit.
But in seriousness, wtf? Surely they could have higher tier protective gear that wouldn't make a burp a death sentence?
The USCSB has a video case study on their channel about a DuPont employee who was sprayed with liquid phosgene after a transfer hose broke. He died hours later, even with medical treatment. Nasty stuff.
I thought about the exact same one, we should all binge watch the USCSB videos, I have and it makes you realize how large scale can drastically change how dangerous stuff is
@@leothecrafter4808 Yeah. They also have a video that mentions a case where a plant failed to scale up a reaction properly, with explosive results.
@@scottydawg1234567 Yeah, that was T2 laboratories for anyone wondering
@@leothecrafter4808 There was also MFG Laboratories.
@@scottydawg1234567 wrote a paper in my chemical safety class on t2
I can't believe there are so many different chempolation stories with such cursed accidents... I'm just glad most of them were came out to be fine/not dead
same
We don't generally hear the stories without happy endings 😕
@@IaCthulhuFthagn kind of like the Anthropic principal, cuz they ain't alive to tell the story.
Good old survivorship bias.
survivorship bias. if they didn't make it, how are they gonna comment?
I have a fun acid in the eyes story from when I was doing my post grad project..
I opened a fridge in the lab and immediately got the classic eye sting, told the senior PhD student that my eyes were stinging and something in the fridge was leaking before I washed my eyes out. It turns out that a bottle of an acid chloride had polymerised and the solid polymer expanded, breaking the container it was in. The fumes had been building up for days and I just happened to be the one to discover it. I didn't need to go to the hospital but the uni safety officer was pissed off because it was in the original manufacturer's packaging and we had multiple bottles of the stuff from the same company in like 3 other labs. The uni got a refund for that.
I just remembered this story from grammar school. We had a short break in chem class and I found what looked like a sparkler or something in the grass just outside the school building. I picked it up and with my friends tried lighting it with a lighter, but to no avail since it was still too wet.
Our teacher agreed to let it dry inside and a week or so after, we took it back out. Attempts to light it with a lighter were still futile, so our teacher brought a fing bunsen burner (one of those ones with a gas tank included) and we started blasting it with the flame. It almost seemed like the thing was just nonflammable until the brightest flash of white light erupted from it. Could hardly see for like a minute.
I don‘t know why someone would make such a thing, or why it would be lying around a school or why our teacher agreed to assisting our idiocy, but that was the most rad sparkler I had ever seen. Still, I would not encourage anyone to light dubious pyrotechnics they find in the school yard.
If your chem teacher isn't down to light random things on fire to satisfy a curiosity, they're not a real chem teacher.
Might have been a welding rod?
Hm possibly. I have no idea about welding so I have no idea. Would explain why it would just randomly lie about though, especially since there was a lot of construction there.
Could be a thermal cutting rod filled with aluminum or magnesium, or even a solid magnesium bar (maybe a firestarter?).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance
Yeah that probably checks out.
The phosgene reminds me. I was doing HVAC in the 90s and was fixing a R12 refrigerator. Well in Job Corpse they taught me to use a flame to leak test. I found a leak, only something was wrong with the stuff. I bright evil purple flame showed me a leak on a filter. Suddenly it felt like I swallowed a cactus down my lungs, my entire body was all pain and tingles and I fell to the ground in excruciating pain and then just laid there for about 3 hours before moving again. Having been exposed to phosgene it sure seemed worse. It tasted like pain, it smelled like pain and purple, and was the worst anything I have ever took a breath of. Not hay or anything of the sort. I suspect an oxime of phosgene was formed. Thinking back, it is pretty stupid to leak check with a flame a system filled with chlorofluoroalkanes and mineral oil, but that is what happened.
I was exposed to phosgene once in an open area. It tasted sour and felt essentially like acid was forming in my lungs. It was powerful considering the very low dose i got. It could be the dose, or it could be a breakdown product or a reaction like you said.
One ore thing about welding, The UV light can burn your skin. A guy from our school once came to class with red face and arms. There was a stripe of normal skin around his eyes, where he coverd them with his arm(at least). He told us that he "didn't feel like waring a mask or gloves". He got a painfull lesson. Also flying molten metal is other reason for wearing PPE when welding.
I learned the hard way why you wear full sleeves to weld. It was literally my first time around a welding machine so I didn't know any better, and I didn't think anything of it while I held a piece in position for my coworker. My forearms were lobster red and peeling by the end of the day. Worst sunburn I've ever had.
and if you're doing stick/MMA welding, the other major hazard is airborne fragments of slag when you remove the slag from the weld
@@lefthandedspanner I remember when I was learing to weld with an oxyfuel torch, the flux popped and startled me, I jerked the torch, the torch backfired. That was pretty scary, and probably th quickest i ever closed the valves on the torch.
When i bought my new tig welder i had to build a cart for it and it was 40 degrees so putting on all my welding clothes didn't sound like fun so i tacked it all together wearing only a pair of shorts thinking i wouldn't get to burnt just tacking.. i woke up that night in pain and within a couple of days all my chest and arms completely peeled, I'll never weld without a shirt again.. tig is the worst for uv burns because there's no smoke to block any of the uv
Yeah, middle of winter I was welding, next day I was wondering why my knees felt sunburned, before realising I remembered to use long shirt, gloves, full face mask, but was wearing shorts lmao
The phosgene thing is another example of how everyone should read the MSDS first, get a rough idea of what hazards to expect before they even get near a bottle of chemicals. The HF and the nuclear reactor incident are a good example of everyone who could possibly be exposed needing to know what hazards are there. Either keep people out of your work area or make sure they’re safe.
An old procedure to prevent some yokel from meddling with an electrical apparatus is a sign reading danger 1,000,000 ohms.
Room-mate was stripping paint off of car-parts using chlorinated solvent.
Yes, he was using the stove-top for heat.
I found it boiling over, got the kettle outside, got a moderate dose of phosgene.
The absence of any immediate choking sensation makes this one especially dangerous!
"Hmmm, do I smell wet grass? There it is again..."
These chempilation videos are just such a specific niche that I didn’t know I needed until recently, LOL.
Lmao we didn't get goggles to burn magnesium, essentially the teacher just said don't look directly at it or youll go blind
High school in the 90s? We didn't get goggles either
im pretty young (2006) and my teachee did the same lol it was hard to control my urges to look at it
Yeah, same here. It was in 2016 in Germany.
Ditto. I think it was 2019? Rural America.
I helped the teacher with it in the early 2000s and did the experiment multiple times over the 4 years and stared right at it pretty often. Nobody really told us not to. Yes my vision is very bad and I know for a fact I’ll be a blind old person! Cheers
Note to self: never pour phosgene on an exposed reactor core.
Just mix Phosgene and HF for extra spiciness
@@chrisb9143 tiny amount of trolling
pro tip: never throw live grenades into a nuclear reactor
I had my eyes flashed by welding once.
That was a crappy night. Waking up and can't see anything. I didn't even know why I woke up. Dry eyes and all.
Definitely learned a lesson there.
The two words "liquid phosgene" fill me with such dread...holy. SHIT.
When you finish the phosgene story and THEN you have the yikes of the day...
Hahaha
Not a chemistry incident, but it's so stupid that i wanted to share it
When i was a kid, i really liked staring into lamps/the sun/bright glowing objects in general, so one day, i somehow got my hands on a laser mouse and stared into the laser for like 5 minutes straight. The eye i shined the laser in has mild damage, but otherwise it's fine. It's a miracle how i didn't go blind
Yeah, I tried to stare at the sun as a kid. Being a smart stupid kid, I did it close to sunset so that the visible light intensity would be bearable. Still have a small spot of damage in one eye that I can see sometimes in the right lighting conditions.
@LabRat Knatz yea
@LabRat Knatz ehhh, I mean plenty of cheap laser pointers lie about the strength of the laser itself, some of them turn out to be far more powerful than they should be, had a bit of an incident with one as a kid
oh god liquid phosgene sounds terrifying
I built a fume hood for my home lab and it has saved my lungs many times!
I cut the side out of a 1000l IBC and made a sliding Perspex window with timber and aluminium chanel.
Fume extraction is done via a bouncy castle air pump and PVC pipe and it's lit by a fluorescent tube that shines through the translucent polyethylene to avoid sparks.
I used to be a welder by trade many years age. I was using some brake cleaner to de-grease the areas that needed welding. I did not realize it at the time, but the strong UV-C from TIG welding reacts with the vapors of the brake cleaner and produces phosgene gas. I inhaled some of it by accident and it immediately took my breath away and I felt like I was suffocating. It only lasted for a few seconds though. I believe there is some kind of fluorocarbon, used as a solvent, in the brake cleaner that I was using. That reacted with the strong UV-C. BTW the welding arc with TIG welding can get as high as 35,000 Deg. F. Hence the production of UV-C. Upon reading the warnings on the can, one was something like "Do not expose to ultraviolet light".
A lot of welders have been caught out by chlorinated brake cleaner, i won't even have it in my workshop incase I ever accidentally grab the wrong can, i normally just use acetone because i don't trust using any brake cleaner 100%, it's just not worth the risk
There's a wide variety of things that might be in brake cleaner, blows my mind that they'll throw just about any solvent in a can and sell it to whoever at the auto parts store. My ex-neighbor went through a lot of the stuff while he was trying to pull a Walter White...
@LabRat Knatz Yes this happened about 30 years ago. No after effects, no temporary or permanent damage.
In high school we had a chemistry lab that was used once a year. Once our teacher told us that years ago they used it more because laws were less strict and had a lot of fun stuff, then the law changed, the school didn't care/had the money for setting up a proper lab. So, they were asked to dispose all the "illegal" stuff but, instead, my teacher and a friend of him choose to take care of all the chemicals (which included mercury and a lot of concentrated acids), bringing them home with them.
Can I get his #?
jkjk
Cool dudes tho
These stories are getting progressively more crazy
regarding ATR, I used to keep some silica in a big container cuz the lab so often runs out of silica, it was always labeled Na2SO3/starch, which of course worked well
I certainly wouldn't even touch triphosgene, although it us a solid, or diphosgene, despite being liquid. If I heard someone was working with monophosgene anywhere near me, the only PPE I would need would be a very good pair of running shoes!
Your “FOOMP” is getting better and better.
Glad to hear it haha
One thing I am pretty sure about the lanthanide necklace: if you make a necklace out of europium, it would not even last for a weekend!
While phosgene isn't used much in research labs today, it can still show up accidentally in chlorinated solvents that have been well aged (i.e. sat on a shelf so long that the air oxidation inhibitors have all been consumed). Got a bad bottle of chloroform once, that lead to a polycarbonate product, rather than a polyester.
I remember the burning Mg demo from high school because our teacher dropped it into a beaker; I learned later that soda glass will block at least UV-C, which may be why we didn't all go blind. The other chem teacher in the school allegedly used a very much too-large beaker for the hydrogen-goes-pop demo and blasted a hole in a ceiling tile, but alas I wasn't there for that one.
Yes regular glass will block UV-C, however quarts glass will not.
Why are chem teachers in high school doing this? In my school it was the lab technician that did all the lab stuff.. and coincidently our lab technician was my mom
The burning Metal Story reminded me of a comment I found under a conservative pundit's rant in a newspaper. Some guy over 50 (according to his profile pic) bragged that "back in the good old days" during Chemistry class, one of his Classmates talked during class. The Chemistry teacher than asked him to blow some Metal powder into a Bunsen burner Flame, to see which Metal it was. The teacher had given him Magnesium (on purpose). The Student went temporarily blind (even for a few days if I recall it correctly). This Commentator seemed to have seen this as an appropriate punishment for talking in class.
The Phosgene Story reminded me of the ClO2 story in my Family. My Stepfather had bought a bottle of Sodiumchlorit solution and a bottle of diluted HCl because they advertised it as a "cure for everything" to him. My mother suddenly called me at 5:00(am) because she said she suffered from shortness of breath and other lung symptoms after my Stepfather had mixed the two solutions together the evening before. I asked her how much he had mixed, and she told me it was only one drop, and also they (my mother and my brother who also suffered symptoms as I found out later) opened the window immediately and didn't get to close to the mixture. As I roughly had a rough Idea of the concentration that was in the bottle (I googled which concentration this stuff was usually sold at) I though they probably where just panicking and that's what caused the symptoms, so I advised them to calm down. During the day, I walked to my parents house, and found a jar outside, that clearly indicated that my Stepfather had in fact not mixed one drop, but at least 50mL of that stuff. That jar clearly contained an explosive concentration of ClO2. I got my gas mask and face shield, and vented it into the wind. Had I known how much ClO2 my Stepfather had actually made, I would probably have advised my mother and brother to seek medical attention.
I am so glad, that safety protocols improved a lot during the last decades.
My grandma told me that when she was working in a drug store when she was young in the early 50's, she accidently spilled HCl all over her stockings. I don't know how concentrated the HCl was, but even the thought of going to a drug store and finding HCl there and the staff handling it without any PPE is terrifying. Luckily there was no permanent damage, but the stockings and the shoes were gone.
This one doesn’t have any cool chemicals or reactions , but shows the importance of the MSDS labels and situational awareness, which clearly I lack.
I used to work for an industrial concrete plant when I graduated high school. Every year around Christmas time , we would spend time cleaning and preparing for the new year. My assigned job was to prep and paint a metal structure. I was given a grinder and a wire wheel to do so. It was a platform that was yellow , and covered in a years worth of concrete buildup. It was a simple job, strip the old paint , put the new stuff on. I was rearing to go so off I went grinding.
The first half of my shift of grinding was ok , I had a stuffy and runny nose , and whenever I wiped my nose , it was bright yellow. The entire time I was grinding, the whole surrounding area was opaque with a yellow dust cloud.
Towards the end of my shift (at least 9 hours in), I started to cough really aggressively , like when you drink water and breath some in. At first I was coughing out the dust , but then the dust became a phlegmy mess. I coughed until something started bleeding and coughed blood for a bit . Blood alongside yellow dust. After that I got told to put on a respirator , so I finished the shift with it on , in quite a bit of discomfort. Even my eyes hurt.
That night was miserable and painful, but I pretended to my parents I just picked up a cough from someone.
When I went to paint the next day , feeling a little better , I checked the barrel of replacement paint (presumably what was on there before) I noticed a whole list of health and safety warnings. Carcinogenic , acute and long term toxicity , targets liver , targets kidneys , targets CNS, mutagenic, the whole works.
I didn’t tell anyone other than the guy who told me to put the respirator on.
I am still young , and haven’t had any noticeable health issues, but I also haven’t been screened for anything like what the warnings represented. Maybe someday I’ll pay the price , or I’ll have been another lucky 18 year old that beat the odds.
Please please check what you are working with beforehand to see what PPE you need,no matter the industry or trade.
What *is* that stuff? You got the jackpot of pain...I'd be dreading the rest of my life if that happened to me
@@word6344 I thought at some hexavalent chromium compound
My high school chemistry teacher showed us what happens when magnesium is burned, and he actually turned off the lights because there was no point to have them on when you are holding what looks like a small strip of the sun. Coolest thing I've ever seen in person, second only to the time he showed us how to destroy a test tube by making a very small amount of rocket fuel in it.
0:45 yes i agree, i accidentaly didn't put on my welding glasses one time and from a like half a second exposure now i have a semi-permanent blind spot on my vision (it will go away in a little less that two years)
My chem class recently did an experiment with burning magnesium recently. We were given these little squares (like 3 in) of dark tinted glass to look through. My partner's job was to hold up the square for both of us while I ignited the magnesium and transferred it to the intended receptacle, which the lab tech was handling. The thing is, my partner couldn't hold the square level and kept moving it closer to herself. I told her that I couldn't see through it like that and to please hold it steady. Well, I covered my left eye and tried to look through the square with my right eye. I held the magnesium over the burner, my partner moved the square, and I closed my other eye most of the way so I wouldn't see it burn. I tried to move the magnesium into the receptacle blind, but the lab tech told me to look while I was asking my partner to move the square so I could, that overloaded my brain and my instinct was to follow the lab tech's order, so I opened my right eye and, low and behold, my partner hadn't moved the square. I got an eyeful of burning magnesium (directly over pure O2, idk if that makes a difference) for what was probably about 1-2 seconds. Later that day my eye actually hurt and I am terrified I'm going to go blind.
These classmates are going to get me killed. Last semester we had students arguing with the professor over how they "didn't have to wear a lab coat because he said he would, 'tell them when it necessary"" (he absolutely did not), and I had one person open the fume hood completely on my during a reaction because she apparently didn't know what a _fume_ hood is supposed to do (this same person didn't know what litmus paper was either). Yes, we did get a safety briefing, twice, and were quizzed on it, but people are stupid.
Welding fumes are no joke , either , especially if you are welding galvanized steel .
Acetylene and many of it's compounds are entirely to touchy to use as rocket fuel , which is saying something .
I am fairly certain you can still get Acetylene generators that use water and calcium carbide for cutting torches in large production shops .
Of course carbide lamps were once state of the art and you can still get them , despite carbide no longer being sold in every hardware store .
I still have several of my own and lots of carbide which i occasionally use to annoy the neighbors ...
At one time you could buy large acetylene generators and light your home with acetylene gas , cook your meals , and , heat your water .
A cousin of mine bought an old farmhouse years ago that had one in the basement , right next to the huge pile of calcium hydroxide that was once carbide . They just dumped it there rather than hauling it out .
Fun times ....
When using a metal in a gold alloy plated with silver and palladium is MUCH cheaper than that metal...
In the factory, we had got new bleaching chemicals, two different containers, that were not to be mixed together! But it happened. I think ( but I am not absolutely sure) that a chlorine gas reaction occurred (it could have been something else) and the building had to be evacuated. A specialized firefighter team had to be called in to remove, and neutralize the containers and spray down the area before the workers could go in again.
What happened the next morning: One of the workers on the first shift fell very ill, became unconscious, and had continuing health and liver problems. Why did that happen, even though the air measurements of the specialists signaled that the air was okay before the first workers were allowed to go in?
the thing is, when the production team started up the machines, the motors, pumps, etc., the whole production hall got warm and partially even hot again. This temperature increase may have released some poison, previously absorbed on the cold surfaces! The absorbed chemicals were not detected by the control measurements the firefighters did before startup, while all machines were relatively cold.
Phosgene? Yikes. Go watch the CSB video on a phosgene leak at DuPont. A hose cracked and sprayed a worker walking by. Even though he received immediate treatment, he died a few hours later.
Yep I heard about that.
WHY WOULD YOU HAVE LIQUID PHOSGENE!?!?! JESUS MAN
THAT SOUNDS LIKE ONE OF THE WORST THINGS TO HAVE HAPPEN TO SOMEONE
I remember getting a tiny bit of Phenol on my finger in a chemistry lesson. The skin blistered up and once I'd washed my hands I was left with a little hole in the top few layers of skin. Phenol is nasty.
Ah, man, can't get enough of these, keep em coming!
Will do :)
It is made of gallium I melted and pushed around the floor lol
I used to design industrial control systems for a living many years ago. My first project by myself was a chemical plant that made fertilizer additives on an absolutely massive scale. For this project, we had a literally four story tall tank of acid that gets mixed with other goodies to make salts that plants absorb easily and on this tank was a probe at the bottom to measure temp of the acid coming out.
During the first test run, one of the techs comes to me and tells me there is acid dripping out of the electrical conduit. There is obviously no way that is true…it must just be rain water that got in the conduit. So I bend down, dip my fingers in the liquid, and smell it…sure as hell, it’s acid. Turns out, the contractor we hired to install everything didn’t put in a protective barrier called a “well” on the output pipe, so when we turned on the pumps, we were literally pumping acid into the electrical lines. All of the wiring had to be replaced as the acid in question (trade secret) was known to eat the wiring jackets.
As a bonus story, I also did breweries and food controls. To clean the pipes and tanks between batches, breweries will use a concentrated sodium hydroxide solution to eat just about everything from the walls. Breweries will ALSO use CO2 to push product through the pipes and out of tanks to keep everything fresh. If you know anything about sodium hydroxide is that it LOVES CO2. On one fateful day, it came time for the techs to clean the brewing vessel with an automated shower of sodium hydroxide solution and they forgot to purge and vent the tank. When the caustic solution got atomized and sprayed into the atmosphere of the tank, it consumed all of the CO2 and caused the entire tank to implode. Keep in mind, this tank is the size of a house and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a very bad day for some of those folks.
On the topic of phosphorus pentachloride.
I once left a reaction of PCl5 an d POCl3 over the weekend in a pressure vessel for a particularly difficult chlorination. After setting up the reaction I noticed double layered gloves had started to melt even under an argon blanket.
When I returned the next weak the plastic cap had melted all over the heating block. I had to remove the melted plastic with piranha solution to save the block. The chlorination didn't work btw costing me a few months of work.
I just love these! Makes me want to search through my old lab stories to post them here as well
Please do!
Im a swimmer, and i currently swim at a pool that is mostly outdoor execpt for during the winters where we have a "dome" up.
One year, the sucked at managing the chemical levels during winter, where we weren't required to go to practice because too much chemicals. Some of the other swimmer who where dedicated, also probably had some tolerance to it, still swam.
Eventually, one kid got burnt by the chemicals, and the pool got in trouble. Also, when the dome is up, sometimes we have to go out to get some breaths of fresh air because of the chlorine.
And once more: Fluorine is evil, it is the yellow chemistry of the periodic elements, and any subsequent molecule containing it is instantly less cool than it would be without Fluorine.
Also, the amount of times i hear "yeah so this dude was messing around with HF without knowing how bad it was" scares me.
If i had a nickle for every time, i'd have like 4 nickles, which isn't a lot, _but still too many._
Pocket phosgene moment
The Navy story with an unshielded reactor core just chilling next to servicemen doesn't surprise me at all. From what I've heard from my friend, he's a Nuke, the Navy does shit like this all the time.
I am a private conservator for Mauser rifles. They can be as old as 140 years, back to the old 1888 Commission rifles and beyond. After determining it was properly headspaced, I was test firing a 1943 Mauser Karabiner 98k (JP Sauer & Sohn, if anyone's curious) with some 1974-dated Romanian-manufactured surplus 8x57mm Mauser ammunition in a matching crate, which is widely regarded as the best quality surplus 8x57 ever made. The first 3 rounds went off just fine, but on the 4th, I pulled the trigger and only got a click. Without thinking about what kind of predicament I was in, I opened the bolt and looked inside. I WAS wearing eye protection as it was mandatory at my range. I only realized after about 5 seconds after opening the bolt that I shouldn't have. I carefully closed the bolt again, and waited for about a minute. After this minute I carefully opened the bolt and ejected the unspent round, trying not to shock the powder into igniting. I kept the other spent shell casings and compared the primer strikes to determine if the firing pin was a little short. I concluded that the firing pin was the proper length and struck the primer just like it did the other rounds. I tried the 5th round and had the same problem, this time I kept the bolt closed and the rifle pointed downrange. I waited 30 seconds and ejected the unspent round. I called it quits after that. I went back a week later to try again but experienced 60% duds. I am currently in the process of getting rid of the ammunition; pulling the projectiles, igniting powder on an Al sheet for funsies, and disposing of the primed shell casings.
The moral of the story is that if it doesn't go bang at first, it's a ticking timebomb and it's only a matter of time before it does go bang.
I've opened the bolt without waiting when a round didn't go off before too, it's not a good feeling when it finally sinks in that it could blow at any time.. if that brass is boxer primed just soak them in water and knock the primers out like normal, they won't go off when wet
@@markshort9098 It's corrosive steel case, Berdan-primed, with a lacquer coating. Thanks for the advice, though. I'm going to use more brass in the future.
This video serie reminds me when i was in 3. semester doing the basic organic chemstry lab interchip. One in the lab has do start synthese a grignard starting compound. He had difficulties to get the Magnesium starting the reaction. So i asked him if his ether solvent is carfully dry. Yes so i help him by etching the Magnesium with jodine and his reaction started well and he was happy sbout the help. Next day he had to continue the synthese by adding carbondioxid ice to the mixture. But he has not read the instruction well and put the carbondioxid ice once whole to the mixture. I saw this too late from my fume at the end of the lab and shortly after that whooosh the Thermometer and the mixture flows on the top of his fume due to the exothermic reaction. So he had to clean the mess and need to start again the synthese from scratch. I was a little bit sad about him but i think he learned the lesson the hard way to better read more carfully the synthese instructions before starting the synthese. Sometimes also you should read publications synthese routes carefully.
That magnesium light story reminded me of how I got my vision problems.
I used to stare at the sun a lot as a child- I thought it was one of those myths like "don't make a silly face in the cold or it'll stay that way" or "whistling at night will bring bad luck". I also shone bright flashlights directly into my eyes because the blind spots looked funny and colourful. Needless to say, my eyes are a little messed up and I need to wear glasses, but I've been a relatively successful artist despite that so it clearly didn't affect anything important.
Only bad problems I've had since are unrelated to staring contests with the sun and flashlights, which is a real relief.
4:21 When they were doing the thing involving melting the phenol, there was no chloroform involved.
13:11 sadly not just labs, phosgene is pretty infamous in the chemical industry as well...
As I saw the title, I was reminded of a CSB video in which one victim was also sprayed with phosgene after the transfer hose ruptured.
Yes!
1:54 Her crush: Hypercubane
Her little sister: Tetrahedane
Lmao
A former boss of mine was rebuilding a small engine and decided to swipe a jug of dichloromethane from the lab to degrease it with. Shortly after immersing the block and head in pails of DCM, white fumes began pouring forth, as the aluminum castings were converted to AlCl3 (apparently, there was enough clean aluminum surface under the grease and crud to allow reaction). Fortunately, this was done outside, so no harm, other than the loss of the engine.
Could that happen with tetrachloroethane?
@@petevenuti7355 I would think yes, if there is a section of metal that has had its sapphire coating scraped off. On chemical compatibility charts from various suppliers, TCE typically gets a fair, or "C" rating compared to DCM's incompatible or "D" rating.
@@robertlapointe4093 good to know! (Compelled to test)
In what would correspond to late high school, I snuck out a whole roll of magnesium band from class and that night after dark, me and a few friends put it on a cliff, lit it on fire and ran behind another cliff. The dark urban Winter night turned to day, and we made some lava out of that cliff. Apparently an elderly couple living in a house a kilometer away reported they saw an UFO where we were at, appearing as a glowing orb which came and went. Burning at a temperature about equal to the temperature of the surface of the Sun, magnesium is pretty cool and is probably my favorite alkaline metal.
I had a coworker at an analytical lab that distilled HF out of samples. No degree required for her position. Not even $20/hr. Just her, alone in a separate room (and no, it wasn't a fume hood room like the one I used for distilling cyanide), her high school education, dumping concentrated H2SO4 into who-knows-what and collecting HF gas. Scary AF.
My uncle used to bring back a massive amount of magnesium cuttings from his machine tooling business. We would burn them in the bonfire pretty regularly and I have pretty decent vision.
Here's a good one. In the 1970s, a junk yard in Tucson (where I lived) had a fire in a 55 gal drum filled with scrap Mg. They called the Fire Dept. They arrived, to put out the fire. How? With their trusty fire hoses, of course! BOOM!!! At the time, I was a chem student at a local college, and *I* knew, damn well, that you DON'T get a Mg fire wet. And these were pros, who presumably, had completed some haz-mat training. And I'm sure, even if they didn't have the special fire extinguishers required for metal fires, they certainly had shovels, to dig up and throw dirt on the fire.
When I worked at an opthalmic company before we occasionally had to strip AR coatings off of lessons to reuse the lens for testing.
What we used for this was, as I was told, a dilute mixture of HF that was kept outside in a plastic hotel cup like you'd find in a restaurant. They always said to make sure to use a nitrile glove with it. I don't know if it was actually HF but I definitely feel lucky to have not had any slip ups if it was, as I was and still am not a well trained chemist. There wasn't any sort of kit for dealing with it if something went wrong, but that doesn't mean anything really 😂😅
A little while ago a friend was working on extracting mercury from cinnabar as part of a geochemistry research project. She was using the sodium sulfide method which involves nearly boiling 25% NaOH. She was transferring/combining the contents of one extraction vessel into another. Unfortunately the receiving vessel was too tall with liquid too low in the bottom and aggressive pouring caused the extremely caustic fluid with dissolved mercury to splash over her face-shield and into her hair. Her stomach sank with that "Oh Shit" feeling and she ran to the safety shower. Luckily she didn't have any permanent damage and it didn't get into her eyes.
0:54 And then there are Class 4 lasers.
Eight years ago I worked in a chemistry lab and when I got dry solvents from the dry solvent tap in the neighboring lab, I noticed the inventory list on the freezer listing fosgene.... Crazy stuff, I stayed away from it...
Yikes
Magnesium puts out a crapton of UV light as well
Yep, pure phenol is absolutely vicious stuff, definitely not safe to get on your hands in even small quantities. Will strip the first few layers of your skin off if you don't wash it off pretty quickly. Some "beauty treatment" parlours use phenol (not pure, in solution usually) as facial "peels" for this exact purpose - to strip the outer layers of skin off the face. But it isn't commonly done because it is so dangerous and can (unsurprisingly) be rather painful.
One of the old names for phenol is "carbolic acid", which is where the name "carbolic soap" comes from - yes, there used to be a type of soap which contained phenol as one of its ingredients - fortunately at quite low concentrations, and due to soap being alkaline, most of it was probably present as the sodium phenoxide (or phenolate if you prefer) salt. This kind of soap was commonly used in hospitals to clean floors and surfaces because of its antiseptic properties (soaps with triclosan have replaced carbolic soap for this purpose now), which is why phenol is often thought of as having a "clinical" or "hospital" smell.
As an aside, is there any type of rubber or flexible plastic glove which will withstand DCM or chloroform? The only time I ever used those solvents in the lab was for cleaning out my high vacuum line, since you needed a chlorinated solvent to dissolve out the special "lithelen" brand grease we used in them. I usually did this in a fumehood of course (or outside if one wasn't available), and we had multiple different types of gloves available. But all of them would swell up, go soft or turn to slime when exposed to chloroform or DCM, and of course would start letting the solvent permeate through and onto your hands before that happened. I could always tell because you get the infamous "chloroform finger tingle", which was like a combination of numbness and "pins and needles", though it went away as soon as you took the gloves off and let the solvent evaporate. The only solution was to wear several layers of gloves, but that seemed wasteful and only gave a few more minutes before the solvent would permeate through anyway.
Yeah I’m not sure - my lab was cheap so the nitrile gloves were the only option - rapidly degloving was my solution - not ideal, but it was what I did
Oh look its me :D
If I recall correctly, phosgene is used to make carbamates, and the alternative methods are not quite as good for various reasons. I know I spoke to one person on reddit who works with phosgene in a lab for making carbamates.
I'd imagine that the use of phenol in nailbed cleaning is based on the assumption that if you aren't cleaning your nailbed *every day* then your body can handle the poison, similar to how the patient can just stroll around in a radiology lab while the nurses have to be careful of all sources of radiation because the patient is likely only there for a single visit while the nurses are there several days a week, all year, so the nurses could accumulate a large dose over many months if they're not careful. That's just speculation though. (I also assume it's just fairly dilute?)
Students just be breaking the Geneva convention in school
Another optical hazard that's gotten very very common is lasers. Don't get too comfortable around lasers, especially now considering you can get a completely hazardous engraving machine with a 5W+ diode source and trivial safety interlocks for less than $500 on the river site or the bay site. Luckily my own incident didn't leave any lasting damage, it was from maybe a 10% reflection of a 0.25W violet diode source and left a squiggly line on my vision that was detectable as an afterimage distortion for a few weeks.
I was running a sheet metal laser for 5 years, one day I guess I looked at the beam too long and ended up feeling like I had sand in my eye for a week
😎
Terrifying
I was in an intro chem class a few years ago. we were doing an oxygen creation lab, and then burning stuff in the air and the o2. My group didn't hear the thing about "Don't burn the magnesium in the oxygen, only watch it in air." Almost cracked the beaker.
the crazy thing is you can even get magnesium to burn in nitrogen if you get it hot first
we talkn some hvac gas now
yeesh that stuff is brutal
Instead of using gaseous phosgene, why not use triphosgene instead? It's a stable white crystalline solid which can be weighed in air without difficulty, and reacts exactly like monomeric phosgene, but is far less dangerous. I actually used some yesterday to make an isocyanate, and it worked beautifully.
Still very sketchy, but less sketchy
i spilled a kilogram of sodium hydroxide pellets because i knocked the container over
on carpet
then i had to somehow clean it with my only PPE being nitrile gloves and goggles
That's a baller wedding gift tho. Dang.
Me a welder: "do we have to tell people not weld without masks?"
My friend "you would be very very surprised..."
Stick welding scares the shit out of me still with a helmet on always thinking I'm making myself blind
I love listening to these and just nodding along like I know what all these magic words mean
i accidentally made phosgene gas thanks to TIG welding on a plate that had be cleaned with chloronated brake cleaner agent, and hadn't flashed off yet...
the slightest whiff of the stuff felt like i got kicked in the chest by a horse, drove all the air out of my lungs and i crashed out of the shop knowing i had to get to fresh air quick... stuff was deadly dangerous for sure
11:16 ...this is why I now only use lab coats with spandex type wrist cuffs.
When we did the magnesium burn in high school, I don't think our teacher ever passed any goggles out. I do still occasionally see spots in my vision, but I don't know if it's from that, the many times I've accidentally looked at the sun, or the one time I watched my grandfather do some welding.
If it's just little black blury dots that float around, i get them too just like many other people.. it's more common than you think
@@markshort9098 Mmm, not talking about the floaters, it's the stationary spots, the ones that flash sometimes.
So, once I was cleaning out herbicide hose filters with carburetor cleaner that was basically just full-strength acetone. It was designed to dissolve carbon. I was wearing nitrile gloves. What I forgot is that my hands are made of carbon and nitrile gloves aren't really chemical resistant. I left that day with chem burns on my hands.
:(
I like organic qualitative analysis. You get to use picric acid and 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine, two of my FAVORITE chemicals!
Are you sure you’re not *This Chemist?
1:55 I guess you can say that you are pretty stable.
Emotionally and chemically
Back in my 1st year of a-levels one of our practicals was the reduction of cyclohexanol to cyclohexene with phosphoric acid. In total there was about 15 reflux setups going full bore, and after the 90 min prac lesson the entire room smelt of that forbidden sweet smell. I probably shouldn’t have cycled home that night as I was definitely high of the fumes.
"...and you're just benzene". LOL
Don't stare into the sun, boy,
Don't stare into the sun!
The fire will burn your eyes, my boy,
Don't stare into the sun!
you can get dirt cheap AM-241 sources out of smoke detector ion chambers, sold on aliexpress
The reactor is dangerous yes, but if it was being changed it dropped below the required ratios of isotopes (this is a grand simplification, I happen to know a large amount about nuclear and particle physics), I’m assuming it was an isolated uranium reactor, but in general, this is not as hazardous as you’d think, uranium is primarily an alpha emitter with some beta emissions as well. Even what you’d consider unshielded for gamma could PROBABLY block beta radiation. Depending on distance and a few other factors, such as is there uranium particulates in the air, short term exposure would likely be safe. In chemistry terms, (once again a grand simplification) formaldehyde is more likely to give you cancer than that reactor core (it was probably a spent fuel cask, as the reactor is built into the submarine). Though if you were in extremely prolonged exposure to it, or you were in exposure to a high output source, you’d be worried about radiation poisoning and sickness, not cancer.
Boiling phosgene... Heck.
The tip at the end of putting +2% ATR is very funny, I wish I could try it out but, alas, I'm not studying chemistry.